Bishop J. Terry Steib of Memphis, Tenn., has issued a pastoral letter on joy, titled “Living Our Catholicism … That Our Joy Might Be Complete.”
In it, he says he sees how people may find it tough to be “outrageously happy,” as Linus Van Pelt once said in a “Peanuts” comic strip. He also acknowledges how some Catholics see their church as an institution with “more rules than the U.S. tax code.”
He adds, “While regulations, prohibitions, obligations and expectations are part of the Catholic way of life, our way of life is certainly not reducible to those expectations.”
But, Bishop Steib reminds his faithful, Jesus prayed for his diciples before his passion, asking God to “allow that his joy might be in them, and that their joy might be complete.”
The West Tennessee Catholic, Memphis’ diocesan newspaper has the full text of Bishop Steib’s pastoral on its Web site, or go straight to the pastoral here.
