Letters to the Editor

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There were no letters to the editor published this week; here are the letters from four issues ago:

Is Midnight Mass on Christmas Eve a tradition of the past?

I would like to address a growing practice in the Church today—offering the ancient practice of Midnight Mass earlier on Christmas Eve.

Though I realize that it is not against any Church teaching, I am disheartened by it and sad to see it fade into the horizon of lost traditions which have made the faith vibrant and exciting for generations.

I am not attacking priests for holding Midnight Mass early. I realize they are very busy. I just hope that they, including the Holy Father, have prayerfully considered the impact that this will have on further generations as they lose one more tradition which enables our faith to come alive in a very tangible sense.

Maybe I am unnecessarily sentimental or just simply being traditionalistic, but Midnight Mass has significant meaning. The Church realized for centuries that man’s sensual nature yearns for symbols and physical signs threaded into the fabric of our faith.

Midnight Mass is full of this symbolism, making us present in the stable on the very first hour of the day that God humbled himself to become man and bring salvation to his misguided creation.

Midnight Mass allows us to enter into that stable with the shepherds and the heavenly host as we sing carols desirous of the one sung on that first Christmas morning, and receive our Lord in flesh as he offers himself on that exalted manger, the altar.

Midnight Mass has always seemed to be the one time throughout the hustling and bustling season that the world is really at peace. The cool crisp air, the snow laying as a calm blanket on the ground, and the world fast asleep as Catholics gather around the world, appropriately the first to ring in the glad tiding that the Savior has been born to us.

- Jonathan Wismann, Aurora

We must pursue the truth on the wings of love, reader says

In a false illusory reality that promotes false truth or no truth at all, nothing is important and everything is acceptable as long as pleasure is held as the highest good or source of moral value.

We are creating a world where there is no recognizable truth, no benchmark, and truth is merely a subjective concept that lacks a valid universal standard.

The demarcation between real and fake has been blurred, and it is in this nebulous state of existence that we become all too familiar with the shadows and fiends of our dissent.

“Truth,” like the word “love,” has been much abused. We have become suspicious when one speaks of knowing the truth or claims to be in love.

Many philosophies claim that man is incapable of knowing the truth, and that love is just an array of transient emotions. Embracing such a view gives all the more distorted credence to the philosophy of hedonism, and the discarding of ethical values.

Truth has verification and love produces fruits. Both point to that than which nothing greater can be conceived. We can know the truth. We must seek the truth. We must pursue the truth on the wings of love.

- Kirth N. Roach, Order of Carmelite Discalced Secular Indianapolis