Madam, - May I be permitted a footnote on Bishop Cornelius Lucey's suspension of Fr James Good's pastoral faculties all those years ago? Some of the UCC academic staff at the time felt we should make representations to the bishop on behalf of an esteemed colleague. Three of us - the late Prof. Risteard Breatnach,Mary McCarthy (lecturer in German) and myself - were selected to do so.
Bishop Lucey listened to us politely for an hour or so but made it clear he was not for turning.
It was obvious to me then that he was less concerned with the rights and wrongs of Humanae Vitae than with the disciplinary insistence that Fr Good should toe the line. Rome had spoken and that was that. I realise now, of course, that we had no business intervening in an ecclesiastical row, mistakenly seeing it as an academic issue of freedom of expression. - Yours, etc.,
JOHN A. MURPHY,
Douglas Road,
Cork