SIR – When David Cameron became Prime Minister he launched his dream of a “Big Society”. That dream was of a country in which people helped each other without expecting any financial reward. Cynics mocked, disbelieving that this could ever happen. However, I’m proof that there are men and women happy to give up their holiday time in order to help disabled people.
I have just returned from a wonderful week in Lourdes in the care of volunteer members of the amazing Knights of Malta. These volunteers come from every walk of life: busy mums, bankers, doctors, teachers and nurses. What they have in common is unlimited kindness and caring skills, shaped by days of basic training in handling and looking after their disabled or mentally sick charges.
When asked why they do it, they answer with a single voice “It is a privilege to serve such a noble cause.” As someone who is wheelchair bound as the result of a severe stroke, I really appreciated being pushed for “walks” along the river that runs past the grotto, where candles blaze, having been left there by the international visitors to this very special shrine where the Virgin Mary appeared to St Bernadette.
Throughout my week a helper was always on hand to help me in and out of bed and get showered and dressed, to make hot drinks, serve food they had cooked themselves and gather up clothes for the laundry.
Throughout the country, churches of every denomination help the poor and needy just as they have done for centuries. My own parish church of St John the Evangelist, Islington, has a daily sandwich and hot drink service, the food made by an invisible team of volunteers. On bitterly cold winter nights the large crypt is converted into a warm shelter. Hot water is provided for washing, beds and sleeping bags are provided for safe refuge and, best of all. A hearty breakfast is much appreciated by the homeless, whose only shelter is a local park. Maybe that Big Society was not a dream at all.
Yours faithfully,
Suzanne Greaves
London N1
SIR – As a supporter of the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children, I was shocked to discover that the Royal College of Midwives (RCM) has, without consulting its membership, called for all legal limits on abortion to be scrapped (News, May 13).
Current abortion laws could be described as an uneasy ceasefire between the so-called “pro-life” and “pro-choice” campaign groups. However, I must remind the RCM of an Angus Reid poll in 2012 that found that only two per cent of women agreed that the 24-week limit should be extended.
Wholesale decriminalisation of post-24-week abortion does not empower women, as this policy suggests. Instead, it risks putting women, particularly those from some ethnic minority communities, at risk of coercive and unwanted terminations due to sex-selective abortion.
More often than not in these cases it is healthy, unborn baby girls who are aborted simply for being the “wrong sex”. Statistical analysis carried out by the Independent in 2014 has suggested that as many as 4,700 females from immigrant communities could have been discriminatingly aborted in this way. I therefore call on the RCM to rethink this misguided policy.
Yours faithfully,
Paul Nuttall
Ukip deputy party leader,
Bootle, Merseyside
SIR – Your recent report (May 13) on the March for Life and the Royal College of Midwives shows that results can be accomplished from Christians when we take a stand on abortion. When Christians know and believe in the power of prayer, have confidence that witness can transform hearts and minds, save lives and literally change communities – that is when we can witness miracles and the transformation from a culture of death to a culture of life. A three-year prayer vigil in Twickenham has seen several hundred lives saved from abortion and another central London abortuary closed thanks to the power of prayer.
What further results could be accomplished if more Christians were fit for mission, ready to speak up for those who cannot speak for themselves?
Yours faithfully,
Robert Colquhoun
Director, 40 Days for Life
International Campaign
SIR – Four doctors commenting on anti-Semitism argue that hiding behind the “illness model” for anti-Semitic views as a psychosis is unacceptable (Letter, May 13). This presumably applies even more so to anti-Semitic acts.
Another doctor (Letter, May 13) deplores the human consequences of gluttony and sloth among his patients. He sees both as “poor lifestyle choices” (implying culpability), and the consequence of “genetic pre-disposition … and bad luck” (non-culpable) as having a role in some illnesses.
That brings us to Amoris Laetitia. Does it endorse some manner of “illness model” in relation to the divorced and remarried? It asserts: “in an objective situation of sin – which may not be subjectively culpable, or fully such – a person can be living in God’s grace”; ie, in some cases of adultery we may subjectively not be responsible for our objective immoral acts. Yet a “re-married” couple presumably knew exactly what they were doing when they
remarried after divorce.
In Amoris Laetitia, pastoral discernment seems to be reduced to diagnosing second (post-divorce) marriages as either a culpable poor lifestyle choice (as gluttony, sloth or anti-Semitism are) or a non-culpable kind of bad luck, perhaps a genetic predisposition etc, or an illness. Does Amoris Laetitia perhaps seek to exculpate many of those in this situation because it sees them as ill, mentally or emotionally?
Will some in such a second marriage now find a doctor’s certificate useful in the confessional? After Amoris Laetitia it seems many could justify dispensing with a meaningful act of contrition.
Yours faithfully,
Tony Kieran
Bexley Village, Kent
SIR – I largely agreed with Graeme Campbell’s letter (May 13) about the prospects for reunion between the Catholics and the Orthodox. However, I feel duty bound to mention that his suggestion that “the Orthodox and Catholic Churches will exist besides each other, like the Latin Rite and ordinariate”, shows a fundamental misunderstanding of the ordinariate.
The ordinariate does not exist “beside” the Latin Rite. Rather, it is fully part of the Latin Rite. Which makes it a far better model for Orthodox-Catholic unity than he appears to realise.
Yours faithfully,
Fr David Palmer
Nottingham
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