Welcome, Antichrist
The December 1998 issue of your magazine is the best I’ve ever read. Mr. Sri’s feature on Mary’s queenship was most clear and concise—it would convert anyone who was open. Your cover story (“What Works for You Is All That Matters”) was typical of today’s families as it discusses moral issues that require courage. Unfortunately, people have wrong opinions that can be taken into eternity. James Akin took on the beast (in Revelation) and I thought he did well. Hilaire Belloc’s piece on “The New Paganism” hit a note when comparing the old and new versions of paganism. The new version is opening the door for the Antichrist for sure. The world will deserve him when he arrives because it fostered the atmosphere that produced him.
William J. Bissan
Pasadena, California
Oh-So-Very Helpful
I was really moved by Edward P. Sri’s article “Is Mary’s Queenship Biblical?” (December 1998). With the collection of various denominational friends I have, the insight Mr. Sri offered on our Holy Mother will be oh-so-very helpful in defending my Catholic “position” on Mary. I was particularly taken by the Old/New Testament queen mother correlation. It helps me appreciate the wedding at Cana with even more depth: Just as an Old Testament queen mother, Bathsheba, was recognized as having an influential position with King Solomon, so was Mary when she instructed those at Cana to “do as he says.” She acted both with the authority of a queen mother and as advocate for the people during that wedding event. Wow! How wonderful. God bless This Rock!
Daniel Plazek
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
How About It, Bishops?
I recently subscribed to your magazine but I am very disappointed in what I have read. In your summer issue I read a letter from a lapsed Catholic who stated that This Rock has affirmed all his reasons for leaving the Holy Catholic Church. I have also read some hate literature in which prison inmates and seers and visionaries were bashed and where Fundamentalists and Evangelicals are continually bashed.
Your latest edition has a picture of an Evangelical preacher who hates the Catholic Church. It reminded me of a Watchtower magazine with a picture of the Holy Father and St. Peter’s. Where is the love? Jesus said “Love one another.” Where is the Bible teaching that is basic to tradition and the Fathers?
I have no problem encountering Fundamentalists, Evangelicals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and Mormons. I love them and I pray and fast for their conversion. I never plan what I will say to them. I simply answer them with whatever Scripture the Holy Spirit gives me. I tell them the truth of Holy Mother Church and I fast and pray that God the Holy Spirit will convince them of that truth.
I have read nothing of prayer and fasting. Evangelicals all over the land who are fasting and praying for America and the Christian Church are encouraging us to do the same. They are fasting and praying for our salvation as Catholics. Praise God!
In prisons everywhere in our land good Christian men and women are enduring their Purgatory, and many of them will go straight to Heaven for they are offering their betrayal, rejection, and physical, mental, and emotional abuses for Church and for our land. St. Dismas, the condemned murderer and terrorist who died with Christ, went straight to Paradise that day. Jesus said so. Praise God for our dear brothers and sisters in prison who offer their prayers and fasts and sufferings for us unworthy creatures who look down on them.
Thank God for seers and visionaries who share their blessings and pearls with us dogs and swine and suffer for it. Whomever Mary and the angels and saints visit and use to give us God’s warnings is God’s business. God shows himself to those who love him the most with sincere hearts.
As for rosaries that change color, I have over a dozen prayer partners whose rosaries did not change color but turned to pure gold because their prayers are pure gold and come from their hearts. All of these people are very devout daily communicants and great prayer warriors.
I also have prayer partners who are Evangelicals and Fundamentalists and who know the Father, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit on a deeply personal level. These people don’t fudge on God. They do what God puts on their hearts to do. They think that Catholics are lost because most our people don’t know God and have no conception of any kind of personal relationship with him. They never read the Bible and they know no doctrine. So how can they know, love, and serve God from the porridge and pabulum that is spoon-fed them in so many of our churches? Many of them are trapped in sin and haven’t been to confession in years. Almost no one but a handful of Evangelicals like Dr. John McArthur and Dr. Charles Stanley are preaching on sin and repentance. We Catholics have had one evangelical bishop in my lifetime—Fulton Sheen.
Last June, a few days before the feast day of St. Boniface, I heard two Protestant people discussing his story on Christian radio and how he converted the German Franks. Their final comment was, “Wouldn’t it be wonderful if God would give America today a St. Boniface?”
