Letters | 26 July 2008

Sensible scares

Sir: To be fair to the scaremongers (Another Voice, 19 July), at least some of the scares mentioned by Matthew Parris (al-Qa’eda, HIV) seem less frightening in retrospect not because they were always insubstantial but because the threats were taken seriously and action was taken to counter them. If the fuss over the threat of Aids in Britain now seems excessive, might that not be because it changed people’s behaviour? In other words, there is some social value to scaremongering from the press and public agencies.

Robert Bargery

London E1

Saint Pius XII?

Sir: Pope Pius XII was described by Golda Meir, the then Israeli foreign minister, as ‘a true friend of the Jewish people’ at the time of the Pontiff’s death in 1958. His consistent anti-totalitarian policy towards both the Nazis and their blood brothers — the communists — deserves better than the calumnies of Gerard Noel et al, who propagated the modernist Catholic myth of ‘bad old Church pre-1962’ (before Vatican II) and see Pius as the representative of that institution.