Re: “At the ‘home office’ (1/19/12)

I have become convinced that your editorial staff deliberately tries to insult the intelligence of your readers. Week after week, the headlines of your stories seem to try too hard to be cute. And while this “folksy” style might be pleasing to some, I think it is insulting.

Your recent story on (Arlington) Bishop (Paul S.) Loverde’s ad limina visit to the Vatican is a case in point. In “Lumen Gentium” the fathers of the Second Vatican Council stated, quoting St. Cyprian, that “the universal Church is seen to be ‘a people brought into unity from the unity of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit’” (LG4). At first glance, your headline for this story, “At the ‘home office,” makes our bishop to be nothing more than a functionary, a cog in the corporate machine that is the Church. Bishop Loverde is our shepherd, and the ad limina visit is, more than anything, a retreat and a chance for prayer and renewal with the Holy Father and his fellow bishops that will by God’s grace bring about the unity that the Church fathers are talking about in “Lumen Gentium.”

I read of the state of the Church in our day: of declining numbers of priests, closure and consolidation of parishes, and dwindling attendance at weekly Mass. And that’s the good news.

Pope Benedict speaks of the need for a “new evangelization.” I think that this new evangelization has a chance of happening when we adopt the realization that we are the face of Jesus in the world and begin to act accordingly. The Catholic Herald could be an effective voice of the new evangelization in Arlington. One can only hope.

John Durkin

Haymarket