Letters | 15 September 2007

Lift sanctions on Iran
Sir: The resolution of the Iranian nuclear crisis is breathtakingly simple, were sanity to prevail (‘Iran will be next’, 8 September). Iran does not need an atom bomb to attain the status of a regional superpower: the size of her population and territory, her vast natural resources, her access to the Caspian Sea and dominance of the Persian Gulf confer that status upon her. If the sanctions imposed by the Americans and the Security Council were to be lifted and, simultaneously, Iran agreed to an international inspection of her nuclear installations, Iran’s moribund economy would be revived at the same time that fears about her nuclear military ambitions would be assuaged.

The alternatives are too terrifying to contemplate.
Parviz C. Radji 
By email

Critical mass
Sir: Damian Thompson, in his excellent article (8 September) on the Pope’s motu proprio, which has restored the right to celebrate and attend the liturgical form previously known as the ‘Old’ or ‘Tridentine’ Mass, comments that ‘it is an exciting time to be Catholic’. He is absolutely right, for more than one reason. Firstly, as he says, because by his action the Pope ‘has indicated that the entire worship of the Church — which had become tired and dreary since the Second Vatican council — is on the brink of reformation’. The next stage in this process for us will be the promulgation of the more faithful, and less dogmatically banal, translation of the English version of the ‘new mass’ which has now been completed.

But there is an even more fundamental reason to be thankful for the motu proprio: that it sweeps away what the Pope has called the ‘hermeneutic of rupture and discontinuity’, a way of interpreting the Second Vatican Council as an event which destroyed the entire preconciliar Catholic tradition.