Dear Parishioners,

Thank you, thank you, thank you!  Because of the generosity of you parishioners who came up with $8,645.00, the Cana Brava Project Church in Nicaragua is as well as built.  The needed $9,500 will be sent with my personal contribution this week care of All Saints Parish in Kentucky.
           
Latest word from Fr. Donie from a cyber-café in downtown Dublin, Ireland - He has returned to the Mill Hill Missionary community and in August will be at a mid-life seminar the community offers in London.  He expects to receive a new appointment in September.  Until then , his best address is:Donie O’Connor MHM, Mill Hill Missionaries, St. Joseph’s, Orwell Park, Rathgar, Dublin 6, Ireland.   I will keep you posted on his next assignment.
           
Here’s an article published in the London Tablet entitled “Pope Francis’ View of Heaven”.  “It is a traditional maxim that though Catholics are required to believe in hell, they are not required to believe there is anybody in it.  They are not required to believe that despite the doctrine that there is “no salvation outside the Church”, atheists and people with other varieties of non-Catholic belief will automatically be refused entry at the gates of Heaven.  In one sense, therefore, Pope Francis was not saying anything new when he told Vatican employees at their morning Mass that Christ had redeemed the whole of humankind.
           
“Even the atheists?”  “Even them”, he said.  “Everyone” – a word that appeared about 20 times in his informal homily.  “The Lord has redeemed all of us, everyone, with the blood of Christ:  everyone, not just Catholics.  Everyone!” 
           
In another sense, however, he was treading on controversial ground, for it may seem to be a short step from that to saying that being Catholic does not matter.  He did not take that  step, of course, but therein lies the heart of an issue that preoccupied his predecessor, Benedict XVI.

Benedict repeatedly warned that that way led to relativism, the idea that all religions were of equal merit, and syncretism, the idea that all religions were really saying the same thing.  Benedict had reined in theologians who he felt had gone too far towards relativism and syncretism.          
           
In a previous generation, Karl Rahner had promoted the idea that virtuous non-Catholics, whether of other faiths or of none, could be regarded as “anonymous Christians” – Christians, who did not know they were Christians.  By virtue of that assumption, the doctrine “no salvation outside the Church” could still be true.  These “saved” non-Catholics were implicitly inside the Church even if they did not want to be.  But his idea was widely criticized.  In a recent Vatican document it says people outside Christianity are “in a gravely deficient situation in comparison with those who, in the Church, have the fullness of the means of salvation”, and that non-Catholic Christian communities – should be he withheld from the status of “Churches” – because they have “defects”.
           
The dismissive tone was in contrast to the far warmer language the Second Vatican Council had adopted in 1965, which said that the Catholic Church “rejects nothing that is true and holy in these religions”, and added:  “She regards with sincere reverence those ways of conduct and of life, those precepts and teachings which, though differ  ing in many aspects from the ones she holds and sets forth, nonetheless often reflect a ray of that Truth which enlightens all men.”  All men – everyone.  That seems much closer to the attitude of Pope Francis than of Benedict.  Same faith, but a very different tone.”

Your Pastor, 
Brian T. Joyce