Letters Extra

In addition to the letters published in this week’s issue of the The Tablet you can find more correspondence here, available free.

Mr Gove’s schools policy will erode equality

Much space is taken up in your editorial “Mr Gove’s classroom war” (The Tablet, 29 May) by an unrecognisable description of current educational practice. Your caricature of “progressive educationalists” recycles many of the myths of the last 30 years, such as “the supposition that children instinctively know what’s good for them”. In fact, I have never met a teacher who would subscribe to the views you outline.
Mr Gove’s proposals are considerably lacking in detail. The model, as Mr Gove himself points out, is based on the development of “free schools” in Sweden in the 1990s. The record of this policy is not encouraging. Recent international comparisons have reported that standards in Swedish schools have fallen sharply. “Free schools” have fewer qualified staff; in areas where there are large numbers of such schools, running costs are higher.     
You credit Mr Gove with promoting subsidiarity, by allowing local groups to set up their own schools. However, although part of the original concept, very few “free schools” in Sweden are in fact run by local groups of parents and teachers. The vast majority operate as chains of schools controlled by private companies. Their only line of accountability is directly to central government. This is not subsidiarity as I understand it. Nor are such schools likely to be “part of a major attack on social immobility”, as your editorial suggests. In Sweden the effect has been precisely the opposite – an increase in social segregation.
Your oddest claim is that Mr Gove’s approach is a new departure from previous policy. In fact, there is clear continuity with the policies of previous Conservative administrations, such as education vouchers and encouragement for schools to opt out of local control.
You conclude that Mr Gove “has a fight on his hands” to get his proposals accepted. Let us hope that Catholics are among those who are prepared to subject them to a critical examination.

The comprehensive schools system run through the local authority education departments was a major breakthrough by the Labour Governments of the 1960s and 70s. It broke down the class-based grammar and secondary modern system that gave privilege to the few and cast the majority into a life of under-achievement. Comprehensives endeavoured to give everyone a chance.
This ideal has been chipped away at by mainly public-school-educated Conservative and Labour governments over the past 30 years. The constant pushing of parent power and independence now threatens to totally destroy the dream of classless education.
Parent power does not work. Parents get involved in schools because of their children. When that child has moved on, so does the parents’ interest. In addition few parents have any objectivity, most believing that their own child is uniquely gifted in some way or other.
Independence has brought academies, which apparently are now going to proliferate even further. The desire for independence will no doubt see the national curriculum come under attack, leading one day soon to schools funded by private companies, choosing the most able pupils and setting their own educational agendas. When that day comes the experiment in education as a means of enlightenment, giving people of all classes and backgrounds an equal chance in life, will have effectively ended.

Safeguarding Catholic education

I have recently retired from leadership of a Catholic secondary school in Essex. As someone with a proven lifelong commitment to Catholic education, I was taken aback by what I consider to be Bishop Malcolm McMahon's recent contradictory positions in his role as lead bishop on education matters.
I can understand where the bishop is coming from in so publicly opposing the Liberal Democrat policy of broadening access to church schools. What worries me is the recent appointment as deputy director of the Catholic Education Service of Greg Pope, a former Labour MP with a dubious recent voting record on pro-life and pro-family issues.
What is the point of safeguarding admissions while at the same time sanctioning an appointment with the potential to undermine Catholic teaching and formation on the importance of marriage and family and the sanctity of life?

New Mass translation obscures the message it tries to clarify

Cardinal Pell (“No barbecue English for Mass – Pell”, 30 May) assumes dim, uneducated laypeople. He tells us our gracious, thoughtful Mass text was "dumbed-down'' by translators "embarrassed by angels, sacrifice" who went "softly on sin and redemption". We listen at Mass. We hear all those things honoured in their due place. We don't talk thus "at a barbecue". We see for ourselves that the new text is less "powerful, dignified and beautiful" – the "different cadence" only a cadence where our Mass text is retained; otherwise stumbling as only a literal translation can, with an occasional verse rhythm to falsify the stress. Our translators accepted Pope Pius XI's dictum: liturgy is the Church's chief instrument of catechesis. Now plain catechesis yields to literalising obscurity. “Shed for all” is clear. Only complex linguistic and scriptural analysis can show that “shed for many” means “shed for all”. “Consubstantial” must be disentangled from the “consubstantiation” of history, then interpreted: “one in being”. Who will explain that in the scripture “Not worthy that you should come under my roof” – a literal translation of a dead metaphor – the centurion actually meant that Jesus need not be troubled, he need not risk ritual pollution by entering a gentile's house? And that the passage is about faith, not a pious act of personal contrition? And that as the chosen people Christ has made us worthy and will enter?
And why have our bishops tolerated this?

As someone who has read widely in several languages over the years, I find some of the proposed texts difficult to follow, and fear that for some they might just as well be recited in Latin, but perhaps that is the ultimate intention of the revisers. Clarity is as important as "reverence", whatever that means in this context, and those preparing liturgical texts should take as their model the simple wording and sentence structure of the prayer that Christ taught us.
One sincere "mea culpa" should be sufficient, so why three of them? And will our catechists explain to us just what is the "most grievous fault" that all of us, from age five to a 105 will have to confess to?

