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.

To rebuild trust we have to put abuse victims first

Your leader on the Irish clerical abuse issue ("A relationship in need of repair", 12 May) reflects all the central points and shows how the road to rebuilding trust and ensuring authentic healing will remain a challenging one.

While the progress at the Rome symposium in February is very welcome - not least the reference to episcopal accountability - the disconnect between words and action will continue to remain if victims and survivors of abuse experience no real sense of accountability and responsibility. The inability to deal with the scandals of the past also make it difficult to communicate the very real progress in safeguarding within the Church where, in dioceses and parishes, those involved in promoting best practice do untold and unheralded good.

Recently in my role I have seen at first hand the positive progress in the decision to bring religious communities within diocesan safeguarding procedures. I have also met with the rectors of our seminaries in Rome, Spain and England and valued their unreserved commitment to safeguarding being integral to the formation of future priests through their curriculula and placements.

However, to have a truly one-church approach to integrating safeguarding within the ministry of the Church, then all of us involved in it - be we bishops, safeguarding commissioners and officers, financial secretaries, Catholic insurance agencies - need to centre our work and decisions within the heart of the Gospel. Jesus was unequivocal in his condemnation of those who would harm children and Pope Benedict XVI reflected this on his visit to our country when he said that in abuse situations the priority was the emotional, spiritual, physical and material needs of the victims.

Only when all our actions reflect this gospel-centred approach will authentic healing and the return of trust within the Church be possible.

It is unfortunate that three times in the course of the leader "A Relationship in Need of Repair" (The Tablet, 12 May), the term "the Church" is used, when clearly the reference is only to Vatican authorities or the hierarchy.

Using "the Church" to refer to a tiny minority of the whole disempowers the rest of the membership who, by baptism, surely also are the Church.

Please, in this regard, could The Tablet give the lead in verbal and theological accuracy and use the term "the Church" only when speaking of all the People of God?

Wealth is not wrong

Cardinal Keith O'Brien's article (The Tablet, 5 May) assumes that those who are rich are usually also bad and that in some way they need to be made to pay - literally - more and more to reflect their moral shortcomings. How telling it is that he says "punitive action " needs to be taken against them, revealing himself as motivated more by moral repugnance than sound economic sense. There is nothing wrong with wealth. The man who has money can use it to do good as countless wealthy men do. The pauper can achieve little. A financial transaction tax may be a good idea or it may not. The key issue to be determined is: would it raise significant money for the exchequer without damaging the generation of income which the UK's financial sector provides?

This is an economic judgement and Cardinal O' Brien is patently not an economist. As for his simplistic exposition of the good the tax would do if it were spent directly on his own "good causes" which he casually assumes are also ours, one could say this about any new tax or indeed current one. Perhaps we should reduce our Roads Maintenance Budget in order to help the most vulnerable communities overseas adjust to climate change. Better still perhaps the Church should scrap its entire media budget and divert the funds to this overwhelmingly important priority. It is little short of cheap for the Cardinal to accuse the Prime Minister of "leaving the poor to suffer while the rich continue on their merry way".

Politicians of all parties usually enter upon their careers in order to help the people they represent and I suspect their motives are at least as ethical as those of cardinals who denigrate entire sections of society in such a cavalier manner. The cardinal should remember that the Good Samaritan was able to help the traveller who had fallen among thieves because he could afford to buy him a bed for the night. It was the priests who walked by on the other side.

Liturgical step backwards

With a certain amount of bewilderment, after reading your news item about the latest musings of Andrew Wadsworth (The Tablet, 12 May), I turned, for enlightenment, to the relevant passages of the Catechism of the Catholic Church. It appears that in Christian tradition the word liturgy means "participation" of the people of God in "the work of God".

Mgr Wadsworth played no small part in encouraging the reduction of what had been a more than adequate and certainly user-friendly version of our Eucharistic texts into one which is verbose, non-flowing and verging on the unintelligible. Now, quite apart from forcing us back on our east-facing knees, he seems anxious to complete the liturgical circle (a downward spiral in terms of lay participation) by the simple backward step which would lead us from a literal but exceedingly obtuse translation of Latin, to the complete and utter obfuscation, as far as the overwhelming majority of God's worshipping people are concerned, of the Latin language itself.

Lapsing is not a modern phenomenon

Daphne McLeod (The Tablet, Letters, 12 May) refutes the claim that many lapsed before 1970 by stating that "lapsation only began after the teaching changed into ‘modern catechetics'". I began teaching in 1959. In a class of 40 children, only a tiny proportion practised their faith. This indicates that their parents did not do so either. The class I was teaching was representative of the whole school and, I would suggest, tells us that lapsation was alive and well stretching much further back.

Not too many years ago, in a talk about the declining number of Mass-goers, I quoted the statistics from quite early in the twentieth century. They showed that there have always been large numbers of baptised Catholics who did not attend Mass. I wonder whether the statistics provided by the National Catholic Directory, as quoted by Daphne McLeod, are more to do with weddings and baptisms. In recent years people have become much more honest, in that they no longer undergo rituals which mean nothing to them for the sake of older family members. I am not disputing that the decline in numbers has been sharper in the recent past but I think the roots of this decline can be traced to a much earlier time and its causes are more complex than Ms McLeod suggests.

I am 73, from a practising Catholic family. I had two siblings and three cousins, all receiving the older form of religious teaching. Only two of the six of us have not lapsed. I know, also, that many of my school friends, all from strong Catholic backgrounds, have also lapsed. I would not attempt to explain this, but cannot see how it can possibly all be attributed to the so-called new catechesis.

