Letters to the Editor

Topic of the week – schools should prioritise wellbeing

Carina Murphy (“Young minds under pressure”, 15 February) is right to highlight the crisis in our education system where academic achievement is often prioritised over student wellbeing. However, this is not always the case and does not need to be.
Last year our GCSE data was adversely affected by six high-attaining students not returning to school following the Covid pandemic, all suffering from significant mental health issues. With the backing of both our governors and trustees the school worked tirelessly with the families, supporting them as best we could in what was a very difficult period for all involved.
At no stage was it thought expedient to put pressure on or encourage the students to leave our school to “save” our data, despite it becoming increasingly obvious they would neither return nor sit any exams. During a recent Ofsted inspection this context was outlined to the inspection team when explaining the decrease in our results from the previous year.
We were amazed and delighted when the lead inspector stated in his final feedback that the school should be commended for its moral purpose in putting the interests of its students before its data. I have led schools through numerous Ofsted inspections over 17 years and have never heard feedback like this, but welcome such an enlightened attitude wholeheartedly.
Surely this is the blueprint for schools, Ofsted and the Department for Education, ensuring students interests and wellbeing are always given greater priority than any set of data.
Edward Conway
Headteacher, St Michael’s Catholic High School, Watford

Raymond Friel (“Formation, formation, formation”, 15 February) sees the academy model for Catholic schools through rose-tinted spectacles. Academies have all the faults of large organisations – too much bureaucracy and a culture of overpowering management-speak.
Academies’ support for differential pay scales is divisive – encouraging the richer resourced schools at the expense of poorer ones. Parental roles in their governance are also much diminished, and there is a snub to the national curriculum in their wanting to do their own thing.
Catholic schools supported by their local authorities would still be beacons of enlightenment for their communities and offer better accountability. Catholic schools should be open and not hide behind the cover of an academy trust.
Nicholas Tyldesley
Bolton, Lancashire

Neither Raymond Friel nor Carina Murphy mentioned parents or families, where children spend most of their time before and during their schooling. The presence of at least one or, better still, two loving and dependable parents must be the single most important influence on the education of children and young people.
Communication between parents and their children, and relations between families and school staff is critically important if Catholic and Christian schools are to produce well-rounded and mentally healthy citizens.
Lord Hylton
Radstock, Somerset

Assisted dying bill
Catholics are not well-served by the poor quality of public debate on assisted dying. It does not help us much for Rupa Huq MP (“Change of Heart”, 1 February) to quote the Hippocratic Oath, or to point out that there have been disgraceful cases in which hard-pressed medical staff have been over-anxious “to pull the plug”.
Doctors have always assisted people to die in order to relieve their suffering. In 1939 Freud was assisted in taking his own life by his physician.
Anyone who has stood at the bedside of a terminally ill relative when the decision has reluctantly been taken to embark on the old Liverpool Care Pathway, or to turn off the machines, or who has discussed a “Do Not Resuscitate” form with the elderly, knows that the line between actively assisting and passively allowing a death is routinely blurred.
Saying it is a slippery slope gets us nowhere. We need a mature debate about precisely how and when, and with what reliable public safeguards, those in unbearable suffering are permitted to move on.
Jon Rosebank
Oxford

I was very moved by Michael T. Fox (“Dying to live”, 15 February) and I also agree strongly with your well-argued editorial. The latest move by supporters of the bill, to drop approval by a high court judge, is an extraordinarily early example of the “slippery slope” we have all been warning about. We must keep up the pressure on our MPs and other opinion formers before it is too late.
(Prof.) Robin Graham-Brown
Loughborough

Stuck in the kitchen
The Archdiocese of Southwark is asking all parishioners to engage in a process of renewal entitled “Called to Bear Fruit” (News, 25 January). The workbook for this consultation has seven pictures, four of our archbishop, one of a priest holding a monstrance, two of the laity at Mass and one stereotypical picture of four women.
Why, when the issue of women’s role in the Catholic Church is one of the main issues for the synod, have the authors chosen to show women in a kitchen wearing aprons?
Where are the religious sisters, the women catechists, readers, Eucharistic ministers, theologians, university chaplains, teachers, choristers and altar servers? Women are the backbone of the Church and there is no future without them. Does the archdiocese really want us to return to a 1950s Church, dominated by the clergy, where women are safely back in the kitchen?
(Dr) Mary Mather
London SE9

