I really liked Fr Edward Butler’s use of the phrase “struggled, failed and stayed” (Letters, 26 April) in his account of the experience of those who remain within the priesthood despite having at some point broken their vow of celibacy. It comes close to a perfect description of Israel’s part in her crazily unequal covenant with God, a covenant which is simply God’s fidelity-in-mercy to the promises he has made to a wayward and faithless people, with its strange history of going away and, eventually, coming back. Israel, of course, prefigures the faith experience of most (though not all) Christian souls in the steady, seemingly ineluctable rhythm of sin, repentance and reconciliation. To accept this is not a recommendation that we sin, or a refusal to call si