Madam, - In recent years retired Maynooth professor Fr Vincent Twomey has been basking in the reflected glory of his former professor in Germany, Joseph Ratzinger, and even more so since his professor is now a higher eminence.
Speaking of the Catholic meaning of "informed conscience", he is quoted by Patsy McGarry as declaring that "for a Catholic to act against the clear teaching of the Church, once one knows what that teaching is, is to sin" ( The Irish Times, December 27th).
Apart from the arrogance of accusing a fellow-Christian of sin, Fr Twomey should explain whether or not the millions of Catholics are now in hell who for centuries were told by the Church that for married couples to have intercourse during menstruation was a mortal sin, or were told for 18 centuries that slavery was no a sin at all, until it was condemned as an abomination by the Second Vatican Council.
It is unlikely that Fr Twomey's former professor now has occasion to read The Irish Times, but surely he would be surprised that his former pupil seems not to have read his magisterial comment, as a highly respected and brilliant adviser to Cardinal Frings at the Second Vatican Council, when he summed up perfectly the teaching of the Catholic Church after the council.
He wrote: "Over the Pope as the expression of the binding claim of ecclesiastical authority, there still stands one's own conscience, which must be obeyed before all else, even if necessary against the requirement of ecclesiastical authority.
"This emphasis on the individual, whose conscience confronts him with a supreme and ultimate tribunal, and one which in the last resort is beyond the claim of external social groups, even of the official church, also establishes a principle in opposition to increasing totalitarianism." (Joseph Ratzinger in Herbert Vorgrimler, ed., Commentary on the Documents of Vatican II, vol. V, p. 134).
If the Holy Father has told his former pupil that he has changed his mind, why has he not informed the rest of us? - Yours, etc,
Fr SEAN FAGAN SM,
Lower Leeson Street,
Dublin 2.