Dear TIA,

I don't know if you respond to individual questions, but I would like to know how to address Christmas cards (use Mr. and Mrs. or first names, etc, etc.) on the envelopes, and how to sign Christmas cards (Mr. and Mrs. or first names, etc. etc.). This is a problem for us every year.

     Thank you very much.

     D.B.



Authors Mead & Horvat respond:

Dear Mr. D.B.,

These are the rules we know for signing and addressing Christmas Cards.

Never sign a message 'Mr.' or 'Mrs.'

To sign a Christmas card, use the simple signature form, for example, John and Mary Brown, rather than Mr. and Mrs. John Brown. However, an engraved card that reads Mr. and Mrs. John Brown wish you a Blessed Christmas and Happy New Year is correct, because the names are not a signature in such a message.

You may use either John, Mary and the children, or the Brown Family, but do not sign John and Mary Brown and family. It is also appropriate to name the children on the second line according to age with the eldest first: first line, John and Mary; second line, Thomas, Michael, Ann and Louise.

According to the degree of intimacy with the recipient, the card may be signed John and Mary Brown, John and Mary, or John, Mary and the children.

A signature is used when signing a letter or card. Many well-bred and well-intentioned American women sign their names: Sincerely, Mrs. John Brown or Mrs. Mary Brown. Both are incorrect. She should use her baptismal name without the title Mrs. in signing letters to acquaintances: Sincerely, Mary Brown.

To maintain a more formal tone, it is also appropriate for Mary Frances Brown to sign her name: Sincerely, M. F. Brown

The same rule applies to man, who should never use Mr. when signing his name. He would write: Sincerely, John Brown.

An unmarried young lady signs her name: Sincerely, (Miss) Mary Jones

Emily Post ends her section on signature with this warning: "Never under any circumstances sign a letter with 'Mr.,' 'Mrs.' or 'Miss' as an inseparable part of one's signature unless one is willing to be considered both ignorant and rude."

Addressing your Christmas cards

In addressing Christmas cards, follow the normal rules for addressing envelopes for personal letters.

Since it is a personal letter, the address should be handwritten legibly. A couple should be addressed as Mr. and Mrs. James Miller. The husband is addressed as Mr. James Miller. The wife is addressed as Mrs. James Miller. A widow retains this form since she keeps her husband's name always.

These are the correct traditional forms. Today everything has become more casual, and it is permitted to write either Mrs. Edith Miller or Mrs. James Miller.

Cards to children are addressed Miss Anne Miller and Master Robert Miller.

This information was taken from American Catholic Etiquette and Emily Post Etiquette.

We hope this is of some help to you.

     Cordially,

     Judith Mead & Marian Horvat

Dear Sir/Madam,

Have you ever visited China and met with members of the Underground Church?

If not, I would suggest that you make arrangements to do so as we did secretly on two occasions back in 1999. We met with true Catholics who were practicing the Faith and the Mass according to a Catholic mandate devoid of Vatican II heretical teachings and the illicit/Protestant Novus Ordo - they were truly Catholic.

It would be a real eye-opener and make you appreciate the terrible sufferings our poor fellow Catholics in China are enduring at the hands of both the Vatican and the Chinese government.

It is beyond a shadow of a doubt that the elimination of the Chinese Underground Church is high on the Vatican' s agenda.

     Kindest regards,

     T.C.

Dear TIA,

Thank you for Margaret Galitzin's article The Silent Catacomb. It is a good highlight of progressivist method. It remains important to point out and document each and every instance of these hostile offenses against the Catholic Faith. Bishop Frederick Henry provides an especially shining example.

I would like to add an obvious well-known point concerning disease transmission via the human hand, which does not require a medical degree to recognize: Because the Novus Ordo Missae's "sign of peace" precedes the reception of communion in the hand, communion on the tongue would be the preferred method to achieve the Bishop's supposed "infection control" purpose. Thus his overall position tends towards the spread of disease, both spiritual and physical, not its restraint.

Departing from Margaret's article, however, I am not inclined to grant such leeway concerning the restrictions accepted by the FSSP. Appealing to the need for permission from the enemy to practice Catholicism has no merit. Recall why the Church was in the catacombs: Due to persecution from civil authority, the Catholic Religion could not be practiced out in the open. Without somehow claiming to "remove" the governing authority, the faithful continued to gather for Mass in hiding. The sacrifice continued. Why accept the silencing of the catacombs now? What true Catholic priest would cut off Mass for his flock? What good Father would deprive his children of the Sacraments? No, no!

Please permit me this simple analogy. As wives, we women honor our vows of marriage and obey our husbands with fear of God in mind. What wife would ever agree to starve her children under this obedience? It is not within the husbands' authority to command this absurdity! To resist this order would not mean we reject the God-given authority of the husband. Nor does it mean we would no longer be married. It means we would be resisting the evil directive to starve our children. We would continue to feed the children given to us by God. We would additionally pray and work for our husbands' return to grace. It is quite clear in civil law that if we sat silently and watched fathers starving their children, we would have guilt and be complicit in their actions.

Woe to those who abuse Catholic authority and also to those who help them! The Vatican II-adhering clergy publicly practice their doctrines of Progressivism. We must resist them. The blame in this case falls to the more traditionally-oriented priest. He is the last keeper of the Faith in this line of liturgically, doctrinally and morally corrupt clergy.

For Catholics the persecution from within widens. This is another opportunity for the scales to fall and the lay faithful to see. The fruit of any compromise is, in truth, starvation.

     Tolle causam!,

     Dr. Pamela Dettman

Dear TIA,

Love your website! It's like a light set on a hill that can't be hid.

Your postings are really helping me become more traditional as I take them to heart.

Sincerely,

D.L.

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