Dear Editor, Bishop Sorondo’s recent statement: “Right now, those who are best implementing the social doctrine of the Church are the Chinese” focuses fresh attention on the said “social doctrine”. Does the said “doctrine” embrace the detention of a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, forced abortions, a regime that ties religion to extremism and terrorism, subjecting certain victims to organ harvesting, banning Muslims from fasting during Ramadan, confiscating prayer mats, proscribing certain Muslim children’s names or demolishing the main centre of Tibetan Buddhist learning, leaving thousands of monks and nuns homeless? For good measure throw in the recent decapitation of crosses from over 2,000 churches and all that other surveillance, harassment and violence associated with registration and regulation of all church activity.
Why is Bishop Sorondo trying to burnish China’s image? Has the Vatican to re-learn that all Communist regimes are driven by an ideology that claims the whole of human life for itself? That Communism demands that all be rendered unto Caesar? That Christianity is a threat that cannot be tolerated? To quote Otto von Bismarck, they “will not go to Canossa …in spirit!”
St John Paul II prioritised the Church’s duty to highlight this. He succeeded because he recognised the inevitable impossibility and naivety of compromising agreements with Communist governments.
Yours etc.,
Neil Bray,
Cappamore, Co. Limerick.
There are economic consquences of abortion
Dear Editor, With regard to the proposed referendum on repealing the Eighth Amendment, Minister Regina Doherty said: “We need to sell…the 12-weeks figure”. ‘Sell’ is an interesting choice of word, considering the strong evidence that abortion clinics like Marie Stopes are accused of ‘selling’ abortion to undecided women.
Last year the UK’s Care Quality Commission found that Marie Stopes staff felt pressured to ‘encourage’ women to decide in favour of abortion because it was linked to their performance bonuses. They called it a “cattle market culture”. In all 70 locations, staff rang women who had left their clinics with a decision to continue their pregnancies, offering them an abortion appointment. In the same report the CQC found that this was “evidence of a policy”.
Is it not naïve to think that when a woman is in a crisis someone isn’t going to look upon her as a business opportunity? Or are abortion clinics above that sort of thing? Their huge profits answer that question, as does their lack of interest in supporting women afterwards and their adamant dismissal without fail of every single study of how decades of legal abortion in other countries has negatively affected women’s’ physical and mental health and future fertility.
The British taxpayer picks up the bill for 90% of UK terminations, and it’s to be assumed that Irish taxpayers will pay for Irish abortions, whether carried out by an abortion chain like Stopes or whether they are done in existing HSE facilities, which sounds unlikely, with the acute shortage of beds and overstretched staff.
How will abortion affect neighbourhoods and the local economy? I live in the USA. Even in this very liberal state on the West Coast, most businesses around our local Planned Parenthood have closed down. People dislike working near abortion clinics (“we know what goes on in there” one unhappy employee said) and customers go elsewhere.
That’s the reality of an abortion clinic in your city or town.
Yours etc.,
Máire Flannery,
NE 36th Avenue,
Vancouver, Wa.
Minister’s strange priorities
Dear Editor, The Minister for Education Richard Bruton said in relation to parent’s rights and allowing students opt out of religion classes, that it is a constitutional right for those who do not want to participate in religion, to be provided with an alternative, meaningful programme.
Yet in relation to the most important human right, the right to life, his government wants to deprive preborn children of their constitution right to life. Strange priorities.
Yours etc.,
Nicola Daveron,
Galway City.
New models of pastoral engagement are needed
Dear Editor, I wish to draw your readers’ attention to aspects of the ongoing debates in our Church over the possibility of married clergy. This topic and its pastoral resolution challenges our bravery, witness and commitment to Christ in today’s ‘global village’.
We need to work out new models and paradigms of pastoral engagement and evangelisation in the Spirit of St Paul. Christ Jesus was King and Prophet as well as High Priest – and the first two of these iconic roles may be filled by laity.
Fundamentally we need to bring the experience of natural leaders such as village Elders in African societies to Eucharistic ministry. Eucharist forms our Church. Clericalism has had its day. The baptised invite the ordained in, not the other way around.
The unity of our Faith is not the same as uniformity. We need to return to a Gospel-based vision of Church, the past, present and future of which belongs to Christ.
Yours etc.,
Philip John Griffin,
Rathfarnham, Dublin 14.
No pro-life experts ‘available’
Dear Editor, Recently, a number of high-profile politicians referred to the Report of the Joint Oireachtas Committee on the Eighth Amendment as if it were a sound basis upon which to make up our minds in the referendum debate. Nothing could be further from the truth.
The Committee hearings were totally one sided, unfair and frightfully incomplete. It hardly heard any evidence that was favourable to the Eighth; none from those alive today precisely because of it and those who deeply regret having lost their baby to abortion. During the hearings, Senator Jerry Buttimer told us that the Committee would not deal with the ethical considerations, yet many experts wandered far beyond their competencies. Dr Peter Boylan expressed his desire to have abortion here, while Dr Veronica O’Keane said that her role was not to offer scientific expertise but rather her personal opinion.
Given that the whole process began to look like a farce, the Committee chairman, Catherine Noone, made a public call for experts to present the pro-life case. Although some offered, none were accepted. This is so astounding given that it was medical professionals who initiated the campaign for the 1983 amendment, and have worked in accordance with it – free from the interference of political ideologically – giving us the best maternal-health outcomes in the world.
Following the Report’s publication, Billy Kelleher TD told us that the Committee on the Eighth had fulfilled its role in helping to frame the debate.
Our choice in this up-coming referendum is between trusting the medical profession who see each abortion as an avoidable death, with all too often a devastated mother, and on the other hand, the false, deceptive, spin of the abortion industry. No woman regrets keeping her baby. Everyone speaks of abortion as a tragedy. Unborn lives do matter.
Yours etc.,
Gearóid Duffy,
Lee Road, Co. Cork.
‘Resist not evil’ needs careful consideration
Dear Editor, I read The Irish Catholic every week and I find it to be honest and truthful. But there was one article in the books section (IC 15/02/18) which contained general advice that we are “commanded to resist not evil”, and was supported by the account in the Gospel of St Matthew of the often-quoted words of Jesus to “turn the other cheek”.
Now I feel that this quote always needs some clarification because it has either been misquoted, mistranslated or misunderstood. For instance, if we are to “not resist evil” then why campaign to retain the Eighth Amendment in the upcoming referendum? Such campaigning is surely resisting one of the greatest evils ever perpetuated by humans on humans. And should we not charge and imprison criminals found guilty of say burglary of old peoples’ homes. Wouldn’t that be resisting evil? I could go on and on but my main point is that the “turn the other cheek” command attributed to Jesus in the Gospels needs careful consideration before being taken at face value.
Yours etc.,
Pat Naughton,
Clondalkin,
Dublin 22.