Article About Matthew Schiller
Dear Editor: It was very interesting to read the recent article in The Tablet about the life of Matt Schiller (“The Tablet’s Former Business Manager Gives Back to Bright Christmas Fund,” Dec. 23).
Matt’s father, Gene, and I were classmates in the 1940s and early 1950s at St. John’s University Business School in Downtown Brooklyn.
We were close as families, and I am godfather for Matt’s brother Mark and briefly corresponded with his sister Sharon when his mother and father, Gene and Claire, relocated to South Dakota.
My time was briefly interrupted from 1951 to 1953 when I was in the Marine Corps during the Korean War.
Like Matt, two of my sons are living in Connecticut. His picture with Ed Wilkinson reminded me of how Matt once looked.
Thanks for the memories.
John Rubsam
Bayside Hills
Addressing the Issue of Migrants
Dear Editor: There’s an old adage that says it all: “Tell the truth and shame the devil.”
Mayor Adams — who was a strong supporter of New York being a sanctuary city, is now burdened with the influx of thousands of migrants and the enormous costs associated with such a hare-brained idea — decided to pursue other courses of action.
Failing to obtain necessary funds from the Biden administration after enlisting the help of Sens. Schumer and Gillibrand in that pursuit, he declared the burden should be shared equally by dispersing the migrants across the U.S.
And because we as New Yorkers are all in this together, his latest proposal involves all of us going to Washington, D.C., in mass to protest our grievances.
Not he nor any other Democrat, barring a few traditional ones, would stand in solidarity and proclaim in one voice, “Mr. President, close the border, protect our nation from unvetted migrants and save us from financial devastation.”
Where are the statesmen whose love of country surpasses the goal of just getting re-elected? As patriots, we must seek them out and elect them.
Thomas and Constance Dowd
Oakland Gardens
Churches Live On With Parishioners
Dear Editor: Over the last several days a bedrock of the Diocese of Brooklyn, St. Patrick’s Church on Kent Avenue in Brooklyn, was demolished.
No one can measure the number of positive things that happened there over nine generations of Long Island Catholics.
Its presence impacted the thousands of people who worshiped and received the sacraments there, and all the children educated in the school for over a century.
Catholic churches are not landmarks; they live on with the parishioners who worshiped there.
Dennis H. Raymond, Sr.
Marlboro, NJ
A New Papal Development on War
Dear Editor: Over the Christmas break, I had a chance to peruse the pope’s new book and was astounded by what I found there. In his new book, “I Am Asking in the Name of God: Ten Prayers for a Future of Hope,” Pope Francis made a startling, unprecedented pronouncement.
“To the explicit rejection of my predecessors, the events of the first two decades of this century compel me to add, unambiguously, that there is no occasion in which a war can be considered just. There is never a place for the barbarism of war, especially not when contention acquires one of its most unjust faces: that of so-called ‘preventive wars’ ” (Vatican News).
The pope is adding a slight edge here to his moral assessment of war in “Fratelli Tutti,” where he states that “war is the negation of all rights and a dramatic assault on the environment,” and that some people “wrongly justify even ‘preventive’ attacks or acts of war” (258). St. Augustine, the pope says, “forged a concept of ‘just war’ that we no longer uphold in our own day” (footnote 242).
So, the Church’s teaching on war is undergoing a transformation. At present, the Vatican’s official stance seems to be that while in theory a war could be just, in reality wars never are.
“Fratelli Tutti” makes it clear that the present pope sees the distinction between war and “the savagery of war” as conceptual in nature.
In reality, all wars are savage. This development parallels in many ways a similar development in the Church’s official teaching on the death penalty, which reached a culmination in 2018 with an addendum by the Holy Father to the teaching in Catechism of the Catholic Church.
While the Church has yet to update the discussion of legitimate defense in the Catechism of the Catholic Church and Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, I believe we can safely speak of a new development in the teaching on the morality of war.
I do not want to give the impression that the development is over. It is more of a process in my mind, but this is the latest stage in it.
As long as Pope Francis is pope, all Catholics need to respect his latest assessment of war in his newest book.
Pope Francis implores us to not lose sight of the millions of victims of the madness of war.
Charles Crawford McCarthy
Brockton, MA