More Inclusive

Since Cardinal Avery Dulles mentioned me in his article Vatican II: Substantive Teaching (3/31), I would like to make it clear that I also understand the Second Vatican Council to mean that it is only in the Catholic Church that the church of Christ continues to exist with all the institutional elements that Christ bestowed on his church. However, I have never understood subsists in to mean that it is only in the Catholic Church that the church of Christ continues to exist. If that were the case, one would have to say that in 1054 the church of Christ ceased to exist in half the Christian world. Then one could not describe the Orthodox churches as true particular churches, nor could one say that by the celebration of the Eucharist in those churches the church of God is being built up. The question at issue is whether the church of Christ is wider and more inclusive than the Catholic Church. It is not clear to me where Cardinals Ratzinger and Dulles stand on that question.

Francis A. Sullivan, S.J.

View of Jesus

Your Of Many Things column on March 17 referred to Jesus Before Christianity, by Albert Nolan, O.P. For six years in the late 1970’s, my family and I lived in Cape Town, South Africa, during which I did a three-year certificate program at the Kolbe School of Theology.

One of our three main teachers was Father Nolan. We had the privilege of reading Jesus Before Christianity the year before it was published. It was and is still a refreshing, provocative view of Jesus, which dramatically deepened my earlier beliefs and made them much more real. That change has persisted. My memory is that he had a similar impact on the other participants.

What a wonderful difference a single individual can make!

Terry J. van der Werff

Sound Principle

Cardinal Avery Dulles, S.J., in Vatican II: The Myth and the Reality (2/24), suggests a sound principle for interpreting the Second Vatican Council in a continuum, which effectively refutes the arrogant polarizations of ahistorical and pseudo-theological extremes. But the setting up of straw men and their facile demolition hardly honors the principle and can even be, as we used to say, offensive to pious ears. One small example: In this time of manifest clerical sinfulness and hierarchical mismanagement in our church, to draw any conclusion, as Cardinal Dulles does, from the premise that people outside the church fall frequently into sin and error is at best embarrassing and at worst hypocritical.

(Msgr.) Thomas D. Candreva, J.C.D.

Right to Life

Your editorial on gun control (2/10) misses the value of firearms in preserving human life. Just as we support the right to life of the unborn and the elderly, the lives of bus and cab drivers, gas station attendants and convenience store clerks are equally precious. Such people often must work at night in dangerous urban or even rural areas, becoming easy targets for predators, whom the courts and law enforcement cannot control.

Each year between one and two million armed Americans defend themselves and their families from injury, sexual assault and death, often without even firing their guns. Would you prefer to condemn them to submit to the savagery of criminals by disarming them?

The solution to violent crime involving firearms and other deadly weapons is to get the criminals who carry or use them in crimes off our streets by long prison sentences. Imposing liability standards on cities, police, judges, parole boards and probation officers would inhibit the Turn Them Loose Bruce types from releasing dangerous felons into the population. The prospect of million-dollar lawsuits by victims and their families would make our society far safer than any gun control scheme that merely keeps decent people helpless in the face of violent criminals.

William J. Brennan

Spread the Faith

Dr. Richard J. Rodeheffer’s article (2/3) is superb. The obvious influence of the Jesuit Ratio Studiorum is most refreshing. As significant is Dr. Rodeheffer’s faith rekindled in essence: don’t keep the faith, but spread it.

Hugh J. Mullin

Credit Where Due

The prodigious Father Andrew M. Greeley, who observed his 75th birthday this month, used to direct his ire at incompetent bishops, faulty practitioners of sociology and resigned priests who wrote about the psychosexual problems of the clergy. In The Times and Sexual Abuse by Priests (2/10), he finds The New York Times guilty of atavistic no-popery.

Thereby he resembles, perhaps more than he would like, the 76-year-old Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the diviner of one’s innermost thoughts, who recently apodictically attributed the media’s coverage of clergy abuse to an intentional desire to discredit the church.

E. Leo McMannus