Letters to the Editor: December 2024

Israel & Hamas: No Moral Equivalence

In the three decades that I’ve been a reader of (and occasional writer for) the NOR, the name Thomas Storck has been one that inspires my respect. So it is with reluctance that I voice disagreement with him and Inez Fitzgerald Storck regarding their features in the October 2024 issue.

In a nutshell, the Storcks imply a sort of moral equivalence between Hamas and the Israeli Defense Force (IDF), and they are wrong to do so. Mr. Storck, in his guest column “Clarifying Our Thinking about the Holy Land,” did, to his credit, mention the “brutal attack” on Israel by Hamas on October 7, 2023. But he did not mention how brutal it was. In stark contrast with the practices of the IDF, Hamas gave no warnings before the attack, and civilians were not collateral damage; they were the targets. Hamas militants beheaded Israeli infants and toddlers, and they raped Israeli grandmothers. Whatever retaliatory measures the IDF took in Gaza, nobody — not even proven liars like the members of Hamas — has claimed they beheaded Palestinian children or raped the elderly.

Mr. Storck quotes a highly questionable figure (40,000 Palestinians killed by the IDF) concocted by the “Health Ministry” of Hamas, the same people who stormed Israel and deliberately committed atrocities against Israeli civilians. There is no way to verify this figure, even though it’s constantly quoted in the media as if it were Gospel. Also, the same people who came up with this figure also claimed that an Israeli rocket hit Gaza’s Al-Ahli Hospital on October 17, 2023, when it was later proven that the rocket came from Gaza.

I take no issue with most of Mr. Storck’s statements about the historical background of the problem, but he makes one frustrating whopper: “Israelis must accept that Palestinians exist and have the same rights to their lands as other people.” The Israelis have been trying to give Palestinians their own land for decades! They pulled back in 2006, tried to let Gaza govern itself, and even provided Gazans with water and electricity. A significant number of Gazans worked in Israel. Hamas ended this attempt by Israel to live at peace with the Gazans with their bloody surprise attack on October 7.

As nice as it sounds for Mr. Storck to say there should be a “two-state solution,” the simple truth is the majority of Palestinians do not want their own country if that means accepting Israel’s right to exist. What they want is Israel itself. Unless they’re allowed to kill everyone in Israel, any talk of a two-state solution is wasted breath. Mr. Storck mentions the phrase “from the River to the Sea” as something uttered by “Palestinians or Israelis.” Funny, but I’ve never heard it uttered by Israelis (unless they’re quoting the people who’d like to see them dead).

Mrs. Storck, in her review of Don’t Look Left: A Diary of Genocide, mentions how the “privations Gazans experience increase over the course of the war.” That is true and deeply regrettable, but the blame should be placed squarely on the people who started this war and who keep it going by refusing to release the Israeli children, women, and men they took hostage: Hamas.

As U.S. Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman once stated, war is hell, but sometimes it’s necessary. In this case, Hamas made it necessary for Israel to defend itself. Just as we might disagree with some of Gen. Sherman’s tactics in his March to the Sea, or the firebombing of Dresden or Tokyo in World War II, while recognizing the cause of the wars as just, so the IDF is fighting a defensive war against Hamas (and Hezbollah and Iran) that is necessary for Israel’s survival.

Mrs. Storck repeats author Atef Abu Saif’s claim that “it’s not Hamas they’re cleansing. It’s Arabs.” This is belied by the fact that Arabs serve in the IDF, attend Israeli schools and universities, are elected members of the Knesset (the Israeli legislature), and worship at Muslim mosques and Christian churches (yes, there are Arabs who are Christians, too) inside Israel. That’s not genocide. The Israelis are not trying to kill all Arabs. But they are trying to make Hamas jamás, and I, for one, pray to God that they achieve peace through victory.

Larry A. Carstens

Castaic, California

I was very disappointed by the October issue of the NOR, in particular by the two features alleging that the Israelis are committing genocide in Gaza. Thomas Storck and Inez Fitzgerald Storck both refuse to give any real description of the extremely gruesome attack by Hamas that triggered Israel’s ongoing reprisals. In her review of his book, Mrs. Storck writes that “Abu Saif makes no mention of the Hamas attacks that triggered the war. This is quite puzzling.” Oh, really? Talk about naïveté!

