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Contents © 2000
by Jim Holman.
All rights reserved.
LETTERS
MARCH 2000
REAL EDUCATIONAL DIVERSITY
As a student teacher in the early 90s, I taught at St. Johnsbury Academy in St. Johnsbury, Vermont. The academy is a private school with both college prep and vocational departments, as well as boarding students from over 40 countries.
How does this relate to your article on the separation of school and state? [See "Calvinism Lite," February 2000 Mission.]
St. Johnsbury, like many Vermont towns, has no public high school. The town pays the tuition of its eighth grade graduates to attend St. Johnsbury Academy or any other high school of their choice (up to a prearranged limit based on the average high school tuition in Vermont). The neighboring town of Lyndon has the same situation, and the two schools compete for students. Many towns in Vermont don't have elementary or middle schools either, and they pay for the tuition of their students so they can go to other towns where there are schools.
This situation gives parents more say in the education of their children, allows some real diversity in the programs of the schools, which are not controlled by the government, and seems to be a workable way to achieve the goals of the organization you profiled in the article.
Steve Cavanaugh
Brookline, Massachusetts
received via e-mail
GIVE ME A BREAK!
In reference to your article, "It Swallows You Slowly," (February, 2000 Mission), you obviously have nothing better to put on your front cover. Obi-wan Kenobi should be commended for remaining anonymous (given his name and cap, in the photo). Everyone else, including James McCoy, have nothing to say worthy of being printed in a good magazine with the word Catholic in its title.
It sounds to me that this rave scene is trying to validate itself by throwing in a few virtuous words and quotations, and somehow trying to mask its ugliness by saying that spirituality is really the root of why these young people congregate. Give me a break! Peace and love -- isn't that what the hippies said when they were stoned out of their minds back in the sixties? The false peace and love of the hippies proved to a failure big time. All hell let loose.
Ms. LaGossa's assumption that everyone is a lapsed Catholic only explains why she is looking for spirituality at a rave. I invite Ms. LaGossa and all her PLURy lapsed Catholic friends to go to Holy Mass, adoration of the Blessed Sacrament, and to receive the sacraments again. With the Lenten season quickly approaching, become a participant, beginning with Ash Wednesday, of the Sacrament of Reconciliation, the Stations of the Cross on Fridays, Holy Week's Triduum, Holy Thursday's Lords Supper Mass, Good Friday services, and then the holiest of all days, the Resurrection of Our Lord. Now that's spiritual, that's awesome.
Louisa Day
Monterey Park
PRETENTIOUS, OR SIMPLY DELUSIONAL
I read with great sorrow about the Mass held by Father Peter Liuzzi at Blessed Sacrament Church in Hollywood because of the California bishops' conference support of Proposition 22 [see "News," February 2000 Mission]. The Mass, sponsored by the archdiocese of Los Angeles' Pastoral Ministry with Lesbian and Gay Catholics, shows another instance wherein both the collective group and Father Liuzzi are publicly displaying their lack of obedience to the Church's teachings on marriage and homosexuality. If they were in conformity, why would there have been a need for this Mass, much less Father Liuzzi's weeping before the Blessed Sacrament?
I find it telling that Father Liuzzi replaced the penitential rite (playing fast and loose with the rubrics again) to expound a point on which he wanted the assembly to focus. His contention in his homily that Jesus is well pleased with us all is totally pretentious, or simply delusional. Did Father Liuzzi know for certain that every man there was in a state of grace? He asked the assembled to "forgive the sins committed by the Church;" the Church itself cannot sin, otherwise it would not be one, holy, catholic, and apostolic. It is people within the Church who have sinned.
Father Liuzzi's comment that those at the Mass should "offer to each other the kind of support that we had expected from the Church until one day the Church has been changed" was a telling comment: if the Church changed, it wouldn't be the Church. What kind of support is he looking for -- the acceptance of homosexuality as normal, natural, and non-sinful? By speaking the truth, the Church is offering the best type of support to keep her flock out of hell.
It saddened me that Bishop Arzube could make it to this Mass, but not to the Mass supporting the end of abortion held last month. (The pope again reiterated the need of defending the preborn in his most recent Angelus message.) In fact, when was the last time Fr. Liuzzi defended one of these least in the kingdom?
Tesa Becica
received via e-mail