Catholic News Times (C.I., April 2005, pp.34-43).

I wrote to a parish priest in the Toronto area who provides his parish with a number of Catholic periodicals, including the Catholic New Times. I recommended that he stop providing the New Times for his parishioners and gave him some good reasons for doing so.

The pastor declined however. In a letter to me he wrote: "We may not always agree with various articles printed in any of our Catholic publications, but they do have the right to disagree or even challenge." He went on to write of the Church's rich intellectual tradition and that "much of the deposit of the faith has emerged from the Church defining itself in the face of opposition and dissent."

He wondered whether I, surely, would not label everything in the CNT as "heretical" (my word). Finally, he thought, the worst attitude to have would be certitude. That, he wrote, "deafens us to hearing how the Holy Spirit may be speaking to us now and blinds us to seeing how the Holy Spirit may be acting now."

As you can see, the pastor's answer is smooth and sophisticated. He said he will continue to make the CNT available in the church.

What worries me is this. If Catholic papers have the right to disagree with Church teaching, do they have the right to promote the very opposite of what the Church teaches and present this as the real truth, as CNT does on abortion, contraception, and same-sex marriage for example ? I don't think they have.

As for his second point, that heresies have led the Church to define the truth in greater depth, should ordinary faithful parishioners now be exposed to the untruth, presented as truth? Would that not confuse them? How can we expect them to grow in their faith? Widespread heresies such as Arianism (named after a cleric, Arius, in the fourth century), that denied that Jesus was truly divine and equal to God, caused millions to be swept out of the Church before the Council of Nicea in AD 345 was able to expose this untruth and to define what Catholics believe to this day. We believe that Jesus is truly divine.

As for his final point, that to have certitude is dangerous, I always thought that great saints (Mother Teresa, Padre Pio) and millions of martyrs gave glory to God through their absolute faith and certitude in the teaching and love of Christ. Are we now to replace this with quibbling, equivocation, and prevarication and think that we will somehow become saints that way?

Parents would object to a school that taught faulty history, faulty mathematics, or false religion in school, simply because it would harm our children's education more than it would help it.

Consequently, I continue to object to having the CNT distributed in our churches.

Frank & Eileen Kennedy

North York, ON