I suggest the NOR review The Dragon’s Prophecy: Israel, the Dark Resurrection, and the End of Days by Jonathan Cahn to try to make up to its faithful readers for this unfortunate situation, in the hope that many of them won’t cancel their subscriptions.

Dennis P. Allen Jr., Ph.D.

Spring Lake, Michigan

Thomas Storck gives a good summary of the history of Israel and its neighbors over the past century and more. Unfortunately, he omits three points, two of them critically important.

No modern history of the Middle East is complete without mention of the first planned partition of Palestine. In 1922 the League of Nations mandated the partition of Palestine into a Jewish “Cisjordan” and an Arab “Transjordan.” The Arab Transjordan became independent as the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan; Cisjordan remained a British protectorate. By this partition plan, all of Palestine between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea was to be a Jewish state.

Storck mentions that under the 1947 partition plan 56 percent of the land was to be allocated to the Jewish state, and 43 percent to the Arab state. While this is true, much of the Jewish land was the Negev Desert in the “southern cone” of Israel, not suitable for development. Considering this, the division of land, though still not proportional to the population, is less inequitable.

Finally, it is often overlooked that after the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, there were about as many Jewish refugees as Arab refugees. The difference is that Israel absorbed the Jewish refugees, integrating them into Israeli society. The Arab refugees were put into camps and told to wait until the Arab armies could “drive the Jews into the sea.” This policy continued over the decades. Even today, with all the violence and misery in Gaza, Egypt is not allowing Palestinians into its country in any significant numbers.

The Palestinian cause is the only liberation movement in history that is motivated not by the establishment of a homeland for its own people but by the destruction of another people. Until that changes, the United States would do well to understand that some of the problems are beyond its ability to solve. As Golda Meir, former prime minister of Israel, once said, “You cannot negotiate peace with somebody who has come to kill you.”

John F. Fay

Freeport, Florida

THOMAS STORCK REPLIES:

Larry A. Carstens is incorrect in asserting that I imply a moral equivalence between Israel and Hamas. I do not do so, and in fact, I do not address who has done the worst deeds in a sad century of conflict. He asserts that “the Israelis have been trying to give Palestinians their own land for decades!” This is a strange claim, given that the Israelis have been seizing privately held Palestinian land in the West Bank for decades. There can hardly be a two-state solution without sufficient territory for both states. As for the slogan “From the River to the Sea,” that is the basis for Israeli policy today. See, for example, the article in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz titled “Netanyahu’s Map Shows Israel ‘From the River to the Sea.’ It’s No Accident” (Sept. 5).

Dennis P. Allen Jr. states that neither my wife nor I “give any real description of the extremely gruesome attack by Hamas that triggered Israel’s ongoing reprisals.” My column was about the historical background of the crisis. Am I, therefore, compelled to state the details of the latest Palestinian attack? How about prior ones? Should I also mention Israeli atrocities? How far back do I have to go? My point in writing was to try to get beyond the latest cycle of violence and look at the background and causes.

John F. Fay claims that the 1922 demarcation between Jordan and Palestine was to be between an Arab and a Jewish state. This is not the case. The text of the actual League of Nations Mandate, while certainly unfriendly to Zionism, nowhere states that the territory from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean was to be a Jewish state. It was separated from Transjordan, yes, but its exact status was left undetermined. Like so many of the documents of that era, including the 1917 Balfour Declaration, in which the British government announced support for a Jewish homeland, it contained internal contradictions, the result of trying to please all sides.

I wrote in my column that “we can only wish that the Arab states had accepted the [1948 partition] plan,” and the failure of both sides to give up maximalist dreams has led to much conflict. Until that happens, we can expect more and more violence, suffering, and death.

On a personal note, like most Americans, I was an unquestioning supporter of Israel until I actually read some unbiased historical accounts of the conflict, in particular Israel: A Country Study, part of a series prepared under the auspices of the U.S. Department of the Army.

INEZ FITZGERALD STORCK REPLIES:

I agree with Larry A. Carstens that blame for the beginning of the current war in Gaza lies with Hamas, who surely knew that Israel’s response to the October 7 massacre would not be temperate. It is also true that war involves civilian casualties. Yet, if we accept Gen. Sherman’s excesses and the destruction in Dresden and Tokyo uncritically, we’re really saying that there are no limits in warfare, that the justice of a cause does not imply any kind of protection for civilians. Paradoxically, this same stance could have been invoked by Hamas on October 7, as they believe the decades-long repression of Palestinians, along with more recent provocations, justified their actions.

