In response to Clifford Longley’s temperate remarks about the Theology of the Body (8 March) Professor George Weigel (Letters, 17 May) offers rhetoric (“auto-constructed catacomb”, “trapped in the mindset”) but no arguments. He is right, however, that Pope John Paul’s “reflections” in his general audiences are not “outside the tradition”, a tradition fully documented in 1966 by P.J. FitzPatrick in Birth Regulation and Catholic Belief. He goes wrong in suggesting that there has been any “development of doctrine” since the 1960s. As FitzPatrick showed, only tradition provides rational grounds for the Church’s teaching. The Pope’s sole contribution was to revive the idea, put forward by William Wollaston in h