Has anyone ever made it to sainthood talking about social justice? For sure, almost all saints have had hands-on experience with social justice. The Vancouver Street Missionaries, together with Mildred Moy, have been visiting the homeless for almost 20 years in downtown Vancouver, whether in bright daylight or on cold rainy evenings.
Many good Catholics would not even take the Hastings bus or walk along Pender Street.
I once joined them, just for an evening, and was amazed at how the Street Missionaries approach the homeless with respect, kindness, and a willingness to listen, offering a blanket or socks or a prayer if requested.
Mildred and her group are showing us that holiness is within reach of daily life and that the great deeds in this city are done without fanfare, mostly in obscurity.
Marianne Werner
Vancouver
Re the Dec. 4 article “Government Takes St. Paul’s Property for Maid”:
I concur completely with recent letter writers regarding this issue. MAiD should never be acceptable in ethical hospitals or Catholic facilities. If the B.C. Government has its way, then our society is headed in a direction where it can only be considered a matter of time before all facilities will be forced to accept the killing of patients at their requests.
For the article to say the Archbishop and Providence Health Care consider that delivering euthanasia off-site respects Catholic teaching is total capitulation and an insult to everyone who believes in the sanctity of human life. Killing is killing wherever it is done.
Carol Gray
Chilliwack
Re “Search for truths behind graves is elusive,” Dec. 11:
Finally, the truth about the “missing children” is coming out. “Not a single child they claim went missing from a residential school has been independently verified as having actually gone missing [independent researcher Nina] Green said.”
That didn’t stop Pope Francis from passing a mid-air sound-bite judgment of “genocide” against Canada as he flew back to Rome from his pilgrimage of penance for the Catholic Church’s role in Indian Residential school abuses. Surely, this is a recklessly uninformed statement and the CCCB should have likewise been more circumspect in their response to these claims of genocide and horror stories.
They could have deflected the blame to the federal government which lowered Canadian flags for the longest period in history. The bishops could have taken a pass on getting our school children to wear orange in solidarity with these unsubstantiated claims of rampant abuse.
The Catholic Church was targeted with vandalism and had churches burned to the ground for their supposed role in widely reported fabrications of 215 missing children. A generation of Catholics was asked to apologize for some unsubstantiated claims they had nothing to do with.
Reconciliation is a two-way street that requires primarily an objective assessment of the records and the facts, including hearing both the good and the bad of the residential schools. It’s time to set the record straight and confront the truth.
Kevin O’Mahony
North Vancouver
Re “Education is up to parents, debate hears,” Dec. 18:
As a former public school parent and a current Catholic school one, I would like to add that while there is indeed a policy to notify parents in advance of questionable activities at school, what this looks like in reality varies a lot depending on the school.
In our case, such policies were simply to notify the parents and nothing more. When I requested that my children be taken out of certain lessons, there was no alternative other than to keep them home on particular days as no separate supervision could be provided for students who requested such exemption.
While SOGI may not be a “curriculum” the way math and science are, depending on the teacher and the tone set by the school administration it can be pervasive and entrenched in almost all aspects of school life. Our family’s experience may be different from another public school family in a different part of Vancouver.
It would be misleading to characterize public and private schools as having no real distinction; although not as much as home school, private schools do offer more parental control than public school.
It would be helpful for families to hear more from Catholic parents who successfully raise their children to practise the faith, whether they attend public, private, or home school.
Sophia Lee
Vancouver
Share your thoughts and contribute to the ongoing conversation by sending us a Letter to the Editor.