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SIR – Fr Ian Hellyer (Letter, November 24) says that the “celibate state is the most appropriate state for the priest and should be the norm for the Latin Church”. Christ recommended celibacy as the ideal, but did not command it. St Peter and other Apostles were married men and there were married priests for the first thousand years of Church history.
The Vatican II decree Presbyterorum Ordinis, while recommending ecclesiastical celibacy and stating that it accords with the priesthood on many scores, adds that celibacy “is not demanded from the very nature of the priesthood, as is evident from the practice of the primitive Church and from the tradition of the Eastern Churches. In these Churches, in addition to all bishops and those others who by the gift of grace choose to observe celibacy, there also exist married priests of outstanding merit”.
In England we already have married priests: ex-Anglican convert clergy, many of outstanding merit.
So if there is no problem in ordaining married men, may we have many more. They would be welcome on many scores. Freely chosen celibacy is wonderful, as shown in the religious orders of men and women, but mandatory celibacy for secular priests can be unduly demanding; though again there are many who freely choose this for the sake of the Kingdom.
Jack Robbins
Downham Market, Norfolk
SIR – Fr Rolheiser’s sensitive piece on the closeness of God (The Last Word, November 24) intriguingly proposes that “while we all go to heaven when we die, depending on our moral and spiritual disposition, we might not want to stay there”.
One could dispute whether “staying there” is wholly a matter of one’s own “disposition” (in the case of Stalin or Hitler, not to mention lesser masters of wrongdoing). For mustn’t divine judgment be just (to the victims of evil as well as its perpetrators) if it is to be divine?
But his suggestion belongs to the speculative side of theology and what concerns me more is Fr Rolheiser’s understanding of “near-death experiences” as experiences of “the afterlife”. These experiences may well involve a sense of the closeness of God, though the witnesses he cites do not mention God. What they report is a feeling of warmth, light, love and “welcome”, a feeling that could be explained in psychological terms.
The key distinction, to my mind, is that the clinically dead who have these experiences are not really dead. If they were, they could not be revived, at least by any means at present known to medical science. Those who
are really dead, as Lazarus in St John’s Gospel was dead, remain dead (except that Lazarus was restored to real life from real death by a signal act of divine power).
What near-death experiences more probably reveal is that during temporary cessation of the vital functions, the spirit-soul accesses layers of the unconscious that are inaccessible to the waking mind, deeper than dream, and perhaps activating powers of perception in abeyance during normal functioning.
This access might include memories of the experience of birth (emergence into light) and even of life in the womb (warmth, closeness). Those three experiences could be dismissed as “only physical”; but there could also be some genuine recall of the reported sense of ‘‘love and welcome’’. For there is no reason to doubt that the fully formed brain of the foetus prior to birth is also capable of elementary thought and feeling. Everything points to an unbroken mental (as much as physical) continuity between the unborn and the newborn child who
has passed through the darkness of the birth canal into the world of light.
The philosophical notion of immanence underpins our theological conviction of God’s special closeness to Man, made in his image and likeness. But while it may be misleading to see near-death experiences as providing worthwhile information about the afterlife they undoubtedly confirm that God is always with us, from actual conception to actual death (and beyond), and they provide a further reason to respect and value the life of those whose conscious mental functioning has ceased, or else not yet begun.
Dr Carl Schmidt
Witney, Oxfordshire
SIR – To resist transgender ideology (Cover story, November 26) we must be aware of its errors, one of which is its failure to distinguish between what is legally right and what is right in reality.
For example, I am legally free to consider myself tall and athletic, but this will not change the fact that I am medium height and rather tubby. Thus with gender, while males and females are legally entitled to think themselves otherwise, the limitations of surgical procedures mean that at best only small and incomplete changes will be effected.
But resistance rests on recognition that the majority are being bullied by a small clique of socially well-placed transgender activists who, being aware that the majority are not with them, work by isolating individuals for persecution, employing the strategy of victimising the one to intimidate the many. While opposing stereotyping, they stereotype their opponents as transphobes, homophobes etc.
We need to call on the power of the many to stand up against these politically correct bullies, for if they are afraid of one thing it is free and open discussion.
Francis Beswick
Stretford, Great Manchester
SIR – Cardinal Burke (Interview, December 1) appears disconcertingly like Luther in 1517. He sees “confusion and error about the most fundamental teachings of the Church”; he says that “the foundation of the moral law” is beginning “to be questioned in the Church”, and that the “order of the Church itself” is “endangered”; he questions the continuity of the Ordinary Form of the Mass today with the “Rite of the Mass that has come down to us from the first Christian centuries”; and in the face of these real or fancied abuses, his action is to send a series of challenges to the Pope.
WE Charlton
West Woodburn, Northumberland
SIR – Niall Gooch laments the rise of the non-apology (Notebook, December 1). But it is not new. The phrase “Never apologise, never explain” dates back to the 19th century, but the attitude goes back to the Garden of Eden.
John Counihan
Southampton, Hampshire
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