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Contents © 2006
by Jim Holman.
All rights reserved.
LETTERS
March 2006
I LIVE IN A DIFFERENT WORLD
For a number of years I have been receiving your newspaper free of charge. I suspect my name was placed on your mailing list because I have been active in pro-life issues and in our local pregnancy clinic, and perhaps also because I had 15 children. Your paper promotes traditional Catholic doctrine, I agree, but I live in a different world. The Latin Mass is gone, and we can not go backwards to it. Many of the old rituals are no longer relevant or even understood by the majority of Catholic people. We no longer have to ask Jesus to have mercy. He is already merciful. God has mercy. Our prayers are a thanksgiving. Jesus is walking in our Church and our lives right now, this minute. Unfortunately, your paper is so negative and full of complaints, it makes me very sad.
You are living in a world that no longer exists. You are dividing the people in our beautiful Mother Church. Please don't send your paper to me anymore unless you change.
Name withheld by editor,
Ojai
Editor replies: The writer should be very sad, for we live in a very sad world -- a world in which children are murdered in the womb, a world in which workers are oppressed so the more wealthy can enjoy cheap goods, a world in which youth are ruined morally by a sex-saturated and greed-saturated mass culture, a world in which sodomy is granted the same honor as the union of husband and wife, a world in which we lay waste the natural and cultural environment, and (worst of all) a world in which bishops and priests deprive the Catholic people of the life-giving food of the Gospel of Christ, hiding the light of Christ under a bushel. We, at the Mission report and comment on all of this. We have not created this world.
There is no Catholic doctrine but traditional Catholic doctrine. It is the teaching given by Christ to His apostles and passed down over the centuries through Sacred Scripture and Tradition, preserved through the teaching authority of the Church. This doctrine, since it is truth, can not change. It might not be the doctrine of the world in which the writer and we live, but then Christ Himself said He was not of the world. And neither should we be. Just as the writer could not stand by aloof when unborn children are killed (even when the world in which she lives says such murder is a human right) neither can the writers of the Mission ignore falsehood when it is promoted by the very men who are consecrated to battle it. We are not dividing the Church; rather, those who promote false doctrine, who sully the purity of the Christian faith and practice, are dividing the Church. They have departed from the fullness of Catholic truth; we merely (and inadequately) are trying to defend that truth, the principle of the Church's unity. Our Lord, in praying for the Church and her unity, said of His followers, "They are not of the world, even as I am not of the world. Sanctify them in the truth; Thy word is truth ... for their sake I consecrate myself, that they also may be consecrated in the truth." (John 1:16-19).
If the writer attends Mass, she knows Catholics still ask for Christ's mercy -- in the Kyrie eleison ("Lord, have mercy"), in the Gloria, and in other prayers. One presumes that parishes, even in California, still say these prayers. Given the world in which we live, and in which we are too much involved, a prayer for mercy is perhaps the most important prayer believers in Jesus Christ can pray.