Christopher Lamb’s thoughtful profile of Mgr Roderick Strange (“Father figure”, 15 August), outgoing Rector of the Beda College, will have been much appreciated by those alumni of Oxford University to whom he ministered during his time as Catholic Chaplain, not least the many couples whom he meticulously prepared for the Sacrament of Marriage. Despite possessing the sheen of a clerical smoothie gliding towards the sunlit uplands of ecclesiastical preferment, it was in fact Call Me Rod’s sturdy and uncompromising adherence to the deeply unfashionable absolute truths of the Magisterium which made the greatest impression on my contemporaries. One of Fr Rod’s blood-and-thunder sermons or assaults on religious illiteracy was guaranteed to leave even the suavest cu