In Defense of Bedford Hills

Our page-one story “The Bedford Hills Witch Project” (Oct. 29-Nov. 4) contained a misstatement. It is not the case that patriotic songs and the American flag are banned on all campuses in the Bedford Hills School District. The Register regrets the error.

In Defense of ‘Magic’

First, my “credentials": I'm an adult convert to Catholicism; my husband is a “cradle Catholic” who returned to the Church about the time I converted. We very rarely miss a Sunday or Holy Day Mass. And, for the past seven years, we've tithed. I'm worried that, based on your Oct. 28-Nov. 3 article about magic cards, parents will forbid their children to play this creative and enjoyable game ('Magic: The Gathering’ Cards Spook the Experts,” Oct. 28-Nov. 3).

“Magic: The Gathering” is probably not appropriate for fourth-graders, and I'm not sure it has a place in any school's math curriculum. That said, I don't believe the game poses any danger to psychologically healthy older children (middle school and above). Yes, some of the illustrations are scary; more are just mysterious, many are humorous, and all are very imaginative. My son has hundreds of the cards, and none shows anything like “Christ as a fat woman on a cross” or “a rape being perpetrated by a monk.” I suspect these cards have been either deliberately or accidentally misrepresented. There are as many “good guys” as “bad guys” in a deck.

“Magic: The Gathering” is a competitive game of skill which appeals mostly to boys—boys of above-average intelligence, those gifted, “nerdy” kids on the honor roll. Magic-players I know include my high school honor-roll nephew and his friends who recently gave up part of their Saturday to help my nephew's family move. My son plays in a middle-school program for gifted kids. His primary playing partners are his dad and his college-senior sister, who both find the game to be great fun. Playing games together as a family is usually counted among the most wholesome of activities for children.

“Magic: The Gathering” is by necessity a social activity—there is no solitaire play. If your son plays the game with friends whom you know and like, gets good grades, and communicates with you, he's not in any danger from a card game. If your child is emotionally fragile, in trouble with the law or at school, involved with alcohol, drugs or sex, then “Magic: The Gathering” is still the least of your worries.

The danger in concentrating on possible occult activities in your kids, is that you may overlook much more likely threats to them. Looking for pentagrams or signs of animal sacrifice in your child's room, while failing to supervise his leisure time or share your values with him, is barking up the wrong tree. It's not that I don't believe Satan is real—it's just that he latches onto more kids by luring them into drinking, sex and excessive materialism, than by witchcraft and New Age practices. We have to remember that a symbol on a piece of cardboard is no threat to believers; Christ is with us.

GRETA PERLEBERG

Wichita, Kansas

Purgatory Debt-Reduction Plan

Regarding “Reaching Out to Purgatory—And Avoiding It,” Nov. 4-11:

As the new millennium unfolds and social activists continue to campaign for the cancellation of developing countries’ debts (and rightly so, in reparation for the centuries of exploitation we have inflicted upon them), perhaps we should consider another kind of outstanding debt, quite possibly in arrears.

How often do we pray for our ancestors?

If one considers that the Church is a body, including its deceased members, and that if the body suffers then we all suffer and that our ancestors may be languishing in purgatory, this seems an ideal time to campaign for their early release.

I wonder, if each family or each parish put some serious effort into praying for its dead, what the response would be from our Father.

Would he cancel the debts?

STEPHEN CLARK

Manchester, England

When ‘Clerics’ Preach Terror

Joe Woodard's discussion of just-war thinking in the Oct. 21-28 edition was very instructive and thought-provoking (“Battling by the Book: Just War Makes a Comeback”). One lingering question which remains with me weeks after reading it concerns the strict differentiation of combatants and non-combatants. The problem I see is that the young Arab men who make up the majority of the terrorists in Afghanistan, and throughout the Muslim world, are under the sway, instruction and encouragement of Muslim clerics who are not technically combatants.

Yet it seems to me that those more mature clerics are far more guilty than the young men to whom they have preached a false and murderous theology. It seems both unjust and an inadequate strategy to target only the naive and misled young men without also going after, in some manner, those who have filled the young minds and hearts with hate, and encouraged the terrorist acts. For, as the news reports tell us, the “schools” across the border in Pakistan where many of these clerics teach continue quite deliberately produce the young “soldiers of Allah” who think murdering Americans buys them a quick ticket to [Paradise].

