July 20, 2007

Letters to the Editor

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Reader: Newspaper must cover full range of pro-life perspectives

Respectfully, I pose this question about your editorial policy: Is it not time to get beyond “quality of life issues” and cover the full range of pro-life perspectives?

You publish numerous articles about immigration reform, for example, but you offer nothing on the subject of artificial birth control. Is it really more important to welcome neighbors from the south into our country than to welcome new life into the world?

Why not feature writers such as Father Thomas Euteneuer, president of Human Life International, or Father Frank Pavone, national director of Priests for Life?

Your readers deserve to know that the Church’s teaching on contraception is not simply a catalog of do’s and don’ts. It is a compassionate, biblically-based guide for married couples, helping them to grow in love, strengthen their family and impart Catholic values to the culture.

Sadly, most Catholics have not been sufficiently catechized to carry out this mission. To evangelize a culture that trivializes pornography, encourages abortion and corrupts life-science research, one must be able to explain, in terms of natural law, the purpose and proper use of sex.

How can we teach the world about God’s holy mystery of procreation if we are unwilling to discuss the subject in our own community?

- Stephen L. Bussell, Indianapolis

Prayer is the best solution in immigration reform debate

Thank you for printing the “Be Our Guest” commentary in the July 6 issue by Susan Hurst to counter Douglas Kmiec’s June 22 column on the immigration issue.

Thank you also for printing Patrick Long’s letter last October countering Dan Conway’s immigration editorial (“Catholicism is pro-immigration”).

I believe that the government of Mexico and the Church within Mexico has an obligation to care for its citizens within their cultural norms.

In my opinion, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ political stance on this issue is weak and, as a result, is being force-fed upon us “other” Catholics.

This issue is between and within sovereign democratic nations.

Prayer is the best answer. It is more powerful than the current political tactics employed by the U.S. bishops.

Prayer in conjunction with democratic processes will ultimately achieve a just solution.

God’s will be done.

- Henry Kurz, Indianapolis

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