Sir, - Religious fundamentalism is certainly alive and well in Ireland and is crawling out of the woodwork daily onto the pages of our national press taking ever bolder and more outlandish forms and leaving very much to one side the original debate on President McAleese's taking of Communion in the Church of Ireland.
This is the very same whiff of the smoke of the Holy Inquisition from the pens of both learned churchmen and ill-informed laity who still insist that the mysteries of faith can be boxed in conclusively and for all time by theological formulations. One correspondent tells us that the Church's teaching is "unchanging and unchangeable". If this were so, Earth would still be officially flat, the keeping of slaves would be morally and scripturally defensible and it would be a mortal sin for a Catholic to attend the funeral service of his Protestant neighbour, to mention just three very different examples of how Church teaching has progressed over the years.
Those who quote the Council of Trent with such absolutism should know that it was the Church's response in its own time to the challenges posed by the Reformation. It set out distinct codes of practice and belief for the Catholics of that era. Likewise, the Second Vatican Council was the Church's response to the challenges and problems facing the Church in the modern world. Fundamentalists cannot have it both ways. If the Holy Spirit was with the Fathers of Trent was He/She not also with the fathers of Vatican II?
The Vatican Council states that the Church of Christ subsists outside the Catholic Church. If one accepts that that this council was the major movement of the Holy Spirit in our time, then are not those who reject it the real "a la carte" Catholics? - Yours, etc. Margaret Hickey,
Castleowen,
Co Cork.