Weve Got Issues Regarding Bishops on Citizenship (11/5), what about the other moral issues that face voters today? Once again, matters of conscience are reduced to bioethical issues. There is no denying that abortion, euthanasia, stem cell and cloning are significant, but so are the other life and j
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Financial Priorities In It Starts in Mexico (10/15), Tim Padgetts apology to his fellow Catholics for criticizing poor Mexicans choice to build ostentatious churches with their remittance monies is a nice touch, especially when such profligacy is equated with purchasing flashy trucks and wide-screen
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Happiness Is a Warm Puppy I agree with Patricia Kossmanns Of Many Things column (10/1). When my mom and I both found ourselves widows, we moved in together and adopted a shelter dog. It was one of the best decisions we ever made. It had been half a century since wed had a dog, but Abby, an Australia
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A Step Backward? The comments of Anthony J. Cernera and Rabbi Eugene Korn in The Latin Liturgy and the Jews (10/8) are a perceptive and welcome caution against the ever-lurking danger of anti-Semitism in prayer and worship, and a warning that the insights of Nostra Aetate and subsequent magisterial
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Staying the Course The problem with your latest editorial on Iraq, A Diplomatic Surge (10/8), is that like many Democrats and some Republicans, you have embraced defeat. The template of the media and liberals in general at the very beginning of this war was and is defeat: This is Vietnam, and we can
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Fumbling Doctrine
I enjoyed reading Father Jim McDermotts erudite and insightful piece on church doctrine in Of Many Things (9/10), despite his animosity toward one of pro sports most sacred institutions, the Green Bay Packers.
Father Jims admission that doctrinal issues are slippery and elusive things recalls the numerous fumbles of which Rex Grossman, the Chicago Bears quarterback, has been guilty in the preseason games he and the Bears managed to muddle through. Heres hoping we can all get a firmer grasp of the issue, whether it is interpreting church doctrine or hanging onto a football.
By the way, Im looking forward to Father Jims take on the New Orleans Saints and the dark night of the soul.
Stan Stoga
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Clarifying the Council
In The Church of Christ and the Churches (8/27), Richard Gaillardetz correctly summarizes the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith as teaching that the church of Christ continues to exist fully in the Catholic Church, and only incompletely in other churches and ecclesial communities. But he seems not to agree that there is only one subsistence of the church of Christthe Catholic Church. His article gives the impression that subsistit in was introduced to weaken the statement in a previous draft that the Catholic Church is the church of Christ.
But he omits a crucial intermediate draft, which stated simply that the church of Christ is present (adest) in the Catholic Church.
The doctrinal commission, rejecting adest, wanted to safeguard the doctrine that Christs church is completely present in the Catholic Church and nowhere else. Such was the well-known position of Sebastian Tromp, S.J., who proposed the term subsistit in. He and the members of the doctrinal Commission were well aware that the verb subsist in classical metaphysics meant full and substantial existence. The C.D.F. is therefore correct in its interpretation of the term.
Mr. Gaillardetz also assures his readers that the council was content to confine its reflections to the objective institutional integrity of the church. I do not know the basis for that interpretation. Far from being concerned only with means of sanctification, the council insisted that the church is a spiritual community vivified by the Holy Spirit, and that only the Catholic Church is in full communion with the body of Christ. To be out of communion, even partially, is no small matter.
(Cardinal) Avery Dulles, S.J.
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Worthy Liturgy It has been several months since Bishop Donald W. Trautmans article on the new English translation of the Roman Missal (How Accessible Are the New Mass Translations? 5/21), and still no dissent in these pages? Let this be it. I grew up with the ICEL translation, first as a churchgoer,
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A Great Mitzvah In Lovingly Observant (6/18), Susannah Heschel beautifully expressed why her fathers writings touched the hearts and minds of so many peopleJews and Christians alike. If ever there was a crystalline example of what Hans Urs von Balthasar called kneeling theology, it was Abraham Joshu
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Integrity Requires Candor Americas Current Comment Conversion/Covenant (8/13) seems to me to stress unduly the difference between the prayer for conversion of the Jews in the 1962 Missal, and the prayer in the 1970 Missal for the Jewish people, the first to hear the Word of God, that they may contin