I hope that Cardinal Meisner’s “clarification” of the Pope’s views on Communion for re­married divorcees (The Church in the World, 4 January) does not mean that, once again, the debate about this is going to be closed down. When my Catholic father met my non-Catholic mother, she was already divorced from her previous (violent) husband. Through marrying her, my father was barred from the sacraments. The consequences of this were his lifelong sense of deprivation and sorrow, her unremitting hostility to the Catholic Church, and the fact that my brother and I were not given any kind of religious upbringing. Does anyone think that Our Lord, who persistently sat down to feast with sinners of all kinds, would have been pleased with these outcomes? Or that he would ha