The long road to lasting peace

Letters to the Editor of The Tablet

Your leader dealing with the Middle East (“Leave the end times in God’s hands”, 18 October) is a brave effort. It outlines the approaches of the leaders and dangers of the situation, and deals clearly with the divisions between Judaism, Islam and Christianity as well as the often overlooked schisms within these faiths.

All concur with the necessity for a lasting peace, summarised by your appeal to our common humanity. When the world says “Never again” referring to the Holocaust, it is usually a pious expression that never again will a people be murdered for their faith or race. Commendable, but how to implement it?

For our Jewish friends it has a different significance: that they will not be defenceless before their enemies nor without a place of refuge. To clarify this helps to an understanding of a reconciliation that we all pray for.

Peter Gerrard
Tipperary, Ireland

Your editorial rightly reminds readers that truth stands above the fever of apocalyptic politics. However, hailing Donald Trump (albeit tentatively) as a “hero” for brokering a brief ceasefire is absurd.

The facts tell a different story. The US remains the principal supplier of arms to Israel and has repeatedly vetoed UN resolutions calling for a lasting truce. Against that background, Mr Trump’s sudden role as peacemaker appears less a matter of conviction than choreography. Calling such manoeuvres heroic risks mistaking theatre for truth. Mr Trump did not halt the flow of weapons or support earlier ceasefires; he merely presided over a pause while the machinery of war kept turning.

True peace can’t be achieved by spectacle. It begins with honesty — about power, complicity and the hard work of justice. As your editorial reminds us, the pursuit of truth must prevail over myth-making, especially when the price of illusion is counted in human lives.

Henry Broadbent
London SE28

In reviewing the reissue of Jonathan Dimbleby’s 1979 excellent book The Palestinians (4 October), Chris Patten presents a worthy analysis of the background to the Israel-Palestine tragedy.

He quotes the tragic epitaph of Yitzhak Rabin: “Enough blood, enough tears” – sealed with his own blood. But I would take issue with Patten’s description of the 1917 Balfour Declaration as “famous”.

Perhaps, from the Palestinian perspective, he should consider “infamous” as more appropriate. It is this pledge, after all, which lit the blue touch paper to what has been endured since, and which places moral responsibility on the British government of the time.

(Dr) David Toorawa
Hemel Hempstead, Hertfordshire

Men-only priesthood

John Hicks wonders whether I might depart for Orthodoxy if the Catholic Church permits female ordination (Letters, 18 October). I am not an ecclesiastical tourist. The Catholic Church has asserted, via the apostolic letter Ordinatio Sacerdotalis of Pope St John Paul II, that it has “no authority whatsoever to confer priestly ordination on women”.

Roma locuta, causa finita est. My worry is that those seeking to overturn this decisive declaration will secure approval for the creation of women deacons, encouraged by the step-by-step precedent which secured change within Anglicanism.

This would cause massive division, perhaps even schism, within the Church of Rome and hinder its divine mission to convert the world.

Female deacons would give false hope to proponents of women priests, undermine the Church’s magisterium and grievously alarm those faithful to belief in the male-only threefold apostolic ministry. It is true, however, that if a tragic split were to occur, I know which side I would be on.

Francis Bown
London E3

I couldn’t help but smile at the photo of world leaders on your Contents page (18 October). It seems that it’s not only among Church leaders in India (Letters, 27 September) that women are missing.

Apart from one woman (I think she is Giorgia Meloni of Italy) who has just managed to squeeze into the photo, our world seems to be governed by an all-male club.

Frank Graham
Liverpool

Influencing Israel

The claim by Rabbi Romain (“A climate of fear”, 11 October), echoed by Jennifer Lipman (11 October), that “Jews here have no influence on Israeli political … decisions” looks disingenuous.

Israel’s response in Gaza, to imitate the biblical slaughter of all Amalekites, was condemned within days by eight leading British Jewish lawyers in a letter to the Financial Times – one of them a nephew of ours – led by Lord (David) Neuberger and Philippe Sands KC, and more recently by 36 rebel Jewish deputies, and loudly by Jewish groups taking part in pro Palestinian demonstrations.

What would be the snowball effect, eventually, on UK politicians if a thousand UK Jewish voices as influential as Romain’s and Lipman’s acknowledged what Israel has been doing in Gaza and the West Bank? And the same in the US. Couldn’t even the brass neck of Netanyahu bend?

History has too many examples of net curtains drawn over persecution of the Other, contrary to our three Abrahamic faiths.

