A Letter from Fr. Tim

Dear Friends,
 
On Thursday, February 1^st, I was scanning the Chicago Tribune when a headline caught my eye on the Opinion page:
   
The author, Maria Prudente, questions that with the shrinkage of newsrooms across the U.S., there will be fewer and fewer people left to report the truth. She laments that “With the threat of artificial intelligence and newsrooms shrinking, who will be left to report the truth if we eliminate our fact-checkers and our writers – our country’s truth tellers?”
 
My own personal bias reveals that I believe it has been a long time since our nation’s newspaper reporters were in fact “truth tellers.” While they may, for the most part, be skilled in fact checking… that is certainly not the same as truth telling.
 
In addition, we have devolved as a country from recognizing the truth as a corporate reality to defining truth as something individualistic and no less forceful – “MY TRUTH” as the saying goes. The problem with pronouncements of “my truth” is that those who canonize it require everyone else to adopt their personal truth as their own, or else.
 
All that aside, as a person of faith, I instantly knew the answer to the question revealed in the headline – JESUS CHRIST, of course! Jesus Christ is really the ONLY truth that ultimately matters! Even though I know the media has become more and more wary of making any sort of religious inference for fear of backlash from a vocal (and apparently very powerful) minority, I was hopeful the author would reveal the answer to her question was Jesus Christ, especially since it was on the opinion page of the newspaper. Alas, she kept to the theme of her article about the loss of people in newsrooms.
 
What does it mean to recognize Jesus as the “way and the truth and the life (Jn 14:6)?”
 
The Catechism of the Catholic Church can help us:
 
The disciple of Christ consents to "live in the truth," that is, in the simplicity of a life in conformity with the Lord's example, abiding in his truth. "If we say we have fellowship with him while we walk in darkness, we lie and do not live according to the truth."
 
Before Pilate, Christ proclaims that he "has come into the world, to bear witness to the truth." The Christian is not to "be ashamed then of testifying to our Lord." In situations that require witness to the faith, the Christian must profess it without equivocation, after the example of St. Paul before his judges. We must keep "a clear conscience toward God and toward men."                                       CCC 2470-71
 
 
While books have been written about the truth in Jesus Christ, I’ll leave this week’s reflection with one final quote from St. John Paul II on how we live the truth in our daily lives:
 
"Conduct yourselves in a way worthy of the Gospel of Christ". As Christians we live and work in this world, which is symbolized by the vineyard, but at the same time we are called to work in the vineyard of the Lord. We live this visible earthly life and at the same time the life of the Kingdom of God, which is the ultimate destiny and vocation of every person. How then are we to conduct ourselves worthily in regard to these two realities?
Pope St. John Paul II, homily at the Pontiac Silverdome, 1987
 
May God bless you all.
 
        Fr. Tim