Reaction to Cimagala column

Good day Father Roy,

I have read with interest your  'Hints and Traces' in today's The Freeman. I am sharing your comments about the situation of the Catholic Church.

The crisis you are referring to is something that happened many times since the Church has been built by Jesus. The best example is the story of the Church of Corinth so well explained in the Scriptures from Saint Paul such as '1 Corinthians 6:12-20'. That was in 50 AD. As it is said “the history repeats by itself”.

How to have a clean living in an unclean world? Homosexuality, abortion, divorce are parts of sexual permissiveness of our today's society. Too often, the church has stood silent on those issues, either pretending that they are not problems encountered by Christians, or also watering down the purity of the church and merely ignoring the issues. The Bible is not silent on those subjects and '1 Corinthians 6:12-20' is the best example however in reading Corinthians 5:1-13 and 6:1-11, we found specific problems that were infecting the church as it is in our society for many years.

They are many reasons to such tragic situation. To my personal and humble opinion, the lack of Religious Education is the number One follows by materialistic matters totally ignoring the spiritual side. People are spending many hours on their computers with Facebook, or reading news about movies stars, singers without forgetting basketball and boxing, but few minutes reading the Gospel? NO. This is the faith in the 21st century. Pope Francis recently declared: “Faith is professed with the mouth and heart, with the word and love.”

In the Lungsuranon's issue of Sunday, April 14, the article on the back page about Pope Francis is very meaningful, but how many of us did read it, did reflect and meditate about it? The reason is the usual “Never mind, it is ok”. The People of God do not care anymore and the worst is that our priests are not there when we need them. We are sheep without shepherds. We are forsaken.

The above personal reflection partly explains why the Church is in crisis.

Respectfully,

Jean Michaut