Madam, – Charles Brennan (April 21st) accuses Pope Benedict of communicating in “a strangled Latinate gobbledygook incapable of expressing the simplest human emotions”. But we can be sure that, if the Pope took a more populist approach, he would be accused of being “a slick operator” and “media savvy”. He simply can’t win.
As for the ideas of Hans Küng, there is nothing liberating, daring or new about them. It is simply the old game of reducing Christ to a cipher for the fashions of the age. We would do well to remember the great words of GK Chesterton in Orthodoxy: "To have fallen into any one of the fads from Gnosticism to Christian Science would indeed have been obvious and tame. But to have avoided them all has been one whirling adventure; and in my vision the heavenly chariot flies thundering through the ages, the dull heresies sprawling and prostrate, the wild truth reeling but erect." – Yours, etc,