Janine and Bernard Kilroy
Hartley Wintney, Hampshire

Christopher Glover (Letters, 4 October) fails to acknowledge the huge change that Nostra Aetate brought about 60 years ago. In the document we find this passage:

“Furthermore, in her rejection of every persecution against any man, the Church, mindful of the patrimony she shares with the Jews and moved not by political reasons but by the Gospel’s spiritual love, decries hatred, persecutions, displays of antisemitism, directed against Jews at any time and by anyone.”

Successive popes by their actions and words have asked for forgiveness for the past. It is vital now to keep on repeating this and better still visit your local synagogue and just ask, “How are you coping? We’re praying for you.”

Westminster Interfaith has organised an excellent series of lectures in London by Professor Michael Barnes SJ, culminating in “Celebrating Nostra Aetate” on Tuesday 28 October, the exact date of the anniversary.

John Woodhouse
London SE25

Writing on the wall

The art exhibition “Hear Us” in Canterbury Cathedral (News, 18 October) is the latest development in the long history of ecclesial graffiti. Many examples of medieval graffiti in churches and cathedrals across the country have been found and recorded recently, including plenty in Canterbury Cathedral.

It is difficult to make sense of what the makers of medieval graffiti were saying when they carved into stone, but occasionally I’ve caught a snatch of a conversation with God when visiting Suffolk churches.

In Lydgate there is a heartfelt message of love to “Lady Catherine” hidden in a rebus and I have seen Marian marks, pentangles and other ritual protection marks carved into and around fonts to protect vulnerable infants from evil.

The US vice-president J.D. Vance said that the exhibition in Canterbury makes the cathedral ugly. Perhaps he would have come to a different conclusion if he’d taken time to find out a bit more about medieval church graffiti.

Jane Crone
Clare, Suffolk

Cartwheeling canon

May I add to the affectionate portrayal of the colourfully eccentric Canon Cheslyn Jones by my friend and university contemporary Stephen Tucker (Letters, 11 October)? “The Lincolnshire Poacher” was by no means the most unlikely tune to which Cheslyn set hymns. I vividly recall singing “When morning gilds the skies” to the melody of Danilo’s opening song in The Merry Widow (“I’m off to Chez Maxim’s”) in his study in Pusey House, Oxford. And I think he even managed to fit a hymn in the English Hymnal to “Don’t put your daughter on the stage, Mrs Worthington”.

He was well known for wearing odd-coloured socks, one of which was always red, to signify his socialist principles. Once, on the way to evensong in New College, he and I cartwheeled together down Broad Street.

How many more such delights did I miss, I wonder, in forsaking Anglo-Catholicism for Presbyterianism?

(Revd Prof) Ian Bradley
St Andrews, Fife

Lectionary rules

There is no point in complaining about the lectionary (Letters, 4 and 11 October); the hierarchy are not going to change it. As a reader I have applied two rules to make it more bearable.

I omit the annoying and pointless “In those days” from the historical readings. (I notice some priests omit the equally useless “At that time” from the Gospel.) If a sentence or line is really incomprehensible, I change it to the old Jerusalem Bible version or even insert my own version.

So far, I have got away with it.

(Name and address supplied)

Faber’s fiery words

Francis Bown complains that he no longer gets to sing “Faith of Our Fathers” in church (Letters, 18 October). Certainly, this hymn has a rousing tune and I still remember striding through the streets of Preston to it, led by the Freckleton Brass Band, as part of the Catholic procession during the 1952 Preston Guild.

However, Fr Faber’s words, with their references to the “dungeon, fire and sword” and “prisons dark” of the English Reformation, are perhaps not appropriate to modern times: the ending of verse two now chimes more with Islamic extremism than with Christianity and, in any case, nearly all of the “fire” was inflicted by Mary Tudor upon Protestants.

The idea that, as Catholics, we were members of an oppressed minority did not seem to square with reality even in my childhood, let alone now, when the King will shortly be praying with Pope Leo in the Sistine Chapel.

Incidentally, back in the 1950s, the students of Manchester University held a poll to determine the worst serious poet of all time (in English). Needless to say, the winner was William McGonagall, but Fr Faber ran him close.

Michael Pike
Lichfield, Staffordshire

Anglican funding

Please could Lester May (Letters, 18 October) clarify where and how the Church of England receives public funding? Its reserves may be one thing, though they do not prevent a large proportion of its dioceses running working deficits, but it receives nothing at all by way of regular public funding.

(Revd) Christopher Swift
Coreglia Antelminelli, Italy

Rees-Mogg’s rosary

You report that Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg has recently released a 12-minute YouTube video on the rosary to his “non Catholic followers” (News briefing, 18 October). I wait in expectant hope for his exegesis on Pope Leo’s Apostolic Exhortation, Dilexi te, and its commitment to love of the poor.

Dave Hill
New Mills, Derbyshire