Catholics On-Line

Molly Mulqueen's front page article, “… Catholic Web Sites Offer a World to On-Line Users” (Jan. 18-24) lists valuable Website sources of reliable Catholic information, available now on the Internet. Please add us to your roster: We're Catholic, pro-life and proud to be!

The Catholic Medical Association is a national federation of Catholic physicians' guilds—and now, we're on the Web. Check out our Website at www.cathmed.com.

Please let other pro-life folks know where to find us.

Richard Watson MD

Mountainside, New Jersey

God Before Man

I found George Sim Johnston's column (“Inner-Child Need Nurturing? Here's Just the Program for You,” Jan. 17) to be very informative. He showed why many converts to Catholicism may he disillusioned by our RCIA programs that are often weak on dogma and truth, but strong on feelings and self-esteem.

He closes the article with “RCIA programs are not the only casualty of the therapeutic culture's invasion of the Catholic Church. Whole orders of religious have been decimated. A spotlight ought to be turned on this problem.”

I am sure his analysis is close to the truth; especially the spotlight part. But the problem is far more extensive than just RCIA. The permeating problem throughout Catholicism today is the inversion of our Lord's two greatest commandments. The spotlight has been cast on the wrong actor; the supporting cast rather than the star of the show. We have raised “love thy neighbor as yourself” to be more important than “love thy God with thy whole heart and with thy whole soul.”

This error has crept into the Church—which for nearly 2,000 years knew better—only during the past 50 years. When we reverse these commandments we end up with a form of secular humanism; a pseudo-religion that appears attractive because it is the second greatest good. It is, however, actually a form of idolatry, placing the importance of humanity above the importance of God.

John Paul II's “Threshold of Hope” will not come to fruition until the spotlight is redirected to shine on God first, and then humanity will bask in the glow of his grace.

Richard McMahon

St. Paul, Minnesota

Population Control

With particular interest I read your guest editorial of Dec. 14 (“The New Population Problem”). I've been at the United Nations more than 10 years as a journalist-columnist for a small Manhattan publication and was impressed with your comments from the Cairo conference, which had tremendous impact here, as did the Vatican-Islamic temporary alliance on the issue of family values.

In the interests of environmental and sustainable development already there is advocacy and some consensus on reducing world population to about two or three billion, and arguments are prepared to justify this.

Besides the revolutionary social, political, cultural, future impact of the coming population implosion, it has been my experience that esoteric political cults are active in the population control, environmental organizations, and NGOs. Today we would call them New Age … but they are essentially old hat to a Church historian.

A rational argument on population imbalances, pension bankruptcies, etc. would not deter such international operators, as they essentially see human life as “pollution” itself to be reduced and eliminated. I believe Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger was involved in esoteric beliefs that abortion and suicide frees a spirit to roam the universe and contraception prevents a spirit from being entrapped in an “evil” body. As a priest or priestess in such cults they see no nobler a pursuit than to eliminate human life from this planet. This, of course, would be a cult(ure) of death.

Robert Bonsignore

Brooklyn, New York