Clifford Longley (4 April) was fearless as well as right in translating the famous “Synod petition” signed by 461 priests, into the lives lived by many divorced and remarried Catholics and their families. Saying, as Fr Kevin O’Donnell says in a letter in the same edition, that we cannot change the Church’s man-made rules but there must be mercy and compassion is both patronising, and unrelated to such real lives. As a divorced remarried Catholic whose first marriage was annulled, I am married to a man whose first marriage, like mine, was entered into for life but sadly failed. He has deep moral objections to the notion that this marriage, whose fruits include my stepchildren, was a fake. I would never insist he went through an annulment. We are active in a parish w