I would like to endorse David Lonsdale's suggestion (Letters, 11 July) that the main losers of Heythrop's eventual closure will be the "whole Christian community". As an Anglican, I did the postgraduate diploma course in Pastoral Theology back in 1985 and recently nine of us from that year celebrated our 30th anniversary. Two of that group are Religious, the rest laity. All are involved in work in the community which is partly the result of the richness of the Heythrop experience – why else would we still be in touch with each other?
I have continued to be nurtured by the ongoing courses and talks given by the college, which have been vitally important for my interfaith work. So let us harness the skills and enthusiasm of the laity, as suggested by David Lonsdale and collaborate to renew Heythrop College as the centre of excellence it has always been.
Diana Mills, Richmond, Surrey
David Lonsdale writes: “Maybe this is a moment in which lay Christians … might offer to take greater responsibility and make resources available”. But this is how it has always been, certainly in terms of making resources available, though much responsibility has been wrested from lay hands over the centuries.
Regardless of the legal structures that religious orders, and the secular Church, have set up, they are not the owners but the trustees of what they refer to as "their" resources. The moral owners are the donors who have funded them since the Church began. There have been large benefactors, suitably lauded. And there have been widow's mites, too numerous to mention and rarely, if ever, acknowledged.
As religious orders shrink and change direction to suit the man- and womanpower available within their ranks, the laity should not be the last to know what is happening. Responsibility should be given back (with some humility, I suggest) to the laity so that they can help determine what changes take place and what they also can contribute in terms of putting hands to the pump to make best use of all those resources that they and their ancestors have made available to the Church.
Margaret Callinan, Victoria, Australia
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