Sir, - I congratulate you, Sir, on the position of prominence and the generosity of space you gave to Patsy McGarry's analysis of the Bishops' "shift of analysis" to social, economic and cultural rights (September 30th). It was as welcome as it was unexpected.
But why does he persist with "modern" man's secular cliche that the bishops, and by implication those who, in the sexually corrupt world of today, understand their Lordships' foremost obligation as members of the Church's magisterium, to guard with their episcopal lives irreversible, doctrinal Church teachings, such as on sexual mores, not by any means excessively repeated. Secondarily, where necessary, as your reporter implied, they must remind the State not to abdicate its responsibility to its citizens, explicated in today's existential situation.
The Church should be helped by its earthly partner, at least negatively, by not placing obstacles on its pilgrim journey to achieve eternal salvation; else, it seems to me that the paradox of the greater the evil the community commits the greater the need for legislation to canonise it is peremptory in the interest of the common good! And so to its logical conclusion: Nietzchean nihilism. Hardly, I'd say. Alas! my own pilgrimage here reminds me, mutatis mutandis, of Virgil's unhappy line in his epic poem Fuit Ilium about the destruction of Troy: "Troy once was but is no more."
I have witnessed in my lifetime the State's volte-face, its lamentable tergiversation during the last two decades of its rules, when it has driven a coach-and-four through two precepts of the Mosaic law (clarifying the Natural Law already written in the hearts of all humanity), and reiterated in the Decalogue, which Jesus accepted as the basis of his teaching and promised to carry to completion.
The assumption by the State that in affairs spiritual as well as temporal it is supreme was a matter that confounded the Church in the 11th and 16th centuries: this was the theory of Caesaro-Papism. The partial acceptance of this postulate in recent Irish legislation where it suited its despotic purposes is regrettable.
Yet there is no wish to anathematise our earthly partner, but rather to be advised by St Polycarp in his letter to the Philippians where an erring couple was named: "May the Lord grant them to repent ... You, too, for your part, must not be over severe with them ... you have to restore them, like parts of your own person that are ailing and going wrong, so that the whole body can be maintained in health." - Is mise, Fr Enda McCormack,
Clogher, Co Tyrone.