I deeply appreciate Archbishop Miller’s Lunar New Year greetings and his exhortation to pray for persecuted Chinese Catholics and others and the situation in Hong Kong.

Last year’s series of protests in Hong Kong was really the result of the people feeling a lack of hope and future living under China’s brutal dictatorial regime. China’s many underground Catholics have, ever since Mao’s “liberation” of China in 1949, suffered great persecutions and hardships for maintaining their loyalty and allegiance to the Pope. Many have sacrificed their lives because of their fidelity to the Church.

Let us hope that they will not be forgotten for reasons of political expediency.

Patrick May
Vancouver


Our thoughts and prayers go out to the families of those killed in the Ukrainian plane downed in Iran. We cannot imagine the pain felt by the families of those who died so needlessly. There is little consolation knowing that it was an “unintended incident.” The horrors of that event will haunt many of us forever. One cannot just simply get over this.

The number of Canadians has now been revised to 57, which coincidentally, is the average number of children killed in B.C. in a single day, not through “unintended incidents,” but deliberately.

In Canada, we commit 380 to 400 prenatal terminations each day, over 100,000 each year. B.C. generally commits 15,000 terminations each year.

Their effects will be felt forever. That pain and suffering will never go away for many of the mothers. No, they will not simply get over it.

Julian Borkowski
Surrey


Re Alan Charlton’s Jan. 6 review of The Two Popes, “Fictionalized tale of two Popes hard not to like”:

Unlike Mr. Charlton, I did find the movie hard to like and was decidedly not entertained.

The agenda pushed by the scriptwriter was the need to reform and repair the Church, and obviously Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio as the whistling, humorous, hip politician is the man for the job.

Pope Benedict as the leader of the Catholic Church and Vicar of Christ on earth is portrayed sadly and pathetically as not being up to meeting the needs of modern Catholics. Christ’s Church with its unyielding doctrines with regard to sexual morality is simply out of step.

Attempting to tell a story about living human beings and institutions is patently foolhardy, particularly when the subjects are of such enormously profound nature.

Doris Rankin
Vancouver