That a small number of Arabs have been elected to the Knesset and serve in the IDF does not change an assessment of the actions of the IDF in Gaza, nor does the fact that Arab Christians and Muslims in Israel worship in churches and mosques. It must be noted, though, that this past March thousands of Christians from the West Bank were prevented from celebrating Palm Sunday in Jerusalem. This is just one example of the limitation of movement imposed on Arabs. See The Other Side of the Wall: A Palestinian Christian Narrative of Lament and Hope (2020) by Lutheran pastor Munther Isaac for an account of what it’s like to live in an enforced enclave in Bethlehem, where passing through numerous checkpoints is required to go to other parts of Israel. This segregation of Palestinians is a form of apartheid.

As I pointed out in my review, the Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church articulates guidelines for warfare. This is a confirmation of just-war theory, based on the natural law and predating Christianity, which requires the protection of noncombatants. The fact that Hamas ignored this stricture does not give Israel carte blanche to reduce large portions of Gaza to rubble and effect mass transfers of the population, resulting in disease and malnutrition, with consequent mortality. The more than 40,000 Gazans, over half of whom are women and children, who have perished as a result are clearly victims of attempted ethnic cleansing.

The 40,000 figure has been contested as too high, though multiple sources attest to it, including CNN, the Associated Press, National Public Radio, Doctors Without Borders, LifeSiteNews.com, and many independent journalists. This figure does not include those buried under the rubble, estimated at around 10,000. Reporters Without Borders has documented the high number of journalists the IDF has killed so as to limit access to the facts. Even if these sources are dismissed as ideological, there are Jewish organizations covering the scope of the tragedy, such as Haaretz, the Israeli human-rights group B’Tselem, and the Jewish Voice for Peace.

There is similar controversy surrounding the decapitation of babies on October 7 and the rocket that hit the Al-Ahli Hospital in October 2023. Reputable news sources have debunked the former and confirmed that it was an Israeli strike that hit the hospital. On the other hand, there are credible accounts of IDF snipers shooting women and children. A Christian woman and her daughter were shot at Holy Family Parish in Gaza City in December 2023. Children have also been deliberate victims of Israeli snipers, as attested by multiple sources, including Jewish-American surgeon Mark Perlmutter.

Our Primal Fear of Being Cast Out

It’s hard for me to avoid the conclusion that what’s enabled the woke disaster is a simple lack of moral courage. “Cancelation” is a synonym for old-fashioned ostracism. And ostracism is a basic social mechanism. Indeed, it’s a basic primate mechanism, as scholars of the various apes have shown. But a crucial aspect of ostracism is that the community does not just exclude the targeted norm-violator; it also excludes everyone who refuses to take part in the ostracism.

Ostracism generates in all of us a primal fear. Among primates, an excluded ape family would have found itself killed by predators. In hunter-gatherer societies, an excluded family similarly starved or was killed by predators. In wet-rice agriculture, an excluded family would have been unable to plant or harvest its grains — and either starved or moved to the city.

As our fear of ostracism is so basic, for anyone to refuse to participate requires moral courage. But look closely at any case of woke cancelation, and you find instead pervasive cowardice. Scholars and administrators (especially administrators) know that what the mob demands (such as choosing whom to fire according to race) is wrong. In most cases, it is so obviously wrong that it violates everything we teach our children.

But our fear of being cast out of our community is primal, and scholars and administrators have been “sucking up” to the mob with a vengeance. They have been doing this across the Western university community, and they even did this at a Catholic college in the case of Prof. Caitlin Smith Gilson (“Twilight of the Universities,” Oct.). This is wrong, ethically wrong. It is a violation of principles that go to the core of our Christian faith.

J. Mark Ramseyer

Mitsubishi Professor of Japanese Legal Studies, Harvard Law School

Cambridge, Massachusetts

The general contours of Caitlin Smith Gilson’s searing article will be familiar to anyone with any principles who has been on just about any college campus in America at any point over the past 30 or more years. Recently, for instance, I had the chance to interview Amy Wax, professor of law at the University of Pennsylvania, who was given the star-chamber treatment by her employer for challenging her students to think beyond their emotions. Roland Fryer, a Harvard professor also hung out to dry by his institution for daring to ask forbidden questions, tells a similar tale. Ditto Laura Kipnis at Northwestern; Bret Weinstein, formerly at Evergreen College; and Peter Boghossian, formerly at Portland State.

