Editor:
Re: Venue shift prompted by concerns, Oct. 2
I’m very appreciative of Peace Arch News for the article, which alerts the readership to an apparent social wrong in our community.
The centre of attention for the last few months is Star of the Sea Roman Catholic Church (parish).
By “parish” we are speaking of people who live in our community, not some bogeyman who “lives in a land far, far away.”
This parish has been active in the community for almost 100 years.
It facilitates high-quality education, children’s programs such as daycare, boy scouts and after-school.
Over 100 volunteers provide free meals for the hungry in the community and, in partnership with other charities, a cold-weather shelter for the homeless.
They host many blood-donor clinics. All this and more is the expression of their faith by good works. They subsidize their good works in their buildings out of their own pockets. These are the fruits of love.
Now, the parish is dragged before a tribunal and supreme court – neither has passed judgment on the parish.
Considering this, according to the story, community members, including Gordie Hogg, find themselves in a “real moral dilemma.”
Nonsense!
The Prince of Wales had a better reaction. Before he embarked on a recent visit to the Vatican for the canonization of John Henry Newman, he wrote of the latter, “he could advocate without accusation, could disagree without disrespect and…could see differences as places of encounter rather than exclusion.”
This would be a civilized response. Would that it be so with all political leaders of our community as well.
Walter Johanson, White Rock