SIR – Donal Foley is quite right in his cautionary comments regarding Medjugorje (Letter, June 16). The Church has always exercised a healthy scepticism in discerning supernatural phenomena.
However, Fr René Laurentin, the theologian and Mariologist, has commented that even the apparitions at Lourdes would not receive approval from the Church today, such is the level of scrutiny surrounding the wave of claimed private revelations of the past century.
Fr Laurentin, now in his 100th year, did the first painstakingly forensic investigation into the apparitions of Our Lady to St Bernadette, after they had been officially approved. In his more recent study of Marian apparitions, he concludes that the effects of rationalism in today’s Church have led to an overscrupulous negativity about such experiences. I suggest that in the case of Medjugorje the level of scepticism has been unhealthy.
Yours faithfully,
Bernadette Eakin
Ledbury, Herefordshire
SIR –Reading Quentin de la
Bédoyère’s article, “Lust: the case for nuance” (Science and Faith, June 23), highlights perhaps the greatest tragedy to be found in the Catholic theology of marriage.
Matthew 19:3-6 is rigorously used to ban divorce and remarriage after it, but has never been used as revelation about God’s intention for human sexuality. Jesus Christ puts the words of Genesis 2:2 into the very mouth of God the Father: “Have you not read that the Creator from the beginning made them male and female and that he said, ‘This is why a man must leave father and mother and cleave to his wife and the two become one flesh’?” Then Christ adds a corollary revealing the effect of intercourse upon the couple: “Therefore are they no longer two but one flesh. What God has joined together let no man put asunder”.
Surely this says everything. Young people leave home and go out courting to find a spouse, facing today all the financial problems needed to obtain a home, the temptation to fornicate, maybe locking them into a relationship with someone who will not be the right spouse. However, one hopes that, after they reach the altar, in cleaving together they achieve that transformation of two into one. Recent research into the hormone oxytocin has found that during intercourse it acts on the brain, causing feelings of trust, bonding and relaxation. A scientific affirmation of Matthew 19:3-6.
Alas, St Augustine’s definitive theology of marriage, quoted by Pius XI in Casti Connubii, is based on the Three Goods of Marriage, proles, fides and sacramentum – not the union of man and wife as one – forming the secure basis of the future family. Augustine had lived in fornication with a slave, so instead of seeing the interpersonal magnetism between man and woman as part of “being one flesh”, he taught that it was the result of Original Sin, meaning married couples, driven by a lust for physical pleasure, have intercourse far in excess of procreative need. He adopted the dictum of Seneca: “An adulterer is he who is too ardent a lover of his wife,” which is where John Paul II got his idea quoted by Quentin that a man can commit adultery with his wife. Worse still, Augustine blasphemously changed the words of Christ into “In intercourse a man becomes all flesh” (Sermon 62.2).
I long for the moment when the Church turns back to those words of Christ and makes an official comparison between the physical union of man and wife and the union in one flesh between communicants and Christ. This has been done before by Herbert Doms OSB in his book The Meaning and End of Marriage (1937). John Noonan’s Contraception: a History of its Treatment by the Catholic Theologians and Canonists says: “Doms boldly developed the parallel with the Eucharist. The physical union in marriage completed the moral participation in the life of the other just as the physical union with Christ in the Eucharist completed the believer’s moral union with Christ.”
This was so alien to official Augustinian theory that Doms’s works were put on the Index of Forbidden Books, and may have been the reason for Pius XII’s tacit denial, in his address to midwives, of the idea (suggested by writers in the last 40 years) that intercourse has an emotional meaning for the couple.
Yours faithfully,
Mrs Elizabeth Price
By email
SIR – Following the articles by Dan Hitchens and Mary Kenny in your June 16 edition, I would urge all Catholics to welcome the emergence, as the second most politically powerful party in the House of Commons, of the avowedly Christian and pro-life Democratic Unionists. Their moral values shine in contrast to those of Sinn Féin, which is equivocal on abortion and whose MEPs at the European Parliament have refused to condemn the Christian-murdering and child-raping ISIS.
Worse, threats to witnesses mean that its leadership has yet to be fully tested in court on its alleged role in the 1972 kidnapping and murder of Jean McConville, a Protestant-born woman who had converted to Catholicism out of loyalty to her husband. Her “crime”? Comforting, in Christian charity, a British soldier gunned down by the IRA outside her home in West Belfast – compassion clearly being a beatitude missing from the Irish Republicans’ version of the Gospel of St Matthew.
Finally, Sinn Féin MPs’ refusal to take their seats in the UK Parliament is a denial of full human and democratic rights to all their constituents, Catholic and Protestant. An elected MP’s public and moral duty is to represent these at all levels, including taking part in parliamentary debates and committee meetings on issues that affect their interests. Their rights should be restored by legislation enabling MPs that fail to take their seats within a month to be disqualified and their seats to be handed to the runners-up.
Yours faithfully,
David Crawford
Norwich, Norfolk
SIR – I was intrigued by your item showing Bishop Davies blessing the new Marian shrine dedicated to Our Lady of Pity at Shrewsbury Cathedral (Report, May 26). The picture shows a bas-relief of the Madonna and Child. Our Lady of Pity is invariably depicted in the form of a Pièta. The latter is particularly appropriate in Shrewsbury, where a rare early 15th-century wooden Pièta is preserved in the church at Battlefield, a collegiate church established for prayer for the dead after the horrors of the Battle of Shrewsbury in 1403.
A Catholic church to the north of the town is dedicated to Our Lady of Pity, having an image of Our Lady over the altar and a stone from the battlefield site inserted in the wall just under the foundation stone. It is a shame that this well-known devotion is not reflected in the image on the new shrine.
Yours faithfully,
Fr Peter Phillips
Shrewsbury Diocesan Archivist, Sacred Heart, Moreton, Cheshire
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