SIR – You are right to welcome the Government lifting the admissions cap on Catholic schools and correct to attribute that wise policy to the PM’s excellent co-chief of staff Nick Timothy (Leading article, September 16). However, your caution in welcoming the potential of multi-religious trusts needs gently but firmly to be challenged if we are not to be – or be seen to be – a community with reservations about our responsibilities to the common good.
In the last year I have run workshops with young Muslim students from monochrome communities in Yorkshire and Lancashire. I have arranged for poor white working-class kids from equally monochrome neighbourhoods to have their first formal meal out in the Lord Mayor’s state rooms in Brexit-supporting Portsmouth. What these young people had in common was a simmering anger at being shut out from what they perceived to be the mainstream. They shared a lack of hope that government or businesses of any kind provided routes of participation that were open to them or those like them.
While some bishops may prefer not to engage in multi-religious trusts because of their responsibility to pass on the faith, others actually have a wider social duty – a duty of mercy – that arises from their particular geographies, especially of economic, religious or racial exclusion now so apparent in our country. At the least, a diocese might act as a catalyst for creativity on the part of the Church.
Moreover, this would be a perfect time for the Catholic Education Service and dioceses to re-examine, with religious orders, the opportunity to establish branches of the American Cristo Rey schools, which have done so much to reduce truancy in inner cities. Alternatively, they could offer help with back office administration, child protection, finance and governance that make so many small private Muslim and Jewish schools so institutionally vulnerable.
Were a great Catholic private school to join such an effort, the signals it would send to a nation not at ease with itself would be striking.
Yours faithfully,
Francis Davis
Professor of Communities and Public Policy, University of Birmingham
SIR – It seems a pity that Bishop Robert Barron lays the blame for the crude and ill-informed anti-Catholicism of the average secularist at the door of the Enlightenment (feature, September 9).
Following on from a century of the “religious” wars that stemmed from secular governments’ attempts to control people’s beliefs (“cuius regio, eius religio”) and the ageless struggle against Islamic colonialism, the great renaissance of the Renaissance was bound to turn its critical eye on a hidebound Church deeply enmeshed in the Ancien Régime.
If the whole Church had followed Benedict XIV’s lead and embraced the ideals and methods of the Enlightenment, outrageous absurdities like the attack on Catholic schools would seem less plausible.
But the chief reason why the secularist caricature of the Church exists is the torpor of educated Catholics. More than once, when I’ve contacted the BBC to correct some calumny against the Church, I’ve been told: “Well, no one else has complained.” Discussing, eg, the distorted image of Thomas More in the BBC’s Wolf Hall, or Dan Brown’s fantasies, Catholics say, “Well, what do you expect?” or “It’s only fiction – nobody believes it.” The trouble is, people do – outside the Church.
Our first and urgent missionary duty, to quote Voltaire, almost (who admired Benedict XIV), is écraser l’infâme.
Yours faithfully,
Tom McIntyre
Frome, Somerset
SIR – I very much agree with the conclusions of Bishop Robert Barron.
The last time any cleric discussed with me the philosophical reasons for believing in God was in the sixth form 50 odd years ago. I suspect I am not alone.
Is the universe some kind of accident or was/is there a supernatural force/reason which we can refer to as God? Did the logos, or reason, take on flesh and dwell among us? Is God benign? Why is there suffering and death, natural disasters, etc?
Like me, the ordinary Catholic is generally unable to give any reasonable answers to these questions posed by non-believers.
All these basic questions have been addressed by the Doctors of the Church over the last 2,000 years, but how often do we get their wisdom disseminated? I have spent the past year trying to study these great philosophers and theologians, but even just studying the secondary sources is not easy. We customers need to be educated in these eternal questions. To answer the non-believers we must be able to show that our beliefs have a statable and respectable philosophical basis.
Our priests and educators must be able and prepared to teach our religion. Gentle summaries of each Sunday’s Gospel are never going to be sufficient if our defence of our faith is going to be viewed by cynical and even well-disposed outsiders as philosophically and intellectually soundly based.
Yours faithfully,
Eugene O’Neale
By email
SIR – Fr Ashley Beck, a disappointed Remainer, tries to paint all Brexit voters with the same ideological brush (Letter, September 16). Certainly there must have been some racists among those who voted to leave the European Union, but for those whose concerns were to do with immigration the problem was not with genuine refugees but with the hundreds of thousands of legal European immigrants who not only radically changed their neighbourhoods but made it sometimes impossible for them to access schools, housing and health services.
Tony Blair’s former adviser, Andrew Neather, has revealed that the then Prime Minister decided to promote mass-immigration in order to “rub the Right’s noses in diversity”. Never has the law of unintended consequences been more dramatically displayed.
Yours faithfully,
John Hoar
South Molton, Devon
SIR – It is all very well for the Cardinal to respond as he did to the plea from the President of Poland to help protect Polish immigrants from disgraceful attacks. But is his statement likely to have any substantial effect?
Surely what is needed is determined prosecution of the tiny minority who commit these anti-social crimes, and the imposition of heavy sentences, be they fines or hours of disagreeable community service.
Yours faithfully,
John Jolliffe
Mells, Somerset
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