I am not happy about the new translation of the Missal being used whilst His Holiness is with us in Britain. I can understand commissioning a Gloria in the new translation but please don't let us have much else.
The controversies we need are about how to gather people for God and how to extend our reach. If the Papal Masses require different answers there will be a huge debate, and those journeying towards the Church will wonder why it is different. 
I  hope those of us who work at the coalface will be given the chance to introduce the changes quietly. I won't have an opinion, just make a joke that we will take a little longer for a few weeks and explain the basic thinking one Sunday a while beforehand. Then I will use the new translation, after the books have arrived, in our daughter church on a Wednesday before the due date so that I can play my part well the first weekend.

Judging the nun who sanctioned an abortion

In your Pentecost meditation, Daniel O’Leary quotes Timothy Radcliffe OP saying: “We must rejoice in the very existence of people with all their fumbling attempts to live and love … whether their lives are lived in accordance with church teaching or not... The Church should be a community in which people discover God’s delight in them.” The Church, this Pentecost, more than ever, needs to follow this practice, because I find, as a priest, there is more forgiveness in secular society than in the church community. Could this be why we find congregations dwindling because we are so judgemental? You will understand my dismay at reading in the same issue how a Catholic nun in Phoenix Diocese, Sr Margaret McBride, “excommunicated herself” saving a critically ill patient by allowing an abortion to take place. Is this not judgemental? To live life fully is to make mistakes, but sometimes in making an apparent error we find the real truth.

When will Rome admit the competence of lay people on resolving abuse crisis?

I see that the Pope has finally appointed a nine-person team to investigate the tragedy which is the Catholic Church in Ireland. There are no lay people on this team. However well intentioned this Pope may be, we need competence as well. These cases would never have arisen if the laity had been allowed to be more involved. This is not the Church founded by Jesus Christ. I am tired of being treated with such contempt. Are we now really back to the "pay, pray and obey" days for the laity? How loudly do we have to shout before anyone in the Vatican hears us – or is the reality that they aren't listening?

Conscience remains the bottom line with Newman

Clifford Longley seeks to resolve, or perhaps dissolve, different versions of Cardinal Newman's view on conscience (“Newman gives no comfort to those who dissent from church teaching”, 29 May). A fallacy of dubious validity is called into play (“giving [Newman's] words some intrinsic meaning irrespective of what he was thinking about when wrote them” – does this also apply to Mr Longley's words?); but the greater argument against Mr Longley is that, with profound respect to the cardinal, heavier theological hitters have said the same thing. Thus St Thomas Aquinas wrote in III Quodlibet, 27: “Every judgement of conscience, be it right or wrong, be it about things evil in themselves or morally indifferent, is obligatory, in such wise that he who acts against his conscience always sins.”

Conscience and the process of discerning

It was with some surprise that I read Clifford Longley’s most recent article on Newman. The concept of Sensus Fidelium or "sense of the faithful" is one that was championed by Newman and is one intimately associated with the concept of reception of doctrine. The faithful, Newman felt, should be more than passive recipients of teachings of the Magisterium. They should be seen as having the duty of discerning the truth and validity of doctrine and then, after prayer and reflection, of deciding whether or not to receive the teaching. This produces a dynamic and reciprocal relationship between the Magisterium and the faithful in which the gifts of the Spirit should be recognised by all. It is surely this process of reception, rather than a simple appeal to conscience, that Newman would have gone through should he have been faced with Paul VI’s encyclical that banned the use of contraceptives by Catholics, Humanae Vitae.

Vatican saint-makers need to look to Latin America

While Fr Jerzy Popieluszko’s beatification as a martyr (The Tablet, 29 May) is to be welcomed, it illustrates the Vatican’s continued bias against the martyrs of Central and Latin America. While the martyrdom of Fr. Jerzy in 1984 was related to the Polish regime’s ‘odium Fidei’, or hatred of the faith, it was equally a pragmatic decision to eliminate a constant critic of the Government’s  persecution of its people.
The same principles that applied to the recognition of Fr. Jerzy as an official martyr of the Catholic Church must be applied to murdered Monsignor Oscar Romero, the Jesuits massacred at the University of Central America, and countless others who gave their lives for their sisters and brothers, motivated with an unquenchable thirst for justice and the coming of God’s kingdom.
The Vatican maintains a bias against the Latin Martyrs because they were doubtlessly influenced by liberation theology, a Catholic theology, which is still severely discriminated against in Curia circles.
There is also the political aspect to the failure by the Vatican to beatify the martyrs of Latin America. The Polish regime in 1984 was officially atheistic and the murder of a priest by the state could easily be interpreted as an attack against the Catholic Church.
However the regime in El Salvador in 1980 when Monsignor Romero was assassinated was officially Catholic, and the papal nuncio publicly denounced him for his outspokenness of the regime’s flagrant violation of human rights and fundamental freedoms of its most marginalised people.
After 30 years of failure it is time for the Vatican to apologise to the Latin American People and speedily put its stamp of holiness on its exemplary Christian martyrs.

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