The Catholic Register - Readers Speak Out

Written by Catholic Register Readers,

A New Earth fan

I just finished reading Dorothy Cummings’ book review of A New Earth (“Tolle’s New Earth brought pain to this body ,” March 16). I must say that I disagree with her thoughts.

I felt more in touch with my Catholic faith and my spirituality while reading A New Earth than I ever have before. It strung together a number of my beliefs and made them relevant to my everyday life as a 35-year-old mother of three children under five.

Reading the book made me feel peace and hope and I know the Catholic institution would agree that those are good pillars for a happy life.

I don’t know what “religion” Oprah feels she belongs to, nor do I know what “religion” Eckhart Tolle calls his own. But I do know that the two of them have one million people watching their webcast about this book and it’s making people stop and enjoy the gift of life. I’m sure the powers that be in the Catholic Church would be happy to have that number of new, interested parishioners.

The flow of Cummings’ review seemed very “us versus them” to me. I like the feel of Tolle’s book, which is very much that all humans are more alike than different. I think Jesus would agree with that message.

Siobhan Kukolic
Mississauga, Ont.

She likes Tolle, too

I totally do not agree with Dorothy Cummings, who really knocked the book A New Earth (“Tolle’s New Earth brought pain to this body ,” March 16). How can you put down something that is deeply making changes to so many people?

To me, anything that can make a positive change to a million people is exactly what Jesus would want for His people.

Jean Allen
Amherstburg, Ont.

Wants second opinion

The review of Eckhart Tolle’s book A New Earth is interesting to say the least (“Tolle’s New Earth brought pain to this body ,” March 16). One finds it caustic, sarcastic and demeaning to Eckhart Tolle and Oprah Winfrey.

Is it necessary to stoop to this quality of review and character assassination to give an opinion? Like some of the media, this has joined the ranks of “New Age.” May we please have an opinion written by a theologian-historian of the Catholic Church?

Josephine M. Rakow
Camp Hill, Pennsylvania

No mistake made

Fr. Basil Breen (“Mary did die ,” Readers Speak Out, March 23) calls on The Register to correct its statement in a March 2 article that “rather than dying Mary was assumed body and soul into heaven” on the basis of Pope Pius XII’s apostolic constitution that was issued at the time the Assumption of our Lady was proclaimed a dogma of the Catholic Church.

In fact the actual wording of the dogma deliberately left out any references to the death of the Mother of God. This was done so as not to give offence to those Catholics who denied that Mary would have died given that she was conceived without Original Sin — death itself being a direct result of the sin of Adam.

And “death” as understood by the Fathers of the Church would, of necessity, imply the corruption of the body — which corruption the Fathers, as Fr. Breen has so lucidly illustrated, were unanimous in denying.

In the view of the Fathers, then The Catholic Register has nothing to correct.

Alexander Roman
Toronto, Ont.

Visual pollution

In the March 23 edition of The Catholic Register, you reprinted an article from The Prairie Messenger with the title “Take nuclear out of our options.” In the article Gordon Edwards is quoted extensively. Needless to say, he is anti nuclear power generation, but is strongly promoting wind mills to produce electrical power. Unfortunately, he doesn’t tell us how costly and how reliable this energy is, that is dependent on the vagaries of weather.

His strongest argument is in the fact that Germany has now built 20,000 megawatts of wind power generators, but he forgets to mention how big a human footprint these windmills have in Germany. Anybody who has travelled throughout Germany will see these ubiquitous windmills, which visually pollute the beautiful countryside. As far as I am concerned, these windmills represent the biggest visual pollution in Europe.

Joseph Skulj
Toronto, Ont.

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