SIR – May I, as a former Anglican, be permitted to comment briefly on your story concerning Pope Francis referring the vexed subject of deaconesses to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (News focus, May 20)?
Several orthodox prelates, including Graham Leonard, former Anglican Bishop of London and subsequently a Catholic priest (whose Requiem Mass I was privileged to attend), were persuaded to accept the notion of deaconesses on historical and pastoral grounds. However, as your article makes painfully clear, the historical evidence for them in the early Church is scarce and at best contradictory.
Sadly, as Bishop Leonard and the Anglo-Catholic constituency in the Church of England discovered to their cost, the role of deaconess is easily hijacked by those who wish to use it as their political Trojan horse to advance the cause of women priests and the whole secular “equal rights” agenda.
I pray that the Catholic Church is wise enough and true to the faith which was once for all delivered to the saints (Jude 1:3) not to be seduced by this dangerous nonsense.
Yours faithfully,
Richard Eddy
Bristol
SIR – Kevin Myers (Feature, April 15) sees the Irish rebellion of 1916 as unnecessary in so far as Home Rule had been “promised”, and the timing of the rebellion to coincide with the commemoration of Christ’s death as blasphemous. But Home Rule was nothing more than a device to secure Ireland within the United Kingdom for the foreseeable future. If proof were needed, the illusionary basis of Home Rule was demonstrated in the 1918 general election when the people of Ireland rejected it and voted en masse for the new party born out of the Easter Rising.
The patriots of the 1916 insurrection simply wanted to reclaim their own land. They were aware of the curse of foreign occupation, successive brutal plantations, religious suppression and landlordism – the spectre of legitimate landowners dispossessed and their land then returned to them at exorbitant rents.
Less than 70 years before the Easter Rising a million Irish men, women and children died on the roadsides and in the ditches of Ireland from hunger, in the famines of the 1840s and 1850s. At the same time, grain and meat and livestock were being exported weekly out of Ireland from the estates of the aforementioned landlords.
Mr Myers refers to the unsympathetic attitude of the Easter patriots towards Britain, “Ireland’s only neighbour and trading partner”. But “trading partner” has a hollow ring when seen in the context of the famine.
Patrick Pearse was the spokesman, protagonist and president of the newly proclaimed republic. With extraordinary vision he foresaw that militarily the Rising would fail and the leaders would be executed. From their deaths would come universal public support for their cause, and eventual victory. Pearse, the spiritual and religious man that he was, saw in this certain parallels (and no more) with Christ’s death on Good Friday, and his triumphal Resurrection on Easter Sunday.
In one of Pearse’s important poems, Óró, sé do bheatha ’bhaile, in which he outlines his hopes for the rebellion, he has this to say (I translate): “Oh that I would see the day, even if afterwards, I live but one week”. What foresight; but surely not a “suicide cult”.
Yours faithfully,
Liam O’Brien
Prestwich, Greater Manchester
SIR – Dr Ed Condon (Letter, May 20) follows the Vatican line set by Benedict XVI’s pastoral letter to the Irish people: that the cover-up of clerical sexual abuse had nothing to do with canon law (and therefore the popes) and everything to do with errant bishops who refused to follow it. His Holiness ignored the Murphy Commission’s detailed examination of canon law and its finding that “the structure and rules of the Catholic Church facilitated that cover-up”.
Dr Condon’s rejection of those findings seems to be based on the view that canon law is some kind of ecclesiastical rocket science that cannot be understood by lesser intellects in the civil courts (“in no way competent to judge canonical questions of procedure and interpretation …”)
Even if that were true, under the 1983 Code of Canon Law, the people who are competent to interpret canon law for the bishops are members of the Roman Curia. In the period 1997 to 2002, five of its senior members, all canon lawyers (Castrillón Hoyos, Re, Bertone, Herranz and Ghirlanda) made statements that reporting by bishops of clergy sexual abuse of children to the civil authorities conflicted with canon law or was otherwise immoral. Cardinals Castrillón Hoyos and Rodriguez Maradiaga stated that bishops should prefer to go to jail rather than report a paedophile priest to the police.
Similar statements about not reporting were made by Cardinals Billé, Lehmann and Schotte, the leaders respectively of the Catholic bishops’ conferences of France, Germany and Belgium. None of these Curia members or senior prelates confined their prohibitions to documents created by a canonical tribunal.
Their views are hardly surprising. They reflect the proper meaning of the words Secreta Continere of 1974 Pope Paul VI and Sacramentorum Sanctitatis Tutela of 2001 of Pope John Paul II. The Vatican’s stand was not softened until 2010, when it announced an instruction by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith that bishops should obey civil reporting laws. By that time the cover-up had well and truly occurred.
I agree with Dr Condon that the bishops’ behaviour in failing to report the abuse to the civil authorities was inexcusable. They should have defied the pontifical secret. But as Quentin de la Bédoyère’s article (Science and Faith, April 1) stated, the bishops were between a rock and a hard place. On their consecration, bishops swear an oath to obey all ecclesiastical laws, and the Code itself told them to accept the Curia’s interpretation of their canonical obligations.
Even if a bishop did believe that he should report the abuse to the civil authorities, the preamble to Secreta Continere purports to take away his conscience in matters covered by the pontifical secret. Following orders is never an excuse, but denying the existence of the orders is an attempt to hide the greater responsibility of those who gave them.
Yours faithfully,
Kieran Tapsell
By email
SIR – Quentin de la Bédoyère speaks of high tensions in moral theology over purification of our sexual desires (May 27). But the universal immediate Voice of Conscience spells out brilliantly that sexuality is for having offspring. Our Lord tells us that following truth liberates. I am not alone in finding that experience.
Yours faithfully,
Fr Bryan Storey
Tintagel Catholic Church
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