Letters to the Editor: May 2025

“Seeing” the Unseen

Mike Filce’s article “Heaven: A Stumbling Block?” (March) made me ponder the resurrection of the dead as not just making our bodies ghost-like “spiritual” substances but as truly reanimating the material cosmos. Just as we can say that Heaven and Hell are states wherein souls reside, in a way, even before death — such as in a state of grace — and thus not nearly as outside the material realm as we might fancy or pretend, so Filce’s article made me wonder whether we might say that Heaven, echoing St. Faustina Kowalska, is that state in which a soul participates, by God’s grace, in seeing all of creation as He sees it, and thus ordains it, in the love of the Trinity, where “all creatures give ceaseless praise and glory to God.” Our impoverished earthly vision, by contrast, so often sees only the chaos and disorder caused by sin. This sanctified view of the world directly animated saints like Francis of Assisi and Catholic poets like Fr. Gerard Manley Hopkins (in “As Kingfishers Catch Fire”) and Joseph Mary Plunkett (in “I See His Blood Upon the Rose”). Imagine every atom of the universe vibrating with the praise of God the Father through the Son in the unity of the Holy Spirit!

This purified vision, which can only be seen when standing within the communion of God, turns the whole world into a liturgy — the heavenly liturgy — in which everything is sanctified through, with, and in Christ to the glory of God the Father. This also means that our eventual return to our physical bodies in the resurrection completes Christ’s mission to return all things to His Father, a gift re-created through His love. This means that the meal I make, as satisfactory as it is, will taste even more extravagant in Heaven. This also means that Heaven really did “come down” to saints like Maximilian Kolbe and Edmund Campion, or perhaps exuded from them, as they lived that heavenly reality, making up for what was lacking in Christ’s suffering through their participation in Him.

Fr. Louis Cunningham

St. Frances Cabrini Parish

Lakewood, Washington

Though it is interesting to muse on what an eternal heavenly existence might be like (great lakes of beer, St. Brigid?), Mike Filce makes a great point that we cannot possibly imagine or understand such a state. I really don’t want to think it’s as boring as singer David Byrne seems to believe. It’s also difficult to understand the importance of our bodies because, though they are temporary vessels here on earth (our “earth suits,” as my mom would say), they are intended to be part of our resurrection and union with Christ in Heaven. That is something we probably need to accept on faith, given how often it’s referred to in Scripture.

As someone who enjoys earthly existence, hopes it continues for many years, and wants to see her grandchildren grow up, the idea of disproportionately valuing our earthly lives is something with which I struggle. I could accept it for my dad who lived to be nearly 95 years old, but I’m struggling to accept it for a dear friend with pancreatic cancer who hopes to see her own children grow up.

Filce has given us a thought-provoking, well-researched article that addresses concepts that are uncomfortable for many of us to think about too deeply.

Susan Kavanaugh

Newport Beach, California

Mike Filce hits on an issue most Catholics are afraid even to raise. If Heaven sounds boring, then what’s the point? We don’t think much about the importance of both body and soul and what that has to do with Heaven. Filce has given us lots of food for thought!

Cathy Duffy

Westminster, California

I enjoyed Mike Filce’s take on Heaven, and I think he gave voice to some common questions and truths that are part of the human condition, or maybe the Catholic condition. Part of the beauty and purity of faith is believing in that which we cannot know in a physical, tangible sense. But I had to chuckle when Filce questioned the make-up of his heavenly body, his potential heavenly pastimes, and — God forbid — possible heavenly boredom. Questions about death and Heaven are always with us, but Filce has mustered the courage to express in writing the things we mostly ask ourselves in private.

Our human minds with their limitations cannot imagine a world without time, nor can we picture an unseen paradise. However, I think we can understand how focusing on worldly concerns moves us further away from God, His kingdom, and our true happiness.

As for me, I hope to be fortunate enough to share a beer in Heaven with St. Brigid of Kildare and Filce. Sláinte!

Mary Hammers

Los Gatos, California

Christianity & Confucianism

Christopher Beiting’s review of Ways of Confucius and of Christ (March) by Lu Zhengxiang (Dom Pierre-Célestin Lu) was a pleasure to read. Not only does Dr. Beiting nicely present the volume under review, he also highlights several points that warrant much deeper study than one book alone could satisfy. Readers (including this one) will surely want to check out Ways of Confucius and of Christ and then keep going from there.

