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Jewish community offers condolences after church bombings in Sri Lanka

It is with a heavy heart that, on behalf of the Jewish Community Relations Council, I write to express the Jewish community’s shock and sadness at the horrific terror attacks that brought such death and destruction to Christian worshippers and tourists on April 21 in Sri Lanka. We express our deepest condolences to the bereaved family members and our prayers for strength and healing to all those injured in body, mind or spirit.

We are devastated to witness such unthinkable acts of violence on any day, and recognize how much more painful the tragedy is happening on Easter Sunday within sacred places. Our houses of worship must be safe and welcoming spaces for all.

This year, as Passover and Easter converge on the calendar, we reach out in support of our Christian brothers and sisters, and reaffirm the profound importance of Jewish-Christian community relationships.

- Lindsey Mintz | Executive director, Jewish Community Relations Council, Indianapolis
 

Reader: Marxism-socialism-communism led to hatred of Christians in Mexico

I was surprised to see the “why” omitted from the book review for Saints and Sinners in the Cristero War: Stories of Martyrdom from Mexico by Msgr. James Murphy.

Why were Catholics persecuted in southern Mexico in the 1920s?

Why were priests forced to marry or face assassination by a firing squad?

Didn’t it have something to do with the socialist revolution in Mexico?

Didn’t the horrors in Mexico in the 1920s following that revolution closely mirror—albeit on a smaller scale—the horrors in Russia after the Russian Revolution, when churches were smashed and Orthodox Christian priests dragged out of their beds at night and shot with a single bullet to the head, or sometimes just kicked into a mine shaft to die a slow and painful death?

It was Marxism-socialism-communism that led to this hatred of Christians and this desire to supplant the worship of God with the worship of the government.

Let’s have the courage to name the evil we have been facing for more than 100 years now—and still face today. Pope John Paul II did.

- Margaret Menge | Bloomington