How about it, bishops? Doesn’t our Lady’s America deserve a bishop-martyr-saint who will stand up and preach the whole truth of Christ without watering it down; a bishop who will lead this land in prayer and fasting and into a great renewal? Don’t out dear Protestant friends and our friends in prison who fast and pray for our salvation deserve your best and our prayers and fasting? Someone has to stand up and truly lead our Church soon; for if they don’t our Church in North America could go the way of the Church in sixteenth-century England. Let us not forget out history. Let us fast and pray and speak and live the truth of Christ—especially his new commandments “Love one another” and “If you love me, keep my commandments.”
Frank MacDonald
Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada
Editor’s reply: It sounds like the “hate literature” you refer to is in the letters section. We don’t necessarily endorse anything that appears in this section; it’s a fairly open (no sacrilege or obscenity) forum where ideas concerning the magazine are freely exchanged. If you think “bashing” occurs in other parts of the magazine . . . well, we’d say only that pointing out the error in someone’s way of thinking, done charitably, doesn’t qualify. As for the picture of “an Evangelical who hates the Catholic Church,” we assume you’re talking about the photo of Billy Graham on our October cover. The photo was part of a collage including images of the Eucharist and a circus tightrope performer to illustrate an article called “Walking the Ecumenical Tightrope.” If Rev. Graham has a particular hatred for the Catholic Church we’re not aware of it; in any event the use of his photo was meant as a benign representation of Protestantism.
Gratuitously Offensive
The October 1998 issue of This Rock has just reached us here in England. I refer to the Dragnet article on Dr. John Wijngaards’ resignation from the priesthood. While most of the article seems fair enough, the final paragraph is gratuitously offensive and also incorrect. Dr. Wijngaards does not “continue to draw a salary from the Church.” I have known Dr. Wijngaards for about fifteen years and he is a man of the highest integrity. As a religious he was not paid a salary by the Church. As a layman, he continues to support himself mainly by his writings, including those published by Housetop, of which Dr. Wijngaards is the founder and director. Housetop is an independent charity that produces Catholic teaching videos and related materials in association with Church partners throughout the world.
Helen Gilmour
St Joseph’s Presbytery
Bradford, England
Self-Absorbed in her Mundane Life
I love your magazine. I coveted it in the days I couldn’t afford it and in the days after evictions and homelessness that I couldn’t find the address to subscribe to it. I’m not pretentious or social enough to care about sounding uncharitable, but give up on Leslie Ryland’s syrup (“Raising Saints,” an occasional column). In every one of her articles I resent her naivete and how she takes the unfolding of ordinary life for hardship. Is anyone interested in other people kids?
I can already tell that she would not see anything wrong—and I’m talking a few years into the future—with her children being present at the donations of charity. She would in her insular world think only of the supposed character or compassion she would be instilling in them, not about the immaturity of their minds and the experience that would detract from the dignity of those receiving.
I live next to public housing that I could not qualify for due to past evictions. I work and singly care for seven children. Work and lack of sleep is constant for me—day after day, year after year. Add in and multiply Mrs. Ryland’s “trials” and the kind she obviously can’t comprehend. I don’t have a computer and, even if I did, no time to use one. The problem is that poor and afflicted people don’t have the time or energy to tell a story more profound.
Does Mrs. Ryland recognize the ordinariness and privilege of her life? How many wives have husbands who work at home? For that matter, how many dads are even around? How many wives don’t have to work?
Better to replace her articles with compelling true stories. What about those of us who don’t have time to play with our kids? Who can’t send them to private schools or insulate them from “naughty” words? What about those of us who never get over the vice of screaming bloody murder at our kids because an otherwise innocent foible on their part will cost us an apartment or a job?
Leslie, “sweetie,” I cannot relate, and there is something revolting about the comfort level someone must be at to be so self-absorbed in their mundane life to think it is even worth writing about.
Don’t make the mistake of thinking this response is merely out of my frustration with my own life. I simply don’t have the time to tell about the miraculous near-misses I experience on a regular basis. Truly, these would be compelling. I simply have no time.
An Anonymous Reader
Leslie Ryland replies: The knowledge of my life’s ordinariness and privilege is with me every day. In writing about it I have hoped to uncover experiences common to many Catholic families and to show how our faith allows us the chance to sanctify even the mundane tribulations of family life. The lives of mothers like you truly humble me and make me realize the trials I “offer up” each day are small sacrifice indeed. In our family prayers each night we always remember those less fortunate; we try to impress on our children how richly blessed by God our middle-class lives are with material comfort; how we must never take it for granted; and how we are obligated to pray for and help the poor. You and your children will be specifically in our prayers.
Distaste for Holding Hands at any Time
I happened to look into your magazine and read the letters to editor concerning holding hands at the Our Father in Mass. I felt relieved. I always had a distaste for holding hands at any time and especially at Mass.
