To the editor:
I am writing in response to the letter from John Murphy in the February 9 edition of the Catholic Herald regarding President Obama being called “the food stamp President.”
Mr. Murphy needs to know the command to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, and visit the sick was given to the Church, not the government.
MADISON — John and Sarah Ramthun are all about T-shirts. Actually, they are all about a particular T-shirt that is making a statement and helping raise money for a program near and dear to their hearts called “Feed My Sheep.”
MADISON — Corrie Ten Boom, a woman survivor of a Nazi concentration camp during the Holocaust, once said, “Forgiveness is to set a prisoner free, and to realize the prisoner was you.”
What is the right time to teach children to forgive? How does one go about teaching and learning this skill?
In the Peanuts comic strip, each fall Lucy held the football for Charlie Brown to kick. At the last second, Lucy picked up the ball and Charlie Brown missed it and fell flat on his face.
After years of being tricked, Charlie refused to kick the football because he no longer trusted Lucy. She broke down, shed tears, and confessed, “I have sinned. I want to change. Won’t you give me another chance, please!” Charlie Brown trusted her again.
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When I first heard about Operation Rice Bowl at my parish in America, I thought they were talking about something I knew so well from Chinese culture.
I don’t have to tell you that the Chinese people eat a lot of rice — you have been to enough Chinese restaurants and seen enough Chinese landscapes with rice paddies to know that. But “rice bowl” was a term I heard all the time, and not just at mealtimes.
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When President Obama mandated that religiously-based organizations violate core tenets of their faith, Americans were rightly outraged.
The president then announced an “accommodation” policy to these organizations, but the so-called compromise is not a compromise at all because it does not take away the mandate that infringes upon religious liberty.
On January 20, the secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, Kathleen Sebelius, affirmed a rule that requires church-affiliated hospitals, agencies, and universities to provide contraception and sterilization in the health insurance for their employees.
To the editor:
Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, wrote a series of meditations that became the book On The Way To Jesus Christ. In a chapter titled “Communication and Culture,” our future pope talked about what the Church faces in today’s society. “Ever since the Enlightenment, Western culture has been moving away from its Christian foundations with increasing rapidity. The disintegration of the family and marriage, the escalating attacks on human life and its dignity, the confinement of faith to the realm of the subjective, and the consequent secularization of public awareness, as well as the fragmentation and relativizing of ethical values demonstrate this all too clearly.”
Cardinal Ratzinger was talking to the bishops of Italy but certainly his remarks were intended for all of the Western world, including the United States.
To the editor:
This is a needed response to John Murphy’s false assertion about Newt Gingrich’s “food stamp president” commentary in the February 9, 2012, Mailbag. First of all, I’ll be voting for another in the Republican primary, so this is not an endorsement of Newt.
Mr. Gingrich’s comments had absolutely nothing to do with demeaning any person from any race or economic situation. His very salient point addresses the fact that the policies of our current president are creating a great wall to prosperity.
To the editor: […]
MADISON — The annual Rite of Election and Call to Continuing Conversion is approaching for the catechumens and candidates in the Diocese of Madison who are seeking the sacraments of initiation into the Catholic Church.
It’s an annual rite, taking place the first weekend of Lent, and it serves as a very public witness to the Church at large of the renewal and growth of our faith. It is filled with small rituals: the presentation of the catechumens, the Act of Election and the signing of the Book of the Elect, the presentation of the candidates, the Act of Recognition, the affirmation by sponsors and the faithful.
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| The Rite of Election of Catechumens and Call to Continuing Conversion for Candidates of Full Communion in the Catholic Church will be held on Sunday, Feb. 26, at St. John the Baptist Church, in Waunakee. For more information about this celebration, click here. | |
For the Catholics not involved in RCIA, this is sometimes the last seen of these Church-seeking individuals until the Easter Vigil. Especially for longtime Catholics, there can be a vague idea that they return to classes to learn their catechism, facts about the Church, and exactly how one is supposed to genuflect in front of the tabernacle.
But RCIA is a deeper, richer process than that image provides. In the 1988 edition of the Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults, it describes the structure of the process as gradual, as a journey that includes “not only the periods for making inquiry and for maturing . . . but also the steps marking the catechumens’ progress, as they pass, so to speak, through another doorway or ascend to the next level.”
The decree on the revision of the rite from the Congregation for Divine Worship in 1972 says that the time of the catechumenate, “intended as a period of well-suited instruction,” is “sanctified by liturgical rites to be celebrated at successive intervals of time.”