And ditto Anthony Esolen, formerly at Providence College.

Esolen, readers might know, is a Catholic, and the place of learning that turned against him is, nominally, Catholic. This gap, between Catholicism as a substantive creed (which Prof. Esolen professes) and “Catholic” as a name on a door, is, I think, the source of much of Prof. Gilson’s dismay. It has often been the source of my own. And yet, I have often reflected, I should not be surprised to find cowardice, as Esolen, Gilson, and many others have, where the courage of Catholic conviction once reigned.

It is cold comfort but, nearly six decades after the Land O’Lakes Statement, almost every Catholic institution in America is simply a homier version of State U, with the same panoply of gender- and assorted other grievance-studies and Marxist agitprop on the curriculum as you would find in virtually any humanities syllabus at any secular institution. Often, in fact, Catholic schools are worse, because the word Catholic in their name or their background makes the anti-Catholics who teach there sensitive about being mistaken for believers. Famous academics tend to be surprisingly low-key compared to nobodies in the academic boondocks, who must shout the revolutionary slogans the loudest to be noticed by the deans who do the promoting based on precisely that. Nobody hires for wokeness like Catholic schools nowadays. Nobody.

Gilson’s references to “men without chests,” to Newman, to Scruton — all these are good and true but strike me as wasted on the factotums who run the American Catholic colleges. It comes down to this: Either parents and donors stop sending money to fake “Catholic” institutions, or the problem — including the intolerable treatment of Gilson and others — will continue.

Jason M. Morgan

Reitaku University, Kashiwa

Japan

Poor René Descartes! This thinker whom Pierre Cardinal de Bérulle encouraged to renew philosophy has been made into the fountainhead of all that is wrong with the postmodern world. Descartes, a thorough Augustinian, as Stephen Menn demonstrates in Descartes and Augustine (1998), has been unfairly demonized.

In her otherwise informative and heartbreaking article “Twilight of the Universities,” Caitlin Smith Gilson repeats the old misinterpretation of Descartes (1596-1650) as the founder of an absolute mind-body dualism that unfettered the human will from nature and reason. Thus, Descartes, she asserts, is the remote progenitor of today’s identity politics.

Paul Hoffman, in Essays on Descartes (2009), provides a nuanced rebuttal of this position. Hoffman argues that Descartes continued to assume and employ the traditional hylomorphism (matter-form-ism) when speaking of human beings. That is to say, Descartes thought the body and soul together make up one substance, and each one, although a substance itself (an innovative idea, to be sure), influences the other. Indeed, “the soul has a natural aptitude to be united to the body.” Moreover, the soul, on one hand, exercises influence over the body by means of the will. Of course, this leaves the will securely in the realm of the rational soul, as St. Augustine maintained. The body, on the other hand, influences the soul by means of the passions, and where the will is weak, this can have a deleterious effect.

About 20 years ago, I heard a lecture by a Catholic philosopher who argued that the Enlightenment philosophers are our philosophical friends because they believed so strongly in reason. The loss of this belief, along with the concomitant belief in nature, is the cause of our current religious, philosophical, moral, and cultural malaise. Emblematic of this transformation, I would add, is Friedrich Nietzsche’s rejection of Enlightenment reason and his elevation of will above all functions of soul. The reader will notice that Dr. Gilson alludes to Nietzsche’s Twilight of the Idols, Or, How to Philosophize with a Hammer in the title of her article. What hammer would she use to fix the idols of contemporary education? I suggest that Ivan Illich provides us a hammer in In the Vineyard of the Text and his other works on education.

Descartes, of course, lived before the Enlightenment, but he should be seen as a firm friend and mentor, like the Enlightenment philosophers, as we try to think our way through the postmodern crisis, as a return to premodern ways of thinking and acting, as the integralists recommend, is — by reason and nature, by plain common sense — impossible.

Richard Upsher Smith Jr.

Steubenville, Ohio

CAITLIN SMITH GILSON REPLIES:

To J. Mark Ramseyer

I deeply appreciate your response to my article and the crucial perspective it brings to matters like these — matters all too common at universities, even Catholic universities.