MARK GRONCESKI

Milwaukie, Oregon

ACLU Jangles the Constitution's Nerves

In your Oct. 21-27 issue there was mentioned how the American Civil Liberties Union is trying to take the name of God out of our civil life (“‘God Bless America’ Jangles ACLU Nerve”). It always upsets me when I see the ACLU trying to do this. What it is really trying to do is to make atheism a substitute for religion, and hence a form of religion. If our founding fathers did not want the state establishing any formal religion as a state religion, they certainly did not want it to establish any substitute for such a religion either.

Atheism has a right to exist in our country like any other religion, but it has no right to be our state religion. I hope our lawyers will see this truth and use it to prove the ACLU to be totally wrong.

FATHER BARTHOLOMEW GOTTEMOLLER

Huntsville, Utah

Founding Fatherly Advice

Regarding Abraham Lincoln's 1863 Thanksgiving address (“Thanksgiving in a Time of War,” Nov. 18-24):

One of the Founding Fathers of the United States, George Mason, made a similar statement about how God deals with nations that have done wrong.

“As nations cannot be rewarded or punished in the next world, they must be in this. By an inevitable chain of causes and effects, providence punishes national sins by national calamities.”

As soon as our nation goes back to God, positive things will happen and terrorism will be conquered.

ANDREA REMLIN

Westport, Connecticut

The Unjust A-Bomb

As a World War II veteran, I just disagree with the letter of U.S. Air Force Major Sigurd R. Peterson Jr. (Nov. 11-17).

There were many in official capacity who opposed the use of atomic bombs as unnecessary and immoral. Among them were General Dwight Eisenhower and Admiral Ernest King, U.S. Naval Commander-in-Chief, as well as Admiral William Leahy, chief of staff to Presidents Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman. Leahy, a Catholic, stated that America “had adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages.”

It is true that there were fanatical groups in Japan who wanted to fight on, but they were in the minority and were no longer in the driver's seat after Tojo's resignation.

Why couldn't peace have been reached earlier? There was a powerful clique led by General George C. Marshall and Secretary of War James Byrnes, plus certain State Department factions, who obdurately went ahead with plans for an invasion of Japan that wasn't necessary and eventually resorted to the atomic bomb. And it is this clique who influenced Truman. Ironically, the eventual surrender terms were similar to what Japanese were willing to accept months earlier.

Some War Department strategists wanted to use poison gas on Japanese troops, particularly at Iwo Jima, but Admiral Chester Nimitz rejected the idea.

JACK MORAN

St. Louis

Age-Old Rage

The column written by Father Drew Christianson, S.J., (“Roots of their Rage” Oct. 28-Nov. 3) was partly correct.

The rage of the Muslim world against Christians started can actually be found much earlier. For instance, the year 711 A.D., when Spanish Christians were slaughtered by the Muslim Moors from Northern Africa.

In the “Moorish camp, following the battle of Algeciras, a number of Spanish prisoners were seized, dismembered and their flesh boiled in cauldrons in the presence of other prisoners. These latter were then set at liberty to spread the news that Spain had been invaded by cannibals. The terror that followed may account for the flight of many who were relied upon to oppose the Moor.” … That's from page 21 of Blood-Drenched Altars, by Father Francis Clement Kelly.

JOHN DE MAIO

Hoboken, New Jersey

Blessing America

There have been a number of letters recently about the moral strength of America. The attack on America is not only real in physical terms, but it is real in symbolic terms. It represents as President Bush said: an attack on our way of life—our democratic free process. This is something which carries over from our forefathers as they fought for their freedom years ago. It is what keeps us as a light to others.

The fight now is against evil. It is our sense of justice and truth that takes on the evil of a fanatical group.

We will prevail in the long run, no matter what it takes. But will we come to see the log in our own eye, while taking the splinters out of the eyes of foes?

Their flaws are much easier to see, since they use visible means of destruction to try to bring us to our knees. They did bring us to our knees, but not as they hoped. For it has been on our knees that we have sought the higher power which has always led our fight for justice. Now we have come up with that wisdom, and we are ready to move ahead. We will return time and again to our knees, not to surrender but to seek more strength and wisdom.

I know one thing for sure. If we start out each day on our knees, than this evil will soon be destroyed, and then all the other evils in our country will come tumbling down too. First, the overt evil we have all seen, then the covert evil, which disguises itself in many deceitful ways in our own land. We will be a country where all our citizens are free to choose and live—both the born and unborn, both the healthy and the disabled, both the executive and the janitor. We will be one people, indivisible, under God, with liberty and justice for all.

And, if we stay the course to extinguish all evil, God will bless America … again and again, forever … if.

STEVE CHERRY

Oregon, Ohio