The Observer, March 28, 2008
Volume XL, Issue 22
Assumptions about Church spark hatred
To the Editor:
"There are not a hundred people in America who hate the Catholic Church. There are millions of people who hate what they wrongly believe to be the Catholic Church – which is, of course, quite a different thing." I couldn't help but recall these words written by Archbishop Fulton Sheen after seeing the article by Tulsi Roy in last week's Observer.
An interview Archbishop Gianfranco Girotti gave L'Osservatore Romano on the topic of confession included a short list of modern sins. The media ran with these, and Ms. Roy implied they were a teaching of the Church. In fact, the words of an archbishop are not necessarily a teaching of the Catholic Church. That is not to say that the words of Archbishop Girotti are not without merit or not legitimate modern applications of ancient moral laws. A fairly casual reading of what he said shows that these are not "new" sins, but rather, interpretations of moral law for a modern world. The Church, by its own admission, cannot just make up sins (see the Catechism 1849).
Ms. Roy claims that the idea of sin is irrational. This is ludicrous. G.K. Chesterton is far better at explaining this than I could hope to be, so I turn to the following passage from his book, Orthodoxy: "But they essentially deny human sin, which they can see in the street. The strongest saints and the strongest sceptics [sic] alike took positive evil as the starting-point of their argument. If it be true (as it certainly is) that a man can feel exquisite happiness in skinning a cat, then the religious philosopher can only draw one of two deductions. He must either deny the existence of God, as all atheists do; or he must deny the present union between God and man, as all Christians do. The new theologians seem to think it a highly rationalistic solution to deny the cat." Essentially, Ms. Roy is denying the cat – ignoring, as best she can, the news and nearly all of human experience just in order to deny sin, to push the claim that everyone is OK.
The article is rife with other errors that I cannot address due to space considerations. Let us hope that Ms. Roy looks a little further into what the Catholic Church actually believes and teaches before she writes another article like that one. Archbishop Sheen, I think, would like that.
Matej Znidarcic
Undergraduate student
