How Should you dress for Mass in the Summer? (Part I of II)

07-08-2012Pastor's LetterFr Don Kilne

Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ,

With the hot weather it is a good time to remember the importance of dressing appropriately for church. Sometimes during the summer people forget that they are going to the Lord's house for worship, and confuse it with a trip to the beach. Therefore I would like to remind everyone, men and women, boys and girls, about the virtue of modesty.

Modesty is part of the virtue of purity. Modesty may vary from one culture to another, but there is nonetheless a universal intuition which seeks to respect the dignity proper to every person. The Catechism of the Catholic Church speaks of it this way: "Modesty protects the intimate center of the person. It means refusing to unveil what should remain hidden...It inspires one's choice of clothing." 


Every person is made in the image and likeness of God, and the human body reflects this mystery. Although there is not much cultural support for this view, parents need to teach their children that their body is not something to be exposed for the world's voyeuristic explorations. As the Catechism states, "Teaching modesty to children and adolescents means awakening in them respect for the human person." And if parents fail to teach their children how to dress with dignity, it is highly unlikely that anyone else will.

God Bless,
Fr. Don Kline, Pastor

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Freedom of worship or Freedom of religion?

07-01-2012Pastor's LetterFr. John

Dear Friends,

Over this past year I've noticed that Secretary of State Clinton often refers to freedom of "worship" and not freedom of religion. I wondered why the shift especially coming from the US State Department, which historically has pushed for freedom of religion throughout the world for generations. Well it appears, at least according to the State Department that the reason for the shift is that talk of religious freedom sort of spooks out many Muslim nations. That is because religious liberty is not seen by them as a right and often is seen as a threat to Islam. (Christianity also was wary of religious freedom prior to the 18th century and the Church eventually settled on the position that Christianity and Religious Liberty are not incompatible. This is something Islam has yet to work out.) Hence the State Dept. believes it can push many of these countries to allow at least freedom of worship, that is; non-Muslims living in Muslim nations be permitted to non-Islamic worship so long as it is contained in the four walls of a church, synagogue or ashram. The official line then from the Secretary of State is that the Administration is demonstrating "sensitivity" to Islamic nations.

While this may work as a short term diplomatic strategy to work up to an insistence on religious freedom as outlined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and inscribed in the U.S. Bill of Rights, it should not be the policy stance of the US. Unfortunately the Secretary of State has also used the term "freedom of worship" in reference to the US and seems to be adopting this limited notion of religious freedom as the Administration's official interpretation of the First Amendment in order to justify policies that run afoul of our long held and broad understanding of religious freedom. I must say it was a very subtle and clever shift, which I guess the State Department figured would go unnoticed or that people would equate the two as synonymous. But it has been noticed and they are not synonymous.

It is a bit of historical irony that the Church who initially held that a restrictive version of religious freedom was preferable to the more liberal vision held by our nations founders, now finds itself defending a robust right to religious freedom against national leaders who have a narrower view of religious liberty! In our own case we can thank Fr. John Courtney Murray, a US priest who provided a solid theological basis for religious freedom that put aside once for all any Catholic concerns with an unfettered right to religious freedom. His classic work: "We hold these Truths: Catholic Reflections on the American Proposition" is still worth a read. In it he successfully argues that the idea of a limited government and the separation of Church and state allows citizens the opportunity to have moral control over their own religious beliefs instead of being told what to believe by a paternalistic state. For us that is a no-brainer but there was a time when these ideas were new and threatening.

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