The fear of being canceled, ostracized, or exiled from the normal order of things motivates a quick suppression of freedom and dialogue. Your use of the word primal strikes me. Something at the root of us reacts and closes off our better, nobler, and virtuous instincts. There are many instances of colleagues’ showing support in private but remaining silent in public, or acting in the public forum opposed to their consciences, for fear of reprisals. Understandably, they worry about job security, about the practical and concrete matters of being hirable, paying the bills, and receiving solid recommendation letters.

But primal fear is diametrically opposed to the role and aim of a university and a liberal education. In The Idea of a University, John Henry Newman writes that liberal education gives men “a clear, conscious view of their own opinions and judgements, a truth in developing them, an eloquence in expressing them, and a force in urging them.” When the essential freedom and leisure at the foundation of a university are replaced with primal fear, men act first and ask questions later, or never ask questions at all.

To Jason M. Morgan

Thank you for your clarion and generous response. We tell ourselves we should not be surprised by the sense of resignation you describe — this is the way of things now. Yet dismay and heartbreak are ever present. We should not be surprised, and yet still we are. Perhaps it is because “Catholic” is still on the door, and it still has enough substance to re-ignite hope. We hold the Catholic approach to a higher standard when it comes to higher education. There is still a deep corporate memory when we hear “Catholic liberal arts.” All the variants of Marxism, from secular to militant, haven’t blotted out that memory and yearning.

For a good long while, I thought the word “Catholic” on the university doors and mission statements held living value. I trusted it would protect and uphold their missions and right their courses. I hoped the bishops would respond, and the board was a wise governing body. I believed that the signification “Catholic identity” had such intrinsic meaning, worth, depth, and breadth that consciences formed by it would respond, and order, goodwill, and common sense would prevail. This did not happen.

Your letter reminded me of the great Italian political philosopher Augusto Del Noce, who speaks of how Marxism took hold in the West in ways it could not in the East; that it was not merely a transition from one social view to another, but that it worked to transform the entirety of human nature through sex and technology. The remaining Catholic universities must realize that this destructive power cannot be harmonized in any way without consenting to their own deaths.

To Richard Upsher Smith Jr.

How enjoyable to read such a worthy caution, one mindful never to wield generalities in place of good, attentive reflection. The history of Western thought takes many turns indeed, some marked by nuance and subtlety, while others are decisive breaks and revolutions — a philosophizing with Phidias’s hammer and chisel.

With Étienne Gilson I say, “There is more than one excuse for being a Descartes, but there is no excuse whatsoever for being a Cartesian,” and with William Barrett I say, “Far from being merely a passing episode in the history of philosophy, Cartesianism is in fact the secret history of Western civilization during the last three hundred years.”

There is a metaphysical reversal of order and intelligibility that proceeds from Descartes that cannot be ignored; it has permeated philosophy and our social order from its ideas to the very understanding of human embodiment. Yes, the Cartesian mind died long ago, and Descartes did not anticipate that his machine would lose not only its soul but its mind. But for the past 350 years this machine has been asked to think, and who has not felt its long shadow?

“Ideas, and ideas alone, are that with which every man must do battle who would overcome the falsehood of the world. Matter is the most obedient of creatures. It is not only wax that can be moulded into any figure at will; Parian marble itself yields, and the formless block turns under the chisel of a Phidias or some other master into a singing god” (Lev Shestov, In Job’s Balances: On the Sources of the Eternal Truths).

Another Garesché

As a historian, I appreciated Casey Chalk’s column on Civil War General William S. Rosecrans (“A Requiem for Old Rosy,” Revert’s Rostrum, Sept.). Chalk relates the battlefield death of the general’s comrade and chief of staff, Col. Julius Garesché, while later noting that Julius had been a writer and “a serious Catholic evangelist.” It reminded me of another Catholic evangelist named Garesché.

Edward Garesché was the grandson of Julius’s brother, Alexander J.P. Garesché. Edward (1876-1960) was a Jesuit priest and author of dozens of books, including seven volumes of poetry. It is widely believed that the last letter Theodore Roosevelt penned and signed was a note to Msgr. Edward Vattmann, thanking him for the gift of Edward Garesché’s book of poetry, War Mothers. The note arrived in Vattmann’s mailbox on January 6, 1919, the day of Roosevelt’s death.

