No Shortage of Applicants

Regarding “The Priestly Story Dioceses Tell: Reasons for Optimism in the US” (front page, April 29 issue): I read with interest the article by Anne Hendershott concerning reasons for optimism in the U.S. vocation crisis.

Anne writes that orthodoxy results in higher vocations. She mentions that bishops with high vocation numbers who are transferred to other dioceses also have high vocation numbers in those dioceses, as well. I would suggest that those bishops are doing something different from other bishops. I would suggest it goes beyond orthodoxy and prayer to something else.

That something else could be the fact that those bishops are allowing more men into the seminary than other bishops. I contend that there is no shortage of applicants.

In my opinion, the screening process is different in different dioceses.

If more applicants were allowed to go to the seminary, including older men, the priestly vocation numbers would skyrocket all over the country. As a former late-vocation seminarian, I have some knowledge of the process.

         Joseph P. Nolan

         Waterbury, Connecticut

 

Anti-Pope Bias?

The Register continues to print an unusual number of anti-Pope Francis articles, to the point of making the paper’s bias pretty clear.

As a whole, I believe our Catholic family is divided into “Catholics who live and breathe the Gospel message” and “Catholics who are obsessed with rules and regulations.”

Pope Francis seems to lean toward the Gospel-message folks, which drives the rules-and-regulations folks crazy. The Register’s bias contributes to the split versus trying to heal the division.

In the meantime, many Catholics sit back and wonder, “Did Jesus want us to spread and live the Gospel, or did he want us to spread the rules and regulations of the Church?”

         Jerry O’Hare

         Colorado Springs, Colorado

 

God and the Cosmos

Relative to “A Tribute to Stephen Hawking” (In Depth, April 1 issue): The Register ran a salutary opinion piece on the scientist Stephen Hawking. I respect the author, whose view of Hawking is shared by millions.

However, I have a contrary opinion. It is difficult to find someone who has hurt Christianity, indeed, belief in God, more severely than Stephen Hawking. He has constructed a model of the cosmos such that everything has occurred by chance; therefore, a God is nonessential and never existed. Those among the Hawking fans who are confirmed atheists have been given much ammunition and prestige to their claims.

Scientists and engineers work from models — always. Models can often be very successful in accounting for natural behavior. Nevertheless, they are reductions of reality. If they result in correctly accounting for natural behavior, it is because the designers correctly estimated both the principal and the less important factors in this behavior. But because the models may prove very successful in their objective, sometimes the designers forget that they are not the real thing. The designers may fail to distinguish what is established from what is hypothetical.

I believe that this is what Stephen Hawking has done. To satisfy the requirements of quantum physics, he created a planar concept of time by using a notion of imaginary time as lateral to real time.

Thus, for example, matter can change state instantaneously, impossible in real time alone. His results explain most or many of the cosmic observations thus far made.

He has not been able to prove his results, which is often suggested as the reason why he never received a Nobel Prize.

In regard to mathematical models, George E. P. Box, the internationally renowned statistician, famously said: “All models are wrong. Some are useful.”

Adding to this admonition, another respected statistician, Athanasios Papoulis (1965), wrote: “Scientific theories deal with concepts, never with reality. All theoretical results are derived from certain axioms by deductive logic.

 The theories are so formulated as to correspond in some useful sense to the real world, whatever that may mean. However, this correspondence is approximate, and the physical justification of all theoretical conclusions is based on some form of inductive reasoning.”

According to Hawking, real time began with the Big Bang. If so, then time before that would be linear, consisting only of imaginary time.

In this linear time, matter, which in Hawking’s mind has always existed, somehow came together in such indescribable density as to lead to the Big Bang. How that intense force came to be, no one knows.

Hawking claims that matter always existed; therefore, there is no God. This is clearly a logical fallacy, either of begging the question or of non sequitur. The fundamental question remains: “How did matter begin?”

         William A. Stimson

         Charlottesville, California

 

Evil, and Bad, Idea

Regarding “The Church Needs Honesty About Human Sexuality” (In Depth, Feb. 4 issue): In this, the 50th year since Humanae Vitae, R. Jared Staudt points out in his article that Pope Paul, in Humanae Vitae, taught that contraception falls into the category of an intrinsically evil action. Even apart from being intrinsically evil, it’s a bad idea. Ovulation is central to a woman’s sexuality. Suppressing it with oral contraceptives will result in:

1. adolescent girls who are less sexually mature,

2. young women who are less feminine,

3. married woman who are less attracted to the masculinity of their spouses,

4. pregnant woman with diminished instincts toward protecting their unborn,

5. mothers who are less maternal, and 

6. children who are deprived of fully feminine mothers.

Eliminating what is a central to woman’s sexuality, ovulation, diminishes her sexuality and her femininity through all stages of her life. Bad idea!

         Hugh McGrath Jr., M.D.

         Covington, Louisiana

 

Correction

In “Orthodoxy Among Key Factors in Ordination Numbers” (front page, April 29 issue), the Archdiocese of St. Louis has 53 seminarians. Its seminary currently has 132 men total from various dioceses. The Register regrets the error.