More than 100 British people, assisted in many cases by friends and relatives, have gone to Switzerland to end their own lives. Although assisting in another's suicide is illegal, the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) has decided on compassionate grounds that criminal proceedings against the relatives would not be in the public interest. This reflects the wisdom that good law needs a stern face but a kind heart - justice and mercy together. An amendment designed to bring the law into line with existing practice is being proposed by Lord Falconer, a former Labour Lord Chancellor. Three religious leaders, the Archbishops of Canterbury and Westminster and the Chief Rabbi, have written jointly to The Daily Telegraph denouncing these proposals, saying that such tinkering with the law is dangerous. It is important that their warning is heeded.

Lord Falconer tries to present his amendment as a tidying up of the law, but the implications go far wider. The current law is an essential component in a complex legal framework based on the principle - whether secularists like the language or not - that life is sacred. Pull out one brick, and the rest are destabilised. It is characteristic of those making the claim to total personal autonomy over life and death decisions, as much in this debate as in the more general argument over assisted suicide, that they ignore the damage that would be done to the rest of the community if their demands were met. All such acts and decisions have a social dimension, whose presence is represented as the law now stands by the role of the CPS and the Director of Public Prosecutions. To dispense from a law in given circumstances, largely on the grounds of compassion, is entirely different from repealing such a law altogether in the name of autonomy, because that is to say the social dimension does not exist. To reverse John Donne, "man" would then indeed be "an island entire of itself".

Lord Falconer argues that his amendment enables would-be suicides ...

Karl Rahner, the Jesuit theologian, once said that he found it astonishing that people living in an era of TV talk shows should question the merits of confession. Twenty-five years after Rahner's death, confessional TV and magazine interviews are even more the norm, as are the greater use of the therapist's skills. Yet confession - the original way of unburdening one's soul - continues to decline in popularity ...

Demonstrations on the streets of Tehran, growing tensions between North and South on the Korean peninsula, and a policy shift by the leader of Britain's Liberal Democrats, Nick Clegg, have one thread in common - they are all related to nuclear proliferation. The issue is near the top of the United Nations' agenda of threats to world peace, and shows little sign of dropping down it. The power struggle in Iran after ...

The pendulum eventually had to swing the other way. Since the Second Vatican Council the Catholic Church has wrestled with the true significance of the common priesthood of the People of God based on Baptism. It rebalanced in many fundamental ways the relationship between priests and people. But in the process, the ordained priesthood has undergone a silent upheaval. Some reassertion of priestly identity was overdue, ...

Something of a consensus exists among church historians that, had the Vatican treated Martin Luther and his circles in a more conciliatory manner at the start of what became the Reformation, it might not have happened. Many of the theological points he was raising were subsequently found to be valid, not least his denunciation of the sale of indulgences. But the rough rebuttal he received led him to adopt positions ...