Beiting notes, for example, that Lu “did not fall prey to rabid xenophobia.” This is an important point, as that was no small feat at the time. Western imperialists had won few friends in Asia. The Boxer Rebellion, which Beiting mentions, was a violent reaction to what the rebels had come to see as “outsider devils,” and not without reason. But it wasn’t just Westerners who were to blame. What we call “China” today was a hodgepodge of states and peoples ruled by Manchurians, whom Han revolutionaries would come to loathe as an alien race. The teachings of Confucius and the agape of the Gospels were surely good balm against the temptation to hate, but they were no guarantee. To have been married to a European woman while an entire country was caught in an upheaval aimed largely against those who were not Han Chinese required more than a little bit of character and courage on Lu’s part, no matter how much help he had from the ancients. It is well worth learning about the life of Lu Zhengxiang to find out how he managed to rise above the darkness surrounding him in his day.

Beiting’s mention of Shanghai and Versailles also caught my eye. Shanghai was, as Beiting hints, a highly international city, more by force than by coincidence. Europeans (and, much later, the Japanese) had taken over sections of Shanghai and ruled the city piecemeal as non-Chinese territory. A sensitive soul, especially a native Shanghainese as was Lu, would naturally have wondered what made foreigners strong enough to help themselves to parts of his country.

Lu was fortunate to have had as his guide in this the famous Catholic Xu Jingcheng (if indeed this is who is meant by “Xu Jingchen,” without the final “g”). But in suggesting that Christianity is what gave Westerners their cultural power, Xu left Lu a most difficult piece of thinking to do, because, as demonstrated during the years of slaughter culminating in Versailles, the foreigners claimed to be Christians but often acted like barbarians. Western behavior was often little better in Shanghai. There is much complexity here for readers to delve into on their next visit to the library.

Finally, I was struck by the appearance of the name of Xuanzang (rendered “Xuanzhang” in the review), and by Lu’s having seen himself as, in some way at least, “a Benedictine version” of the great Tang Dynasty-era propagator of Buddhism. Christians have had a much more difficult time rooting their faith in Asian soil than did Buddhists like Xuanzang. By a subtle irony, both Confucianism and Christianity, as Beiting notes, are rich expositions of the natural law. Buddhism, by contrast, has a very particular kind of law, dharma (which is written in Chinese with the character for “law”). And yet, the latter has enjoyed greater universal appeal in Asia than have either of the former.

Some 13 centuries lie between the lives of Xuanzang and Lu Zhengxiang. Perhaps readers will be inspired by Beiting’s review to think about why Xuanzang largely succeeded in his missionary endeavors, while Lu’s labors, as of this writing, appear to have borne much more modest fruit.

It is true, as Beiting writes, that Christianity appears to be spreading in China. So, too, does Buddhism, with Tibetan Buddhism becoming increasingly popular in a country whose government persecutes both Tibetans and Christians (and Uyghur Muslims, for that matter). Lu worked for the Republic of China, of course, so the horrors of the Chinese Communist Party can’t be laid at his feet. But the next-door island nation of Taiwan, whither the Republicans fled in the year Lu died, is, as Beiting writes, no better than China when it comes to population issues, despite being ostensibly much more Christian.

Whether there is something in the propagation of Christianity that hits roadblocks in Asia, or something in the natural law or the particulars of philosophies and creeds that is at play, Beiting’s review is a welcome opportunity to look much more deeply at the life of a man who lived these questions, and whose example can surely provide us with some answers today.

Jason M. Morgan

Kashiwa

Japan

Rudyard Kipling famously wrote, “East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet,” an injunction that might apply to America’s recent foreign engagements. Apparently, however, Christopher Beiting’s review of The Ways of Confucius and of Christ offers a vision of Orient and Occident meeting under the banner of Christianity.

Beiting’s is an excellent review on a highly charged subject with a long history: the clash of traditional Chinese society with the West, specifically, Christianity. As Dr. Beiting reports, some Chinese, realizing that Christianity is the chief source of the West’s success, sense that their own success will necessarily be based on embracing Christianity. The late sociologist and historian Rodney Stark was also hopeful when he reported 20 years ago that influential individuals in the People’s Republic of China seemed to be quite aware of how essential Christianity has been for Western success and how it can provide the seeds for China’s growth into modernity.

