SIR – The inspiring article written by TA Pascoe in your current
edition (Cover story, June 3) is so incredibly important that all Catholics should rejoice and rush to join forces with him. We all know that Jesus’s command to his disciples was to go out and spread the word across the world, a world larger now than that known by his disciples 2,000 years ago. However, we now have modern means of transport and communications.
Nevertheless let us start with our own hungry countryman. All Christians should evangelise.
For 17 years I have produced, as a play, The Life of Christ; for seven years the Passion of Jesus in Trafalgar Square on Good Friday; and for 27 years the Nativity story as a play at my home at Wintershall in Surrey. Well over 300,000 people have seen these productions, which have helped to teach them about Jesus. They lap it up and want more – particularly the children, often led by atheist teachers. But I have not been able to follow up the teachings and need others.
Every city, town and village could produce such teachings. It’s not an impossible task. We and our team at Wintershall will help any who want help to copy us. It’s a beginning; but of course there are other ways of teaching Christianity, and all need prayer.
Yours faithfully,
Peter Hutley OBE, KSG
Wintershall, Surrey
SIR – In this Holy Year Pope Francis, in Misericordiae Vultus, calls us to “reawaken our conscience, too often grown dull in the face of poverty”.
Let us rediscover the corporal works of mercy, he says: to feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, clothe the naked, welcome the stranger, heal the sick, visit the imprisoned, and bury the dead. He reminds us that people in the world’s poorest places have the same hopes and dreams as the rest of us – they too have the desire to stand on their own two feet and control their own destinies.
I am proud that our government is also of the same opinion and has committed to giving a tiny percentage (7p in every £10) to overseas aid. UK aid has changed lives, including protecting Britain against the threat of Ebola and defeating poverty by ensuring that more than 10 million children get a good quality education. I am proud that UK aid saves a life every two minutes and that between 2011 and 2015 it supported over 62 million people with access to water and sanitation.
Despite an increasing majority of the UK public believing in its importance, aid is under attack based on unfounded allegations and incorrect facts spread by some newspapers. UK aid programmes are among the most transparent in the world and I think that as Catholics we should celebrate and spread some of the Good News stories about our country’s achievements. For as Pope Francis said in Evangelii Gaudium: “We have to state, without mincing words, that there is an inseparable bond between our faith and the poor. May we never abandon them.”
Yours faithfully,
Sister Gillian Price FC
By email
SIR – This year Her Majesty the Queen is celebrating her 90th birthday. An attractive volume entitled The Servant Queen and the King She Serves has been published recently by the Bible Society, Hope and the London Institute of Contemporary Christianity. The book focuses on the strong and consistent Christian faith of the Queen.
Since the publication emphasises in clear terms the Christian faith of Her Majesty, would it not be appropriate for the Parliament at Westminster to honour her by repealing the 1967 Abortion Act and thus promote human life from its earliest point in England and the United Kingdom at large?
I am sure that such a decision would be the best gift the English nation could give to a Christian monarch who has challenged the vicissitudes of life and led the country in times of triumph and tragedy.
I believe that in this way,
her words in the introduction of the aforementioned publication – ‘‘I have indeed seen his faithfulness’’ – will gain a greater strength and a fresh momentum. God save the Queen!
Yours faithfully,
Fr Geoffrey Attard
Victoria, Malta
SIR – The recommendation, by Cardinal Robert Sarah (World news, June 3), that priests offer the Holy Sacrifice of Mass ad orientum – is not, as one of your articles suggests, a “change” – it is a restoration of what has always been the correct orientation, that is towards the Blessed Sacrament reserved in the tabernacle. The widespread practice of priests facing the congregation with their backs to the Blessed Sacrament was an invention of liberals (and Anglicans) who either did not understand or did not accept the Real Presence.
Clearly, it sent a signal to the faithful about the doctrine of the Real Presence, reducing it to the status of the same in an Anglican service and, as a consequence, the majority of Catholics are now lapsed Catholics – why go to a Catholic church when you can go to any other and it’s just the same?
This restoration alone won’t be sufficient to bring Catholics to Holy Mass. The Church will also have to re-enforce the retention, by priests, of the forefinger and thumb after the washing of the same in preparation for handling the Blessed Sacrament; re-enforce Holy Communion on the tongue; re-enforce, while kneeling in submission to Christ, distribution of Holy Communion by consecrated hands only; and remove the infection of English hymn-singing from Holy Mass, which distracts the faithful from and denies them silent contemplation of the Sacred Mysteries.
Yours faithfully,
Alan Pontet-Piccolomini
Ifield, West Sussex
SIR – Extraordinary Ministers of Holy Communion might bear
the following incident in mind before they next perform this service.
One of my sons, who lives in a Midlands city, recently went with his non-Catholic wife to attend a First Communion service in which a friend’s young daughter was taking part. When my son failed to join the queue for Holy Communion, his wife asked the reason. He replied that he was in the wrong disposition.
He had been angered too much by one of the Extraordinary Ministers, who was dressed in a faded T-shirt, shabby jeans and scruffy trainers – an appalling example, he felt, to all the First Communicants. He wondered also if the offender would still have dressed like that if he had been about to receive an honour from Her Majesty the Queen.
Yours faithfully,
Kevin Heneghan
St Helens, Merseyside
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