Letter to the Editor

Dear Editor:

As we undertake our Holy Week and the Passover celebration that Christ undertook for our salvation, I find that this is maybe a good opportunity to mildly engage the responses that have been re-running in the Chinook Opinion from past articles in the 1980’s. One of the challenges that face our Roman Catholic Church which particularly surface at this time of the year is whether we baptized people who are joining the Roman Catholic Church or whether we accept their baptism from another Church that they had previously been attending.

In 1948 the World Council of Churches was founded as a grouping of the worldwide Christian inter-church organizations to work for the cause of ecumenism. While the Roman Catholic Church is not a member of the organization that has currently 352 member Churches, it has been participated in the discussions and refining the three primary areas of Baptism, Communion, and Ministry and their agreements in these areas. They have tried to reach common areas of agreement and areas that are still in need of developing commonality. A marvelous development that occurred through this organization and other agreements is the unity around valid baptism into the Christian faith. To simplify its statement, to be recognized as Christian and to have a valid baptism which these member Churches accepted, the individual who received baptism in a community that professed Jesus to be the Son of God as well as being one of the Persons of God, as a unity in the Trinity: Father, Son and Holy Spirit; all three of these Persons would need to have been used in the formula and Rite of their baptism, i.e., “I baptize you in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit; and, water was used in the ceremony whether it be by submersion, immersion or that it was poured over the individual. For us specifically as Catholics the minister doing the baptism needs to speak in the first person, “I” as a representation that the minister was acting on behalf of Christ.

In these past articles that are running in the Chinook Opinion the Mormon faith seems to be the subject and claimed recipients of religious intolerance. The Reformed Latter-Day Saints, however, do profess Jesus to be one of the Persons of the Trinity, acknowledging that Jesus is a deity. It is doubtful to most of the Christian Church that this is the teachings of the Latter-Day Saints mainline Mormons. Historically, when the members of a Church refuse to affirm biblical Christianity and the creeds of Christendom they are not recognized as Christians.

That said, this response is not religious intolerance, it is truth. What is amazing about our Christian profession, is that the deity, the Son, was sent by the Father, to redeem and save us and the fallen state of humanity, all of us! The marvels of Christmas that culminated in His birth from the Annunciation nine months earlier, reveals to us the marvel of God willingly and humbly taking on our humanity in the flesh. And now, this loving and merciful God, at the Last Supper announces that He will continue in our midst to make Himself present to us, through the bread that He will transform into His Body and the wine that He transformed into His Blood in the sacrifice that culminates on the Cross of “Good Friday”, which is re-presented at Mass and offered for us in Communion to nourish and strengthen us, “to go and proclaim the Gospel message with our lives.”

This Holy Week leading to Easter Sunday is a great time for us to ponder how we can better reflect the Love that Christ has shown us and put that Love where there is no love (because we are not tolerant to one another). Being tolerant and loving to others is the great response of St. Matthew’s Gospel (chapter 25:31-46) that “when you did it to the least of my brother’s you did it to Me”.

Rev. Father Michael Schneider,

St. Gabriel’s pastor