San Diego Union-Tribune Cartoon Draws League Response

To the Editor:

It is truly regrettable that S. Kelly, your cartoonist and the Union-Tribune continue to engage in Catholic-bashing (Editorial Page cartoon, July 12, 1995).

While the Holy Father makes a sincere effort to reach out to disaffected women within the Church with a pastoral letter which extends good will and conciliation the Union-Tribune responds in a mean-spirited manner ridiculing the Catholic Church.

The Catholic Church’s refusal to extend ordination to women is based on careful consideration of Scripture and Tradition in its determination that “official priesthood for women is contradictory to binding Church doctrine and to the nature of women.” (Hauke, M., WOMEN IN THE PRIESTHOOD: A SYSTEMATIC ANALYSIS IN THE LIGHT OF THE ORDER OF CREATION AND REDEMPTION [Ignatius Press, San Francisco? 1986], p. 481.)

Criticism of this analysis may well be fair comment, but it would be a great deal more useful if the Union-Tribune attempted to do so in a competent, scholastic manner. As a general circulation newspaper, it is appallingly hypocritical for the Union-Tribune to call for tolerance for diversity in so many other areas when it displays such a strident intolerance for the Catholic Church’s determination of who is eligible to receive its sacraments.