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.

Helping children grieve well

It was so encouraging to read in The Tablet's Education supplement of Rainbows and its work assisting young people come to terms with deep emotional aspects of serious relationship loss.

In my time as principal of an English Catholic secondary school I was very deeply conscious of the very deep emotional scars, and often accompanying adverse behavioural impact, of significant relationship loss. In this context I was enormously appreciative of the great healing work undertaken by our Rainbows trained staff. I witnessed at first hand the powerful impact several Rainbows courses had in significant healing of the deep emotional wounds inflicted on innocent young people as a result of death, divorce and separation in their families.

As principal, along with family and friends, I was always invited to the end of course Celebration Day events, which in our Catholic context always included an emotional and meaningful Eucharistic celebration before a more secular and most enjoyable party. At these events I remember many of the parents coming to express a very special appreciation of the reconciling impact of the course on themselves and their children.

Living now in Ireland I was pleased to rediscover Rainbows with my grandchildren but now in a parish context. The one criticism I have of my Irish experience was that it seemed to follow the more secular/community course and its final celebration event was lacking in both Eucharistic and family contexts.

I can fully recommend Rainbows for use by both schools and parishes: long may this brave and most positive initiative continue to grow and flourish.

Myth, metaphor and science

The Garden of Eden fairy story should have been officially consigned to the dustbin of history along with the many other medieval relics. There is no merit in basing discussion on it as David Andrews does (Letters, 21 January, responding to Jack Mahoney's article "Humanity's Destiny", The Tablet, 15 January). Many years ago when I was taught Apologetics at Ushaw we were told that there were three types of soul, viz., human, animal and vegetable. This is another medieval relic.

This universe is the result of the cataclysmic force of a creative idea of God, what we now call the Big Bang. The essence of the idea was what Teilhard de Chardin called the "within" and it is something that has been progressively revealed through the medium of matter.

From the atoms initially formed, there was progression to molecules, to compounds and then through polymerisation to huge molecules large enough for life to burst out from the Within. With further complexification the development of material forms split into the three main branches of plants, insects and animals.

As the animal kingdom continued to evolve materially in brain capability there was an accompanying evolution of consciousness reaching the dawning of reflective consciousness in higher primates and full reflective consciousness in man.

It is not a matter of several different and separate compartments of consciousness. As de Chardin writes, "Refracted backwards along the course of evolution, consciousness displays itself qualitatively as a spectrum of shifting shades whose lower terms are lost in the night."

Differences in consciousness, the manifestation of our immaterial correlate known as the soul, between types of animals including humans, are differences of degree, not of kind. I dream, but so do my dogs.

Jack Mahoney's article provides a wonderfully refreshing lens through which to view the sacraments. In a society where death is feared and seen as the failure of medicine to provide immortality, the Eucharist stands as a reminder that Jesus has conquered death. In order to provide us with a concrete reminder of this, Jesus gives us the Bread of Life to bridge the chasm between death and resurrection. Above all, the Eucharist is the Bread of Hope in a world that sometimes appears to have lost its soul.

Tackling the taboos

Human gender issues and personal relationships, as they occur in the Catholic Church's teachings and elsewhere, are regular themes in your editorials and features. Indeed 50 years on from Vatican II three big subjects recur week after week - priestly celibacy, the role of woman in the Church, and homosexuality.

However much public opinion and Western society's views on these matters has changed over recent decades - dramatic and vociferous as this change has become - I think most Catholics still look with enormous respect to the holiness and judgement of the Church's centuries-old teachings in these areas. But there comes a time when the genuine shift in society's attitudes, its decencies, practices and understandings, both cultural and scientific, are so fundamental that to totally ignore them begins to call into question the grace and spiritual wisdom of the church's hierarchy in interpreting what is the real will of God in our time, and how God wants His spiritual leaders to respond to the development of people, both for their good and for the survival of Christianity.

The Catholic Church has moved its position on many issues over the centuries. It has had to. Respect for human dignity and scientific discoveries alone have forced the church to alter its stand on slavery, torture, burnings alive, crusading wars ... Galileo and Charles Darwin made the Church accept that Genesis was perhaps not meant to be historically accurate. Positive relativism in practice, maybe.

The time is well overdue for a prayerful, honest and conscience-seeking examination of how today's Catholic Church should respond to the changes in attitudes to human relationships and gender issues we have seen these last 50 years. Not just in Austria but led by Rome, in open debate. Is it, for example, God's wish that his priests are forever to be denied the option of a full loving married life - that women should never be ordained - and those people with a natural gay orientation be regarded as intrinsically disordered in their unions? Or is this the Church trapped by the inertia and obscurancy of its senior clerics, too timid in their own positions, naive, or just plain unworldly to genuinely question the dogma of some traditions in the light of God-inspired twenty-first century understanding, and not open to the will of the Holy Spirit and God's intentions?

Big change in this area of teaching will come - eventually. Human nature does not stand still and God wants his church and people in harmony, engaged in their beliefs. We may bow to the whims of public opinion at our peril, but by ignoring God's directions we act against his will.

Joint commemorations

With reference to the sermon preached by Cardinal Connor Murphy O'Connor at Chester Cathedral to mark the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity (The Tablet, 28 January), could we not begin to remove his "three enemies of ecumenism, suspicion, inertia and impatience" by extending the Feast of English Martyrs to include the Protestant martyrs as well as their Catholic counterparts?

On the say day, we could hold ecumenical services at, for example, Tyburn and Smithfield to celebrate all who suffered appalling deaths in defence of their faith.

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