LETTERS

Growth in Faith

The Gift of Faith

I just finished struggling to understand another issue of your new magazine. Thank you for the challenge and your refusal to compromise the truth.

Maybe I sound a bit inconsistent in that opening statement. But I never ask that my faith be simple or easy, I just ask that it be focused in the right direction. The Catholic Faith is helping. It is helping at a time when so many Catholics seem ready to throw their faith away. I am not.

My introduction to the Catholic Faith came about 25 years ago when I fell in love with a wonderful Catholic girl, now my wife of more than 21 years. I was raised Methodist and had no intention of converting. However, after my wife and I had been married a couple years, I decided to convert to keep peace in the family.

I soon settled into the sad practice of the Christmas/Easter Catholic, seldom attending Mass or thinking about the religion. My indoctrination had been brief and my study habits poor, so I understood little of what it means to be Roman Catholic.

That began changing about 11 years ago after the birth of our first child, a son. My wife would take him to Mass every Sunday and I started feeling guilty about staying home. After a few months, I started tagging along, figuring I could tolerate an hour of anything, ever a boring church service.

But something unexpected happened. The words of the priest started making sense. And after a couple years, I found myself attending confession for the first time in more than a decade. I joined the choir. I became an RCIA sponsor. I got involved in my parish and have tried to live my faith. That isn't always easy. As Christ's own suffering and the sacrifice of early Christians demonstrate, living our faith never has been easy. But I figure the challenges of this life are a small price to pay for everlasting life with God.

What I do find sad - and a bit frustrating - is how so many Catholics today take their faith for granted, try to water it down for comfort's sake or reject it entirely. It saddens and dismays me that so many people are ready to cast aside the Faith that I am working so hard to understand and live.

I doubt that I will ever understand even 10 percent of the doctrine of our Church. But I will keep trying. I have been very fortunate in the past several years to have the patience of several devout Catholic friends who share reading material and time to help me. And I've had the help of several priests, especially Fr. Dudley Day of the Institute on Religious Life.

For me, it has been a long and sometimes inconsistent journey from skeptic to a man who is considering sending his children to a school under the spiritual direction of the Legion of Christ. The Catholic Faith is helping me continue on that journey. Thank you.

Jim Fair

Glen Ellyn, IL

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End Game

In playing Communion of Saints together as a family, we have found the game to be best suited to upper elementary and junior high school children and their parents. High school students can also benefit from it, and even preschoolers can play along.

Communion of Saints is not a game that will keep everyone clinging to the edge of their seats, and indeed it need not be so. Its substance is of too serious a nature to be taken trivially. Moreover, it is a learning game; and, therefore, a springboard to further learning. The designers of the game have done an excellent job in creating a game that serves as a stepping stone to further exploration of Church teaching and history.

Communion of Saints allows parents and educators alike to begin a strong catechetical program that encourages children and teens to pursue aspects of Church teaching and history that interest them. The poet Keats once wrote: "Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a candle." Communion of Saints gives families and schools the opportunity to light the candle of religious education in our children.

Rose Marie Kastelic

Coalhurst, Alberta, Canada

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I am writing to you regarding the review of the Communion of Saints board game which appeared in the July/August issue of The Catholic Faith.

Although one positive feature of the game was accurately noted (that the artwork is of high quality), the review is riddled with mistakes. The first sentence contains two (the game was released in 1995, not 1991, and our company name is Schola Vitae not Vitae Schola), and the one-paragraph description of game play contains four (for instance, guilt and punishment tokens are not "exchanged" for good deeds). The greatest error, though, is one of omission. The game is not a quiz, yet the reviewer entirely overlooked the value of its non-competitive format.

The notes accompanying the game state, Communion of Saints "is not a quiz; players learn as they go." This is the most distinctive feature of the game. In my experience, Catholics in general, and young Catholics in particular are often quite sensitive about the extent of their knowledge of Catholicism. Our faith is an extremely intimate and personal matter, and even people who might enjoy contests based on secular subjects can be quite intimidated by the thought of a "Catholic Quiz."

The Communion of Saints board game was developed to provide a graphic, non-competitive, objective format for exploring the parameters of our Faith. If the game is not a quiz, one could reasonably ask, "What is the motivation for playing it?" While working through the Infancy, Childhood and Adulthood circles in the game, players encounter situations that are typical in the life of a Catholic. The element of chance in the game (the use of a die) normally produces great variety in the presentation of these situations, and allows the players to see the consequences of a wide range of actions that they may not have previously considered.

In Prokofiev's Peter and the Wolf the bird asks the duck, "What kind of bird are you if you can't fly?" The duck responds, "What kind of bird are you if you can't swim?" The format of the Communion of Saints board game is fundamentally different from that of the other two games that were reviewed. Communion of Saints should not be criticized for not being something it was never intended to be. The value of its unique format was completely overlooked by the reviewer.

Communion of Saints has been well received by a number of people as a vivid and enjoyable presentation of Catholic doctrine. For example:

Fr. Robert D. Smith, columnist for The Wanderer says, "It is thoroughly orthodox." He says its inventor is to be commended for trying to bring a "vital sense" of "traditional Catholicism" to young people.

Fr. Matthew Habiger, president of HLI says, "I have given it to a good, practicing, Catholic family to assess for me. They have found it to be just great - they love it. They say it is both entertaining and instructive."

The explanations of Catholic doctrine that appear in The Catholic Faith are wonderfully clear and inspiring. They are not strident or pugilistic. They make joyful reading because of their fidelity to the Church and the thoroughness of their presentations.

The review of the Communion of Saints board game is in sharp contrast to your usual fare. Although the inaccurate portrayal of the game provided a convenient foil for highlighting the fine qualities of the other games that were reviewed, it is nonetheless a gross distortion of the actual product. It was very surprising to find journalism of this quality in The Catholic Faith.

Patrick Supeene

Director

Schola Vitae, Inc.

Medicine Hat, Alberta, Canada

Father Hardon responds:

I wish to assure you that your Communion of Saints board game is remarkable for its fidelity to Catholic teaching. The holy cards are beautiful and the non-competitive format is highly commendable. You have the promise of my prayers for you and your company.

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Abortion Stops a Beating Heart

Today it is not a crime to commit abortion. People say it is not a crime because the unborn baby is not alive. But a characteristic of being alive is a beating heart. Unborn babies have beating hearts by the fourth week of pregnancy.

When someone's heart stops beating they are dead. Abortions cut babies from their mothers and in the process cut them from life. The unborn baby's heart stops beating and therefore is dead. This why abortion is killing.

In the Ten Commandments, the Fifth Commandment is "You shall not kill." This is written clearly in the Old Testament. The Fifth Commandment tells that you must respect everyone's life and not harm anybody in any way. That is why abortion is wrong.

It seems that the reason women abort their children is because they do not want them, but they do not want anyone else to have them either.

We must all keep trying to stop abortion. We must do whatever we can to stop all the killing of unborn babies. We must be sure to work even harder now that the number of abortions are increasing.

Erica Jordan

Age 12

Baton Rouge, Louisiana