SIR – In commending the “treasured possession” of priestly celibacy, WJ Farren (Letter, January 8) makes the common assumption that those Anglican clergy who found a home in the Catholic Church converted owing to their opposition to the ordination of women in the Church of England.
I can only speak for myself, but my conversion to the Catholic Church was prompted by the realisation that only the Catholic Church possesses the fullness of truth, and that communion with the Successor of Peter is the necessary guarantee of authentic teaching and practice. I converted not because the Church of England changed in 1992, but because I realised that it had lost something essential in 1534. I remain grateful that, by the generous dispensation of the Holy Father, I was able to be ordained as a married man. I am also profoundly grateful to my brothers in the priesthood, who through their commitment to celibacy provide a living sign of Christ’s espousal of the Church.
Yours faithfully,
Fr Matthew Bernard-Qureshi
St Teresa’s, Newbury Park,
Ilford, Essex
SIR – Professor Rist (Letter, January 8) is of course right to remind us of Augustine’s strictures against the proselytising of Jews. However, his claim that “this teaching was followed by many medieval popes” is not entirely accurate, especially as regards the popes of the High Middle Ages. From the pontificate of Gregory IX (1227-41), and for the next 300 years until the Reformation presented a different challenge, the conversion of the Jews was a major concern of successive popes.
If we ask what caused this change of attitude, it was Pope Gregory’s discovery of the Talmud (shown to him by a convert Dominican, Nicholas Donin) which convinced him and his successors that Judaism was not in fact the religion of the Old Testament (which was the ground on which Augustine argued against proselytisation in his Against Faustus the Manichaean).
As with Augustine’s views, consideration of this issue is absent from the recent Vatican document; surely another example of what Professor Rist calls “at best a cavalier and sadly misleading attitude to the history of theology and Catholic practice”.
Yours faithfully,
Fr Simon Heans
By email
SIR – Professor John Loughlin (Feature, January 8) mentions “sharing the production of coal, steel and atomic energy” as the basis of what became the EU; but the formation of a superstate, inflicting arbitrary and irresistible regulations on the infinitely varied existing countries of Europe has resulted in a serious loss of self-government by the countries concerned.
These countries, not all of them strictly “nations”, have widely different traditions, attitudes and priorities, and to ignore them is to fly in the face of reality. In Italy, for example, the north and south are as chalk and cheese. In Belgium, unrest between Flemings and Walloons frequently arises. Much healthier was de Gaulle’s concept of L’Europe des patries, allowing those who had triumphed first over Nazism (and, more slowly, communism) to breathe freely instead of being clamped into a new servile straitjacket.
What is needed instead is a looser, more liberal confederation. Recent vast differences over the number of refugees that can be permanently admitted to Europe without disastrous regional results may well be the the final blow to the EU in its present form. All power not only tends to corrupt, but also always seeks to increase itself by whatever means.
Yours faithfully,
John Jolliffe
Mells, Somerset
SIR – Much is rightly written and said at Christmas about
loneliness among the elderly (Feature, December 25). There are many whose disabilities (including simple deafness) cut them off from other people; there are many who simply do not have the money to make good provision for their old age. But there are also many in the present generation of old people who have a house to sell or a decent pension, or even both, who blindly refuse to take the precautions that would mitigate the loneliness that is inevitable when those close to us die or move away.
I am lucky enough to live at Hartrigg Oaks, a retirement community on the outskirts of York founded by the Rowntree Trust, a Quaker-inspired organisation. In 1998 it was a pioneer in retirement communities in this country, but there are now many others – though none, I believe, with quite the same healthcare provisions we have. We have a waiting list, but not as long as one might expect.
Why do more people not move to communities where they will have the company of others who are in the same boat? I think it often boils down to neglect of a virtue which nowadays is rarely mentioned even in Catholic media: detachment. Pope Francis does preach and practise poverty in solidarity with the poor, but few people other than Religious seem to realise that we have to be able, when the time comes, to detach ourselves from bricks and mortar, from the garden we have lovingly tended, from at least some of our furniture and other treasures, from the neighbours and neighbourhoods we have known – and “launch out into the deep”.
Dying is about letting go, but long before we expect to reach that stage we should be preparing for it, and if we do, we are likely to find the intervening years much less lonely than they might otherwise be.
Yours faithfully,
Janet Stankiewicz
Hartrigg Oaks, York
SIR – Home Secretary Theresa May’s plan to sort out the African migrant crisis through handouts is bound to fail. Aid given to African countries will not necessarily stop the current influx of migrants from Africa.
What May is forgetting is that aid did not start yesterday and linking the migrant crisis to aid is completely flawed. I think she is trying to politically manipulate the electorate into thinking that massive aid pumped into Africa will end the current depressing crisis. She should have taken stock of the aid which has been pumped into Africa for so many years and review its success in developing Africa.
British people who are battered by the pain of deep budget cuts will definitely not see the justification of boosting aid overseas while public services face deep cuts.
Africa needs fair trade and systems and structures that will permanently raise it out of poverty. I think aid will create a dependency syndrome and will not put a brake on the mass movement of people.
Yours faithfully,
Handsen Chikowore
London SW2
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