Madam, - The right of heterosexuals to enter into mutually committed domestic relationships is an important one in itself, providing us with the opportunity to develop complementary legal obligations that may be given legal civil status and protection. Without this convention society would be far poorer and the incentive for all of us to form mutually supportive bonds proportionately weaker. We would indeed be islands then, "cut off from the main".
So, as a heterosexual Catholic who draws spiritual strength from my church's support for heterosexual marriage, I can no longer in good conscience accept, or even by silence support, the Vatican's campaign to maintain the social, personal and emotional isolation of all homosexuals.
Indeed I have now firmly concluded that this campaign is fundamentally abusive, contrary to the inclusive love of God, and therefore anti-Christian. Lacking both charity and wisdom, it lacks also the authority to bind the conscience of any Catholic, and confirms what many lay Catholics in the West now firmly believe: that their official Church leadership is fundamentally dysfunctional on a wide range of sexual issues.
Catholic bishops could quite easily defend themselves against the charge of homophobia by proposing alternatives to marriage acceptable to themselves that would end the isolation of homosexuals. They have never done so nor even proposed to do so - and this is surely convincing proof that they have no sense of any pastoral or moral obligation to do so. How, then, can they expect anyone to take them seriously as moral authorities on the issue?
This failure is all the more lamentable in light of the fact that much - perhaps most - adolescent bullying of homosexuals in Ireland takes place in the context of Catholic education.
Indeed, the failure of the current Catholic leadership to emphasise the solidarity of the Trinity with all victims of bullying and prejudice has become a central feature of their own growing irrelevance to the lives of those they presume to guide.
The authority of Jesus grew directly out of his willingness to share the lives, the isolation, and even the fate, of the victimised. When reflecting upon their own total lack of authority today, do our bishops ever hit upon the most obvious reason: that in virtually every case they share none of these things? - Yours, etc.,
SEAN O'CONAILL, Greenhill Road, Coleraine, Co Derry.