It's funny to hear two people or groups talking past each other. Take the US Postal Service and the Freedom From Religion Foundation going at it about the upcoming Mother Theresa commemorative postage stamp. Both sides get the issue partly right, partly wrong.

The FFRF complains that by issuing a Mother Theresa stamp, the USPS is violating it's regulation against honoring people who are primarily noted for religious undertakings.  I did a little digging, and found this page on the USPS.com web site.  The relevant section would appear to be:

So what was Mother Theresa known for?  Ask anyone on the street who has heard of her, and the response would probably be "working with the poor".  That's it in a nutshell.  Mother Theresa was not primarily known as a preacher, although she spoke with strong religious and moral conviction.  Although she was the foundress of a great religious order who has missions all over the world (including here in Memphis), she is not known primarily as such.  She was known primarily for going out into the streets of Calcutta and gathering up the forgotten people, showing them compassion and supporting their dignity.

It seems to me the FRFF would have more of a leg to stand on if they protested on the fact that she was not really a US Citizen, although she was given honorary citizenship by President Clinton and the US Congress in 1996.

However, they do have a valid point.  "You can't really separate her being a nun and being a Roman Catholic from everything she did," said FFRF spokeswoman Annie Laurie Gaylor to Fox News.  She's right about that.  You cannot separate Mother Theresa's humanitarian work from her Catholicism, because religion drove everything she did.  Even if the humanitarian work is what she's being honored for, that work came about because of her love of Christ.

The USPS countered by pointing out they've honored people before with religious backgrounds, such as Malcom X, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Father Flanagan.  These men were honored for civil rights or humanitarian work, but they were all informed by their religion.  The USPS is splitting hairs pretty thinly when they say they are not honoring the religious work of these men.  For Dr. King and Fr. Flanagan particularly, while their work might be recognized as good on a secular level, it was religious work built on their faith in God and in Christ.  To deny that is really to deny the work as a whole.

The FFRF really goes off-axis when responding about these previous honorees.  They opposed Fr. Flanagan's stamp but not Dr. King's.  Gaylor is quoted saying that "Martin Luther King 'just happened to be a minister'".   Really?  A man who referenced the Lord time after time in his speeches, who waxed eloquently using language straight out of the Bible (anyone remember the "I have been to the mountaintop" speech--a clear reference to Moses and the Hebrews?), and who helped found the Southern Christian (there's that word) Leadership Conference, "just happened to be a minister".  It seems to me that most of what he did stemmed from his ministry.

If you think about it, it's pretty silly to say that Mother Theresa is not being honored for religious work, because all her work was religious.  At the same time, the USPS is technically still upholding its regulations because most people would recognize Mother Theresa less as a religious figure and more as a humanitarian.  While it's walking a fine line to claim that your not honoring a religious figure for her religious activity, the FFRF is really the group out on a limb with their desire to suppress honoring someone who did great humanitarian work because that work was religiously based.

As for me, I'll be getting my Mother Theresa stamps because I think she should be honored, both as a humanitarian and as a Christian.  So there.

FoxNews.com - Atheist Group Blasts Postal Service for Mother Teresa Stamp

Have you ever been driving, looking at the car in front of you, and suddenly the tail lights, license plate and bumper look like eyes, a nose and a mouth? I'll bet you have. Or have you sat in a chair doing nothing, looking at the wallpaper or the ceiling, and suddenly you can make out a face in the pattern? You've probably seen pictures of rocks in the desert that are famous for looking like a human profile when viewed from just the right place or when the light hits it just right. There's the famous Face on Mars, the sticky bun that looked like Mother Theresa, and the Faces of Jesus and Mary have been seen in everything from clouds, to frost-covered windows, to slices of toast, to candy bars.

We humans seem to be hard-wired to see human characteristics in just about anything. More than anything else, we can see a human face just about anywhere we look. Is it any wonder that ancient peoples found gods everywhere in nature? Stare at a lake or a rock or a tree long enough, and you are bound to see a face in it. It's not a human, so it must be the face of the lake itself or the face of the god that dwells therein. Over time, stories develop about this god. He or she is given a name, an origin, a personality. The god becomes more real to the humans by becoming more human itself. No religion I'm aware of ever developed around worship of an object or a mindless force. The god always had to be built up into a human-like creature before it became worthy of worship. Man created gods in his image.

Perhaps this talent to find persons wherever we look was planted in us by our Creator. We have a personal God who wants us to look for Him, so he planted in us an innate desire to seek out a person when we look around. But God knows that this instinct alone isn't enough. Left to ourselves, we can work out the existence of some sort of god, but we can only cast him into a mold of our making, ultimately ending up with a God that is only a pale reflection of ourselves.

Fortunately, God has not left us alone in our search. In His revelations to Abraham, Moses and so on, God took on a human characteristic such as a voice so that He could tell and show us more than we would figure out on our own. In Jesus Christ, God the Son went beyond assuming a human characteristic or two by becoming fully human Himself. He could teach us, show us, and lead us directly. He gave us a face that satisfies our innate longing to find a person wherever we look in the universe. And He helps us to go beyond our homemade gods and see the glorious truth that, rather than God being a person we've made in our image, we were made in His.

From the Office of Readings for Ash Wednesday as presented on Universalis.com.

Here in this third week of Advent, we see the lights of a false dawn that comes before the true light of Christmas. Everywhere you go, you see houses with their Christmas lights on and their Christmas decorations out. In the stores and on the radio you hear Christmas music following you around. Everyone has become so used to thinking of these weeks after Thanksgiving as "The Christmas Season" that by the time Christmas actually comes around, they are already sick of it.  read more »

I thought this was interesting. I know there are people out there eager to get the Tridentine Mass more widely used. I've never been to one myself, but I hear it is a rather more grand and mystical rite than the Mass we've been using since I was small.

For that matter, though, why don't we ever hear from anyone wanting to have a regular "new" Mass in Latin rather than the vernacular? Isn't that part of the appeal of the "old" Mass. Saying the Mass in the universal language of the Church might strengthen the bond we Catholics have around the world.  read more »