Dear TIA Staff,

When I worked in Africa, The native people there who were Christian, used to go with us to the open markets. There, everything was sold but they always steered us away from the tables where voodoo items were sold. They said, all the feathers, skins, bones and paraphernalia sold there were evil, and used for costumes and ritualistic garments. None of them were fit to buy as a souvenir.

The hat JP is wearing may be far more sinister than clownish.

     Keep up the good work,

     D.L.

Dear TIA,

Thank you for all the work you do for the faithful in these confusing times. Thank you also for providing the Saint of the day articles, I very much enjoy reading those.

St. Philomena's story was of particular interest to me. Her courage and determination at such a young age is truly inspiring. And the miracles she works are amazing, so much so that when I was suffering from an elbow injury for a whole week and had a tennis tournament to compete in, at the advice of my mother, I wore a St. Philomena cord around the wrist of my injured arm and applied her oil to my elbow. I was extremely surprised at how quickly my arm recovered, and at how well I performed on it in the tournament. It seems as if the good Saint will not overlook the even the smallest requests from a tennis playing teenager.

     Best regards,

     A.D.

Hello!

I check your site every day and recently saw a letter, I believe, that contained responses detailing John Paul II's relationship with a woman who followed him to Rome.

I can't seem to find that now. Could you please help me with that?

Thank You!

     GOD BLESS YOU!

     P.W.



TIA responds:

Hello P.W.,

The letter is here. The information you are looking for is here.

     Cordially,

     TIA correspondence desk

Hello,

I am a cradle Catholic, i.e., nothing will ever make me believe any doctrine except that which is in the Roman Catholic Church. Getting to your essay: nowhere in the essay is there mention of "Jesus." There are those names that people associate with Jesus, "Christ" "Real Presence" etc. IMO, these words place Jesus outside of the "here and now," make Jesus someone who lived long ago, and whose legacy to the early church carries on right up to 2011.

Yes, his legacy carries on, but so does he. The NT tells us that he promised to be with us always. I believe that he is closer to people than my mother is to me. Perhaps your bemoaning the lack of faith in the Real Presence is due to the lack of awareness that Jesus is a real person-God, who because he loves us, makes his presence a physical one so that we may, mysteriously, eat his body and drink his blood. The door between heaven and earth is opened during his sacrifice so that, somehow, we can touch him.

When I was a child, I loved the large parish church my parents took me to. I loved to see the Pope, on special days, in the Vatican.

Fortunately, I was taught by Franciscans, whose love for Jesus affected me in a way, that if and when I sinned, I was not only breaking the Ten Commandments, but somehow hurting Jesus. I guess that the Vatican, being a political state, impresses some people. How it got to be a political state is not so impressive, especially when Jesus put down the worldly enticements offered to him.

In my rambling, I pray that you understand that Jesus, the here and now man-God, must be preached, even in the face of the two thousand years of convoluted church history.

     F.U.

TIA,

I thought you would be interested in this.

From Vatican Insider, this article, in Spanish, shows how the new post-conciliar missionary sees himself in the service of man, not God. The article is titled, "In the Amazon, in the service of man." It reads:

At age 90 years, Consolata Missionary Silvano Sabatini, who has spent 40 years with the indigenous people of the Brazilian Amazon, has much to tell - about his "'rebellious' life on the edge," about his brave, stimulating and destabilizing "being with the Other," about the meaning of Mission with all its tensions, contradictions, and complexities (in a moment when the rethinking of the missionary activity of the Church is very urgent and current).

Yanomami Indians waiting to be catechized

Everything is in his book-testimony The Anthropologist Priest. Among the Indigenous People of the Amazon (Ediesse, Roma 2011), written in collaboration with anthropologist Silvia Zaccaria, who dedicated several years to field research with the indigenous people of the Brazilian Amazon. ...

It is a project with a radical view of the evangelization that expresses itself in a unique way: "We do not baptize any Yanomami [Indians]," Sabatini says,"because we are convinced that it would make no sense to baptize a person outside the community, and that it is the culture that should be evangelized. Man has the right to have his culture, and he must find the way to express himself in a Christian way in it. Baptizing outside the community would mean establishing a double personality in Baptism."

Which is why, Zaccaria says, "Sabatini responded in this way to a monsignor who wanted to know how many Yanomamis he had baptized: 'Not a single one, thanks to the Good God.' "

It should hardly need to be said that this conflicts with the perennial teaching of the Church and the missionary efforts of great Saints like St. Francis Xavier. In a Letter from India to the Society of Jesus at Rome, in 1543, he wrote: "As to the numbers who become Christians, you may understand them from this, that it often happens to me to be hardly able to use my hands from the fatigue of baptizing: Often in a single day I have baptized whole villages."

Also, Scriptures tells us:

"Thy own wickedness shall reprove thee, and thy apostasy shall rebuke thee. Know thou, and see that it is an evil and a bitter thing for thee, to have left the Lord thy God, and that my fear is not with thee, saith the Lord the God of hosts." (Jer 2:19)

"He that believeth and is baptized, shall be saved: but he that believeth not shall be condemned." (Mark 16:16)

     Mark Stabinski

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