I belong to Holy Cross Parish in Burnaby where last year we started Coffee Sunday every second Sunday after the restrictions were getting eased up. It was a time when people started chatting outside the church after Mass.
It has been a wonderful fellowship opportunity, and our parishioners are enjoying each other’s company and catching up with coffee cups and treats in their hands.
When we started, we committed to having ZERO GARBAGE during the event. I hid a large garbage bin before the event, but only the recycling station was visible. It also has been a great educational opportunity for some people who are not sure what can be recycled and compostable.
We have now extended this commitment to our monthly pancake breakfast with the Knights of Columbus, and it is wonderful to see young students from our parish manning the recycling and compost station and washing dishes.
If you know of any other parishes that are committed to recycling, composting, and reducing, I would love to learn from them.
Makiko Morelli
Burnaby
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Thank you for Nicholas Elbers’ May 29 article on Dr. Julia Sadusky’s interesting talk on gender ideology to Catholic teachers, principals and counsellors. It is indeed vital for teachers to put supportive relationships with students ahead of gender ideology itself, and to differentiate between a confused student and an activist, although they are often the same person. Teenagers, like all of us, do want primarily to be heard and understood.
However, in my opinion a Catholic school system has a greater responsibility to these students than mere accompaniment. “Accompaniment” can be confused with what clinicians call “watchful waiting” (neither confirming nor disconfirming an atypical identity).
The problem with this approach is that young people can easily confuse it with affirmative therapy, i.e., being supportive of transitioning. It would seem to be the case, from a Catholic perspective, that this should be the last resort for seriously confused youth, which would only be followed in rare cases after several years of psychotherapy to address the actual causes of gender confusion such as autism, depression, anxiety disorder, OCD, life traumas, pornography, and other factors.
Teachers, principals, and counsellors should at least have a general understanding of Woke ideology (the “philosophical forces”) as well as of the above predisposing factors so they can refer students and parents to clinicians who are trained to deal with gender dysphoria. Just as we would never simply “accompany” a young person who believed she was fat and was considering a double mastectomy in order to lose weight, we should, as a school system, be prepared to do everything possible to dissuade a young person from a regime of experimental hormones and, in many cases, life-altering surgeries, eventuating in thousands of cases of the heartbreaking process of detransitioning.
This would indeed be a holistic Catholic way to “hear and understand” our students.
The Formed website, available through all our parishes, has an excellent documentary entitled Dysconnected which explains all these issues in more detail.
Peter Nation
North Vancouver
