SIR – Dame Louise Casey has told a House of Commons select committee that “it is not OK for Catholic schools to be homophobic and anti-gay marriage”. She has attempted to put Catholic schools into the same category as those Birmingham state schools subjected to Islamic Trojan Horse tactics.
Dame Louise’s 2015 report defended faith schools. Perhaps now she was trying to give “balance” after her devastating criticism of Islamic tactics. She provides only a gross distortion of the Church’s teaching and education policy. Gay people are due the same respect as everyone else. The Church opposes discrimination. That does not mean that the Church accepts gay marriage. Dame Louise should herself read the Department of Education’s guidance: “No school,or individual teacher, is under a duty to support, promote or endorse marriage of same-sex couples”. She says “mixing is a good thing”. Catholic schools are mixed: mixed ethnically, mixed across the spectrum. They include many who are not Catholic. But they share an ethos for which Catholics have always stood.
“Tsar” is an unfitting title, however informal, for any official or minister. Law did not obtain in Tsarist Russia. Here it does. The danger here is that the intolerance of liberal totalitarians will undermine the law’s respect for religious freedom.
Yours faithfully,
Fr Leo Chamberlain OSB
St John’s Priory,Easingwold, North Yorkshire
SIR – It is sad that, as the New Year began, our courts were once again being asked to legalise euthanasia. This action ignores what we, as a civilised country, should be working towards: a society that ensures that life is protected all the way through to a natural death. At this time the campaign should not be for us to seek an early death but to have in place the best possible palliative care so that euthanasia need never be contemplated.
I call therefore upon Brothers, friends and families of the Knights of St Columba to openly share the message of our faith to protect life from conception to a natural death; to look after those who need help materially and spiritually in their lives; and ultimately to share the message of Our Lord Jesus Christ to those who need to hear it.
I belong to a group of Catholic men, young and old, throughout this country who believe we can really make a difference in helping those less fortunate than ourselves. We are the strong arm of the Catholic Church, materially and spiritually, putting family and life at the heart of all that we do. As Knights, we do not ask what we can get but rather ask what we can offer.
In this year of 2017, which commemorates our Holy Mother’s appearance at Fatima, let us take her holy message forward.
Yours faithfully,
Charlie McCluskey
Supreme Knight of the Knights of St Columba,
By email
SIR – In your leader (December 16) commenting on the new Ratio Fundamentalis Institutionis Sacerdotalis (guidelines for priestly formation) the following point was made: “It is often said that the revival of the Church depends on a renewal of the priesthood.” I agree, but this needs to be in the context of the renewal of the family, from whence (one hopes) vocations to the priesthood stem.
After all, fewer babies means fewer children to hear God’s call. This is why Archbishop Chaput of Philadelphia encapsulates what lies at the heart of the renewal of the Church so succinctly: “There will be … no renewal of the Catholic Church without renewal of the Catholic family, and no renewal of the Catholic family without a bold proclamation of the sacred truths regarding the transmission of human life.”
Yours faithfully,
Edmund P Adamus
Portsmouth
SIR – Piers Paul Read asks the question “Is Jansenism back?” (Charterhouse, December 9) and there are certainly parallels between the situation in the 17th century and the present. However, before anyone accuses those supporting the dubia of the four cardinals of Jansenism, they should remember that at that time there was a very much worse scandal created by certain Jesuits, mainly Spanish, of pushing casuistry to such limits that murder, adultery, abortion etc were to be excused, leading to unworthy Communions. The motivation was to make the Church more inclusive of a corrupt and decadent elite.
Blaise Pascal, in his letters to a countryman or provincial, described these abuses with undoubted accuracy, particularly in his sixth and seventh letters.
There was a very real need for a reaction against this extreme casuistry of the Jesuits and the Jansenists provided it, although they went too far in their rigidity.
The question of predestination – taking St Augustine to the limit – was a separate issue that led to the condemnation by successive popes of five propositions which the Jansenists claimed were never held by Bishop Jansen. Curiously, the first of these five propositions, which said that not all men receive sufficient grace to resist sin, is remarkably similar to passages which have given rise to doubts about Amoris Laetitia. At the same time our Jesuit Pope has condemned casuistry – all very confusing!
Yours faithfully,
Nicolas Bellord
Horsted Keynes, West Sussex
SIR – Jonathan Wright, in his review of Luther’s Jews by Thomas Kaufmann (Books, January 13), asks “Why Martin Luther’s anti-Semitism matters” and states that the Reformer’s venom cannot be ignored. He also quotes from the book: “for Luther, Judaism was something like a walking corpse”.
It is important to put this into historical perspective. Luther would not have been alone in anti-Semitism. Eamon Duffy, in his history of the popes, Saints and Sinners, dealing with the period of the Council of Trent, wrote: “The Jews of Rome were herded into ghettos by Pope Paul IV, forced to sell their property to Christians and to wear yellow headgear; copies of the Talmud were searched out and burned.”
It would appear that Pope Paul IV actively shared Luther’s anti-Semitism.
Yours faithfully,
David J Murnaghan
By email
SIR – I note that the biologist Paul Ehrlich is to be a speaker at a Vatican-sponsored conference. His support of sex-selective abortion, compulsory sterilisation, the debunking of his doomsday predictions from previous books, and so on, make me think: what on earth is going on at the Vatican?
Yours faithfully,
Brian McKenna
Dumbarton
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