As a leading scholar of the Chinese Academy of the Social Sciences told a group of Westerners in 2002, this think tank of the communist government was tasked with scrutinizing the West’s culture, to try to discover the key to its superiority, and concluded that “the heart of your culture is your religion: Christianity. That is why the West has been so powerful. The Christian moral foundation was what made possible the emergence of capitalism and then the successful transition to democrat politics. We don’t have any doubt about this.”

Another Chinese academic, Zhuo Xinping, a member of the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress, wrote in 1997, “Only by accepting this [Christian] understanding of transcendence as our criterion can we understand the real meaning of such concepts as freedom, human rights, tolerance, equality, justice, democracy, the rule of law, universality, and environmental protection.” As Stark reported: Even Chinese Communist Party leaders have intimated similar sentiments.

It’s astonishing that such sentiments are admitted to by those in influential positions within the largest experiment in doctrinaire materialism in history, and yet Westerners are trying to dismantle this heritage! Despite all this, China remains mostly closed to Western cultural influences — except for Marxism, which, ironically, is self-imploding, as history has shown.

Terry Scambray

Fresno, California

A Subtle Error

I immensely enjoyed Eric Jackson’s guest column “The Complex Legacy of John Ireland” (March). On the whole, I agree with his sentiments concerning the Cathedral of St. Paul and his assessment of the life of Archbishop Ireland. But hidden within his remarks is a subtle error that must be addressed.

Toward the middle of Jackson’s column, the adjective “postconciliar” appears suddenly in reference to Church architecture. I take exception to the identification of the Second Vatican Council as a cardinal moment in Church architectural design, and its implied negative connotation. I am of the firm opinion that Vatican II is not responsible for the demise of Church architecture, and I challenge those who make this claim to defend it. We need only look at the cornerstone dates on hideous churches to see that there is no correlation.

In the late 1950s, architects and builders churned out some of the most egregious architectural insults to our faith and compounded the co-opting and attempted takeover of the council by nefarious forces within the Church. It is also clear that the buildup to Vatican II was part of a long and insidious decline of the faith that is not confined to particular moments in history.

I deeply appreciate Jackson’s column, but a humble retraction of his “postconciliar” jab is in order. I highly recommend Fr. Blake Britton’s Reclaiming Vatican II: What It (Really) Said, What It Means, and How It Calls Us to Renew the Church (Ave Maria Press, 2021) as a rebuttal to the idea of the council as a cardinal moment in the demise of the Church.

Timothy Presley

Marquette, Michigan

ERIC JACKSON REPLIES:

Timothy Presley takes exception to my use of the term “postconciliar,” but I think a closer reading will reveal that I had no intention of implying that the Second Vatican Council was “responsible for the demise of Church architecture.” The phrase I used was “post-conciliar modernist architecture,” and my purpose was to compare the style of the Cathedral of St. Paul and the Basilica of St. Mary in Minneapolis with that of “my simple suburban parish church.”

It is true that hideous churches were built before the council. St. John’s Abbey Church (1961) in nearby St. Joseph, Minnesota, provides an excellent example. On the other hand, the Shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe (2008) in La Crosse, Wisconsin, proves that beautiful buildings can still be built, even after the council.

Vatican II has come to stand for more than it can reasonably bear. Probably the madness that seems to have descended on the West after World War II would have done damage to the Church even without a council. But that is a subject for another day.

I thank Mr. Presley for his response and his book recommendation.

A Special Providence

I want to thank and congratulate the NOR for the two-part “Symposium on Catholics & American Political Life” (Dec. 2024 and Jan.-Feb. 2025). The topic was timely, and the wide range of perspectives offered many insights that have been useful to consider. Indeed, since President Trump’s inauguration and the whirlwind he has unleashed, I have re-read both installments. The commentary challenged my own thoughts about our nation, with contributors ranging from the unabashedly pessimistic (looking at you, Jason M. Morgan) to the more hopeful (e.g., Will Hoyt and A. James McAdams). My own views tend toward the latter. Despite the many serious (and sinful) flaws in our culture and government, America is a land where God is still present and is still doing good, and I believe Catholics can and will move the nation to a place more aligned with His will. As Otto von Bismarck purportedly said, “God has a special providence for fools, drunkards, and the United States of America.”

Thank you for your continued work in publishing important voices and opinions.

Michael Reilly

Wilmington, Delaware

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