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Friday, March 29, 2024

From Readers – July 30, 2020

In God we trust

I read the Letters section of the June issue and was saddened after reading “Mass Return Dangerous.” This letter was persuading people to stay away from Mass, and spinning it as your “duty” to stay away. No! Perhaps we need to ask ourselves some questions: Are you Catholic? Do you believe what you pray on Sundays? Are you putting your faith in God, or mankind? What we have going on right now in this country is expected of a people putting their faith in man to solve problems. COVID-19 did NOT catch GOD off guard. He knows all things and is completely in control. He knows the day your life will be demanded of you. You will not cheat him out of that day — I do not care how many masks you wear, how you wash your hands or how many days you choose to stay home. When your life is demanded of you, you better be ready. I will be ready, because I will be going to Mass and praising his greatness. I will not look God in the eye and tell him that I stayed home in fear, because I did not think that the creator of the entire universe could protect me. We should be running, not walking, to Mass. And doing what we were created to do, worshiping the King of kings and Lord of lords and begging him for his mercy.

Duane Stangler
St. Augustine, Cohasset (Diocese of Duluth)

A public square

I can’t improve on retired Archbishop Charles Chaput’s message delivered at Alliance Defending Freedom’s Summit for Religious Liberty in July 2019, so let me quote passages from it. “More and more, we hear claims that beliefs central to Christianity — that we are created male and female, and that marriage unites these two expressions of humanity in a unique covenant — amount to a form of bigotry. When basic moral convictions and historic religious wisdom are deemed “discrimination,” our ability to achieve civic harmony is impossible. Sooner or later, a nation based on a degraded notion of liberty — promoting tolerance but only of certain viewpoints — will not be worthy of its founding ideals. “We ultimately get the nation we deserve, either through our diligence or our indifference. Our engagement as citizens has a huge impact on the kind of nation we become. Democracies depend for their survival on people of conviction fighting for what they believe, in the public square. People of faith should make no apologies for engaging public issues respectfully but vigorously, guided by a faith that informs their reason.” I look forward to your newspaper becoming a kind of public square where we can exercise the diligence the retired archbishop is encouraging.

Roland Mayer
Epiphany, Coon Rapids

Learn from history

What’s happening to us? We no longer seek the wisdom of our history or our elders. Instead we treat the past as irrelevant to our search for our future. Thus the past comes unhinged from the future. There is no continuity, nothing to carry forward, nothing to value. We want to forget the darkness of our past. But in doing so, we destroy the possibility of learning from that darkness how to create a better future. The history of our ancestors is essential to better understand the present and how to avoid the pitfalls of bias, discrimination and exclusion. We are imperfect human beings. If we acknowledge this and our past, good and bad, we can move into the future with everyone included, respected, forgiven and embraced.

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Father Michael Erlander
Retired priest of the archdiocese

Police procedures misrepresented

Your readers were poorly served if they read the “Transforming police” article in the June 25 issue, since the author provided a number of positions that were at best misleading but more accurately should be classified as incorrect. I would submit that policing can be considered a profession since it requires a specific course of instruction, benchmarks that must be met, testing documentation that needs to be retained, a license from the state and continuing education over the years to maintain the license. Police hiring includes an in-depth examination of the candidate’s past so it is blatantly false to say that an officer terminated by one agency can simply be hired by the “next town over.” Contrary to the claim “when it comes to policing, they (the departments) do not do the research,” research and the examination of practices is an ongoing process on a local, state and national level via such groups as the Minnesota Chiefs of Police Association, the Police Executive Research Forum and the International Chiefs of Police Association. Procedures for disciplining/terminating officers are pursuant to the collective bargaining system that is jointly agreed to by the mayor/city council and the bargaining agency represented by the officers. These procedures are not forced upon them by an outside entity. It is hypocritical for a city to bemoan these procedures for political purposes when they have willingly agreed to them during the latest contract negotiations.

Gregory Pyle
St. Paul Police Department, retired

More numbers to consider

We are certainly inundated with endless information about COVID-19 and how it relates to other “large number of deaths” events! WHO: “Pandemic” — “an epidemic occurring worldwide or over a very wide area, crossing international boundaries and usually attacking a large number of people.” It most certainly can be argued an abortion should be considered as a pandemic by the fact that an individual of the human race is eliminated from the safest place on the planet — its mother’s womb! (Without a choice of its own.) The deaths by abortion certainly were done without social distancing and masks for all the moms. That’s not to include all the birth control pill abortions that have been done over the years. Life is 100% fatal just on its own. 1.5 billion abortions over the past 50 years! God is watching.

Ed Gorman
Transfiguration, Oakdale

Share your perspective by emailing TheCatholicSpirit@archspm.org. Please limit your letter to the editor to 150 words and include your parish and phone number. The Commentary page does not necessarily reflect the opinions of The Catholic Spirit.

 


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