Team effort

In Jonathan Tulloch's otherwise excellent piece about Sylvia Wright's work in Tamil Nadu (The Tablet, 'Hope that grows under a tamarind tree', 12 May) there was - sadly - no mention of the consistent support over her 30 years in India that Sylvia has received from her home parish, Holy Name, Leeds.

I have observed this from the outside, from a neighbouring parish now happily joined with Holy Name in the fairly recent reorganisation of Leeds parishes, and I have been consistently impressed by the way they have kept it up over the years. They formed the Sylvia Wright Trust to give practical assistance and to raise considerable sums of money, usually providing the hard-working officers of the Trust who are quite frequent visitors to India. Enormous credit must go to them for their prayers for Sylvia and her work and for their effective support in helping her build up this inspiring project.

They have, of course, rallied other parishes and organisations to help them, and on her recent visit home there was a gathering of about 600 supporters in Leeds, attended by the Lord Mayor and our bishop emeritus, David Konstant, showing that it is not only the Catholic Church which rallies to the cause but also many other people of other denominations and none. It is not the only cause which Holy Name supports: our current parish priest, Fr Pat Smythe, has a particular interest in East Timor, with his Peter Trust doing great work there, but he is careful not to trespass on the claims of the work in India, whose support has continued over many years despite all the changes of parish priest there have been. A marvellous example of lay initiative!

Lapsing is not a modern phenomenon

Daphne McLeod (The Tablet, Letters, 12 May) and Gail Brown (Letters, 5 May) have evidently had very different experiences of religious instruction in Catholic schools. My own education began in 1937 in a Catholic state "elementary" school, and progressed to a Catholic state grammar school.The catechism formed a substantial part of the instruction, and I learnt at my first school that "They who die in mortal sin will go to hell for all eternity", and that "It is a mortal sin to neglect to hear Mass on Sundays and Holydays of Obligation"; I was able to draw the obvious conclusion.

On Monday mornings, there was an interrogation by the headmaster about Sunday Mass attendance, and any child who had not been to Mass (and had the courage to admit it) was berated in no uncertain terms. At Grammar school we had to learn the answers to a dozen or so questions at each weekly catechism class, and any boy who failed to give a word perfect answer was given the cane. The weekly lesson on Church History seemed largely concerned with the Fathers of the Church and the various heresies of their times; it could not be described as inspiring. I can remember only one teacher - his subject was the New Testament - who encouraged questions and some discussion. I had the impression that every teacher had to do his stint of religious instruction, and find it hard to believe that they all had a "Catholic Teachers' Certificate".

Daphne McLeod's description of her enlightened religious instruction - not much learning by rote, with the children acting or illustrating the story told, and writing about the instruction in their own words - is one that I do not recognise from my own school days. I suspect that many older readers will, like myself, be more familiar with the picture painted by Gail Brown.

It was indeed helpful to appreciate Daphne McLeod's long involvement in religious teaching in Catholic maintained schools, but perhaps the correlation she postulates between the nature of RE teaching and declining church numbers could benefit from an examination of a wider range of potential social and cultural variables. Has a full social analysis of the second half of the twentieth century yet been published? A two-variable correlation, Daphne McLeod's two recent letters (24 April, 12 May), do appear to be unduly optimistic.

'For many'

Translating pro multis in the Liturgy of the Eucharist is less straightforward than Fr Paul Kelly thinks (The Tablet, Letters Extra, 12 May). For one thing, the Mass is a participation in the Last Supper. Christ's reference to Isaiah was to resonate for the apostles so that they knew that he meant "all". It seems right to share their understanding as Our Lord intended.

There is a semantic problem too. Multi differs in nuance from "many" much as satis does from "enough". The idea of multi does not exclude any large number, even all; whereas "many" means a large number, though not all. The literal translation is relatively harmless in those languages, like Polish, where the force is exactly that of multi. But not in English.

"Everyone agrees that Christ died for all." Well, no. When the Curia first pronounced on pro multis, traditionalist readers of one leading Catholic newspaper corresponded long and fiercely (even quoting the Catechism of the Catholic Church) to prove that Christ did not die for all, and that the 1960s-70s scholars had got it wrong. People believe what they hear.

Fr Paul Kelly (The Tablet, Letters Extra, 12 May), explains fully and clearly why "many" means "all". However we are still left with a problem: if it has always been clear and known, that many means all, and the reason for using "many" is the reference to Isaiah, then it would be helpful and avoid confusion if this was clear in context, to the non-biblical scholar.

This is a problem which goes deep and is at the centre of much of the unhappiness with the new translation - that to keep purity with historical use of language, the texts are failing to communicate with the current generations. A possible answer could be to have a Vatican-approved translation for as many languages as possible and then these could be used as the base for local translations which would be approved by the bishops' conference of the area concerned. Since this would be a relatively small-scale affair it could be done regularly to ensure that the translations reflected current usage of language. Because of the unfriendly translation of the Nicene Creed we, in this part of the world, are now using the Apostles' Creed, which is a shame as we lose the glory, wonder and poetry of the Nicene Creed, but at least we can understand and pronounce the words.

Military chaplains

The Tablet report (21 April) about military chaplains says: "A priest who becomes a forces chaplain becomes a member of the armed services." In schools, universities and hospitals, chaplains serve the community but are not teachers, lecturers or health-care workers, unless they have the necessary professional qualifications. Surely military chaplains should serve the armed forces without being military personnel, without holding any military rank and their work reflect the non-violent values of the gospels.

Closed churches

I was interested in Kathryn Turner's article about locked churches (Parish Practice, 28 April). Here in Southport, St Mary's and St Patrick's are open all day, and in nearby Formby, Our Lady's is always open. Growing up in Liverpool in the 1920s we were told "never pass a church without going in and saying a little prayer". Now in my eighties I feed sad when I see so many churches closed apart from services.

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