As Chalk mentions, Roosevelt attended Rosecrans’s funeral. Six degrees of separation knows no end!

James K. Hanna

McMurray, Pennsylvania

Understanding a Divinized Reality

Thomas J. Kronholz exposits with deep compassion and uncompromising truth the great struggle we face as Christians to be “in and not of” this world (Jn. 17:16), stressing the imperative need for us to understand that we now live in a redeemed and transformed reality (“The Universal Dimensions of the Incarnation,” guest column, Sept.). He also lovingly confronts the lie many of us unknowingly embrace, namely, that we live lives in which only some aspects of ourselves and our existence are “spiritual,” and others are inherently “earthly” and thereby ours to do with as we choose and desire. But when we understand a divinized reality, as Mr. Kronholz describes it, then suddenly everything we do is encapsulated in that new reality, everything we are is a part of it.

We don’t live lives that pass interchangeably between two different realities, depending on what activity we’re occupied with; rather, the moment we’re baptized into Christ, our whole reality, the totality of the grace, love, and power under which and in which we live, is transformed for His glory and honor and purposes (cf. Rom. 11:36).

Darryl Friesen

Winnipeg, Manitoba

Canada

Artificial Intelligence: Nothing New Under the Sun

Bob Weil’s informative article “Wrestling for Truth with ChatGPT” (Sept.) is a reminder that any technology can be used to promote an ideology. This, of course, is nothing new. Consider television, and before that, the printing press, and before that, papyrus. Perhaps the exploitative use of technology in the case of ChatGPT differs from its predecessors only in that it is less honest, as any reasonably well-informed person should recognize immediately. But the ill-informed will never recognize it.

There is a related disturbing aspect to ChatGPT and indeed the whole AI cult that has to do with the very words artificial intelligence. Many (most?) have been led to believe that AI constructs exhibit intelligence, and the only difference between AI and ordinary human intelligence is that the former is an artifice. But a moment’s reflection ought to inform us that AI is not intelligence at all. Rather, it is a matter of a machine following specific instructions provided by an intelligent human being. It produces something that looks like the work of intelligence, but it is simply the result of a machine reacting to input. This is true even of AI contrivances that are said to “learn.” The “learning” is only the result of a machine following instructions and replicating results.

So, there is no reason to fear AI as such. What is to be feared is the fact that many people confuse AI with real intelligence. I propose an alternative name, and I am sure I’m not the first to do so. The things that are done under the name of AI ought to be called Pseudo-Intelligence. It is a fitting and accurate description.

Deacon Greg Sampson

Charlottesville, Virginia

Trent: Bringing Order from Connubial Chaos

I take issue with Fr. Peter M.J. Stravinskas’s claim (letter, Sept.) that much of the canonical marriage confusion in the contemporary Catholic Church can be blamed on the Council of Trent. He writes that Trent “changed the minster of matrimony from the priest to the couple themselves…and we have suffered from that decision ever since.” I am not a canon lawyer or an historian of marriage, but I am fairly widely read in these subjects, and my understanding is that the “revolutionary act” of the Council of Trent regarding marriage was to require that a priest be present as the Church’s “official witness” to it, such that, in normal circumstances (that is, when the presence of a priest would be routinely available), to marry without a priest’s presence would render the marriage invalid.

Before Trent, in Western Catholic sacramentology, only the exchange of vows by the couple themselves was required, a circumstance that could, and frequently did, occasion disputes of a “he said, she said” sort, which could involve the parties in prolonged canon-law litigation. A man wants to have sexual relations with a woman? They go off into the woods together, exchange vows, promptly “render the debitum,” and, hey, they’re married. The man wants to get out of the marriage later on? He claims they did the rendering all right but exchanged no promises or vows. In such cases, lacking any witness beyond the couple themselves, the victory would usually go to the party with the greater degree of determination, financial resources, and “connections.”

Trent sought to bring some order to this chaos and even acknowledged that when the presence of a priest was difficult or impossible to procure, the couple could “marry themselves,” ideally, before lay Catholic witnesses.

The priest is the “minster of marriage” in both the Orthodox Churches and the Eastern Catholic Churches, at least those of the latter that follow the Byzantine liturgical tradition. But I am not aware that this has ever been the case in the Roman tradition.

William J. Tighe

Allentown, Pennsylvania

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