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A Brief Reflection on Excommunication
By John Houk

A Reflection on Homosexuality in the Catholic Church
by John Houk

By John Houk

By John Houk

It may strike some as rather dry and uninteresting to plow through documents
written forty years ago. I can only add that they, along with the people
who have read them, are why I can still find a home in the Catholic Church.
At the age of 67 my formal education in Catholic teaching was pre-Vatican
II. It was a satisfying experience because at that time in my life I wanted
a closed system of thought. These are the questions and these are the answers
was the way Catholic thought was presented to me, and it gave me a sense
of completeness and intellectual security. That must have been what I needed,
and perhaps the Church understood that.

The Second Vatican Council swept away hard-core Catholic positions that had
been blessed by previous Councils and numerous popes. Catholics responded to
this newness in several ways. As my father enjoyed saying, there were those
who made things happen, those who watched things happen, and those who said, “What
happened?” It was my experience that most of us watched, and a lot of
wondered. If it had not been for my own questioning children and faith-filled
wife I probably would never have gotten past the wondering phase which would
inevitably have resulted in my drifting away.

The Council, as I now understand it, was an invitation to discipleship, and
the key to discipleship is that you will never understand your faith until
you try it out yourself. It is a do-to-learn system. How different from my
previous expectations of pre-determined questions and answers. Yes, there is
top-down teaching in the Council documents, but now I, and you, are included
in vastly new and important ways. At its most basic level the Council was an
invitation to participation.

By John Houk

Forty years ago in December the final document of the Second Vatican Council was published concluding the two-year process of publication. The whole Council was, and remains, unprecedented in its scope and tone with the final document having its own unique history.

Are You Pro-Life?
by John Houk

How would you respond to the question, "Are you pro-life?" Think about it for a moment before reading on.

"Are you pro-life?" has become a sticky moral question, a contentious legal question and a hot-button political question. It is not even clear what this question really means unless you know who is asking. Often the context of this question tells us that what the asker really wants to know is, are we opposed to legal abortion. Looking more closely we can see that in this context (1) abortion is the most important, or even the only, "life issue", and (2) the way to deal with abortion is through the legal system. When faced with this question in this context I often feel like the man who was asked, "When did you stop beating your wife?" The "wife" question cannot be answered without incriminating yourself, and I, for one, cannot answer the first question either without a long explanation, which the asker would likely not find satisfying.

by John Houk

It is not my regular routine to read the classifieds in the diocesan paper. The whole paper usually occupies no more than five minutes as I flip through looking for familiar names, who has died, who has moved, who is celebrating, etc. The "news" is always terribly slanted and invariably stale. Yet here I was reading the classifieds. Do you want your walls washed? Two ads offered special senior citizen discounts and claimed 30 years of experience. How could someone have 30 years experience washing walls? Doesn’t that tell its own story? But two types of ad clearly dominated the page, and that is what caught my eye and really peaked my interest.

by Roberta M. Meehan

Rushing madly, trying to get to Chicago. Advent! Advent! Advent!
Hang on, Chicago! I'm coming! Really.

And as I wrote that ramble, I stopped and paused and thought about
the words before me. Advent, of course, is loosely translated as a
coming. And we all know the coming in question is the coming of the
Christ Child on Christmas Day. That part is relatively easy for us.