Sir, - There is, I find, always something of the gang about these multiple-signatory letters occasionally witnessed in your newspaper. There was also a palpable resentment evident in the one signed (June 28) by a western triumvirate including the predictable Fr Hoban. I suppose it was inevitable. Yet one was struck by the peremptoriness far exceeding any magisterium with which Fr Manning, Fr Hayden and, in particular, I myself, three curates who have each contributed constructively, I hope, to this debate as thinking individuals, were all put right - and in our hierarchical places - by the alternative Vatican operating from the margins.
Is the only response of Frs Conlon, Hoban and O'Horo to the convinced presentation of Church teaching, to a questioning critique of modern hedonism or to 2,000 years of Catholic witness ("bizarre rubbish", apparently) a defensive re-assertion of "liberal" prejudice? They seem both angry and weary. Can they not tolerate even the expression of support for what is nothing more than the considered position of the Church of which they themselves claim to be members?
Or is it the worrying fact that the detractors of celibacy seem now largely to be in their middle age, while - horror! - a younger generation is actually daring to see something radical and positive in it, and in many other elements of our tradition so lately undermined? It must be some sort of clerical menopause. Do come away, dear Fathers, from those rusty, culture-bound barricades of the Sixties and Seventies - the rest of us are moving on to a new millennium! - Yours, etc.,
Rev. David O'Hanlon, CC. Parochial House, Kentstown, Co. Meath