Bro. Goretti Zilli, MM
Via the Internet
What about Striking the Breast and Bowing?
I notice the argument is still ongoing about holding hands during the Our Father. I find it strange that the liturgists who advocate this practice do not encourage striking the breast during the Confiteor and during the Nicene Creed bowing at the words “by the power of the Holy Spirit he was born of the Virgin Mary, and became man.” Also, they never mention an act of reverence, such as genuflecting or a deep bow, before receiving Communion.
The first two actions are part of the General Instruction for the Roman Missal; the latter is stated in Vatican II as something which should be done before reception of the Divine Sacrament. Since these are the recommendations of Church authority, could it be possible that this is why holding hands during the Our Father is done and the others are not? Just wondering.
Glenn Phillips
Houston, Texas
Emotional and Seditious Amateurs
I have been a subscriber to This Rock for about a year now and I passed out Catholic Answers’s catalogue to everyone, especially in my RCIA class; that was until a friend handed me your September 1997 issue of This Rock in which you stoop to Protestant and Mormon disinformation tactics.
From the very pictures you used of the tattoed young man in strange positions to the article itself, I could not believe I was reading a Catholic apologetics magazine that I thought was absolutely dedicated to the truth! I also heard that Thomas Keating wrote you a letter concerning this article, correcting you, etc., but you did not have either the honor or integrity to publish his letter.
We must hold ourselves to a higher standard then Loraine Boettner and his anti-Catholic cohorts. If you are no better then they, who is there to turn to? Either be 110 percent dedicated to truth and portraying itand that includes photos that actually represent the matter at handor get out of the business! There is no room for emotional and seditious amateurs!
Christ is truth! Be and live that truth and the level of commitment to it, or you will lose the very backing you so desperately seek. I threw out your request for funds to be able to give out Pillar of Fire, Pillar of Truth at the upcoming visit of the Pope. Before this article you would have gotten funds from me. Now I am so close to canceling my subscription to This Rock it is not funny.
Craig J. Townsend
Sacramento, California
Editor’s reply: The art directors for our magazine are faced with a quandary: how to illustrate (on a budget) articles that don’t lend themselves easily to visual representation. The case you refer to, “The Danger of Centering Prayer” (November 1997), discussed the Eastern and New-Age influences on so-called Catholic centering prayer. The art director at the time chose to illustrate it with pictures of a young man in poses assumed by practitioners of Eastern disciplines such as yoga and transcendental meditation. The fact that he was shirtless and had a tattoo was perhaps problematic, but the article itself—whether or not you agree with its conclusions—was a reasoned piece by a centering-prayer skeptic. In a subsequent issue we printed two pages of letters defending centering prayer and its proponent Fr. Thomas Keating. As for Fr. Keating writing us a letter concerning this article, we don’t know who told you this, but our policy is to publish all letters that are reasonable in tone and length.
Too Few of Us
I am writing to inform you of a website for Protestant apologetics. The site is called Center for Reformed Theology and Apologetics located at www.reformed.org. There are many Catholics who routinely and not so routinely debate on-line with the writers who defend the sola scriptura position. The trouble is there are too few of us to keep up with barrage and volume of criticism from the other side. It would be helpful if this site could be published in This Rock. I am certain that more knowledgeable Catholics defending orthodox Catholic positions would be helpful. Thank you and God bless you in your apostolate.
Michael O’Connor
Via The Internet
Broken Lives and Outright Deception
Your recent articles on apparitions have prompted me to thank you for dispelling some of the myths and lies surrounding the vision fever that so enthralls the modern Church. I have recently finished E. Michael Jones’ fabulous book The Medjugorje Deception wherein he courageously and faithfully chronicles the harvest of rotten fruit begotten by the Medjugorje crowd. While we hear much of the good fruits that Medjugorje has produced, little has been documented of the broken lives and outright deception spawned by the sheer fraud and blatant disobedience by those involved in the industry hatched by the alleged apparitions. Jones is to be commended for his courage and faithfulness in the face of daunting opposition from those in “orthodox” Catholic circles.
Barry P. Bruss
Rochester, Minnesota
Stricken Christ Child
On the cover of your December issue there is a painting of the Madonna and child. Right next to it is the headline “Buckethead Gets the Foot.” Because in this particular rendering the Christ child has a somewhat stricken look on his face, almost as if someone had kicked him, I assumed momentarily that “Buckethead” referred to him. Not a big criticism; just a suggestion that you might want to avoid such a strange juxtaposition of art and words.
Betty Bohannon
Jupiter, Florida