Chain Letters / Emails

I started to have an interest in my faith when I was in High School. I would often attend a mass and novena at San Jose Catholic School Parish. Aside from Santa Maria Catholic School Church, San Jose is the closest church from my school (Sun Yat Sen High School). Upon entering the church premises, I would often encounter chain letters dedicated to different saints. The bad thing about chain letters is that it warns you that an apparent danger is looming once you fail to offer a prayer to that saint or fail to mail it to other people. If an innocent school boy reads that, he will certainly be frightened. I was once frightened by those chain letters but I outgrew it eventually. Our Theology professor at San Agustin says that chain letters are not supposed to be read. They’re not part of Catholic Doctrine. If you receive such letter, the wise thing to do is to throw it away.

As technology advanced, chain letters becomes chain emails. I just received one today. It still contained a warning that if you fail to forward it, you’ll be cursed and would suffer bad luck. If you fail to pray, something bad will happen to you and your family, etc… etc… I don’t want to ruin my day so I just deleted it so I wouldn’t see it in my inbox anymore. My patience was however tested when people from the mailing list of the sender begun replying and forwarding the chain email back and forth. You are talking about more than 20 recipients there.

Chain letters / emails should be dealt with rationally. We’re all grown up and prided ourselves as professionals that things like this should not even be entertained. If you receive something of this sort just totally delete it in your inbox.