We are living at a time when there is an unprecedented threat to western liberal democracy (“Vance’s priorities”, Editorial, 8 February). The social democratic experiment in Britain is looking more fragile than it has at any time since the end of the Second World War. The Catholic Church can ignore the crisis, the growing threat posed by the populist hard right, or participate vigorously in the debate. But first it needs to clarify its values.
Are we an authoritarian institution likely to have most common ground with the world’s dictators? Or are we on the side of the crucified rebel? Often I gaze at an Anglican Church which has reinvented itself so that abuse and cover-up can be challenged by articulate and principled women bishops.
What a long road we still have ahead of us. Our Church looks partly marooned in the patriarchal mindset of the Middle Ages, and partly like an outpost for contemporary misogyny, asserting that women are just not qualified to hold high office; that the Lord’s handmaidens must know their place.
Our small and dwindling congregation in north Norfolk is 90 per cent female. Many of them brought up their children as Catholics. Now grown up and well educated, is it surprising that virtually none of them belongs to the Catholic Church? Our myopic synod has silenced discussion of the most pressing topic of all: how to empower Catholic women before Trump, Musk et al. take over the world.
Jeff Wood
Holt, Norfolk

Poetry and life
Christopher Howse’s column (“Can Larkin’s poetry be separated from its author’s hateful opinions?”, 15 February) was a disturbing read. Then again, in this age of social media, any person, whether famous or not, has most likely written something that could be viewed as insensitive in some way. It is a shame that Philip Larkin’s great body of work will now be tarnished by racist comments in unearthed letters.
I am a PWS (person who stutters) and know that Philip Larkin is admired by many stammerers. Larkin’s lifelong struggles with stammering were well noted. The website of the US-based Stuttering Foundation has a “Celebrity Corner” with profiles on famous stammerers, including Larkin.
Larkin’s brilliant body of literary work will continue to stand the test of time. It is painful that he made such insensitive remarks in private correspondences.
James Anderson
Toronto, Ontario, Canada

Michael Duggan reflects persuasively on the reasons for Seamus Heaney’s lapse from faith (“The courteous apostate”, 8 February). Heaney’s childhood Catholicism did not prepare him to recognise its truths in the secular world he later encountered.
It is no coincidence that the great doctrinally assenting Catholic poets in English of the past 150 years have, overwhelmingly, been converts: Gerard Manley Hopkins; David Jones; for a time Robert Lowell; Les Murray. Born into a non-Catholic world, they came to see that world as comprehensible ultimately only through the prism of Catholic faith.
Heaney could not do that and moved in the opposite direction, even if his poetry surely tells deep theological truths about that story. It is an interesting question whether a cradle-Catholic poet of Heaney’s stature born in the last 50 years, into the globalised world which both alienated Heaney from his faith and gave him his success, would have such a complex relationship to the religion of their origins. Possibly they would not.
(Dr) Ian Cooper
Cambridge

Reading the Word
I was saddened to read the letter on the lectionary from Hugh McGinlay (15 February) with his question “Why do we read all these texts in the first place?” The Word of God is a living vitality in our lives as Christians. The combined value of Word and tradition was well set out and taught at Vatican II in Dei Verbum, the “Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation”. The living God speaks to his people today through these scriptures. They are dated, but not out of date.
If Hugh feels the need for an alternative or additional readings from various authors, he might choose to refer to the Office of Readings in the Prayer of the Church.
Peter Harrison
Bristol

Coda to unity
Thank you for your searching coverage of Christian Unity week (“That we may all be one”, 25 January). I venture this coda to your Living Spirit quote from Rowan Williams on the Eucharist.
“Every sincere approach to Communion in every Christian gathering is good and draws Grace. In each reception of Communion, the Holy Spirit determines what is impacted in the body and soul of each minister and recipient, meeting no difficulty, even when the belief, understanding and intention of minister and recipient are at variance.”
Kevin Grant
Newcastle upon Tyne

Wine and women
Claret in the Cambridge chaplaincy with Monsignor Gilbey (Letters 8 and 15 February)? For the favoured few, no doubt, most certainly not for women students nor male friends not deemed “one of us”. How different was the egalitarian hospitality of Oxford chaplain Michael Hollings, also in the late 1950s, with an open door for everyone. Maybe no claret, but a listening ear.
Janine and Bernard Kilroy
Hartley Wintney, Hampshire