Letters | 9 April 2015

In defence of Catholicism

Sir: Michael Gove gives an excellent defence of Christianity (4 April), but his embarrassment about the Roman Catholic part of the story is unnecessary. He writes of his discomfort as, declaring oneself to be a Christian, ‘You stand in the tradition of the Inquisition, the Counter-Reformation, the Jesuits who made South America safe for colonisation … the Christian Brothers who presided over forced adoptions’. The Inquisitions (Papal, Spanish and Portuguese) were indeed shameful, but were often as ineffective as the governments that supported them. The Counter-Reformation was a great movement of spiritual and cultural renewal that altered and improved western civilisation. Jesuits, and other religious orders, defended the indigenous people of South America from exploitation and earned great enmity from fellow Europeans. The Irish Christian Brothers were but one of many organisations, some of them Protestant and some secular, who sent vast numbers of children overseas. A positive view of the Catholic tradition strengthens, rather than weakens, Mr Gove’s case.
(Revd) Fergus O’Donoghue, SJ
Saint Francis Xavier Church, Dublin

I prayed with Paxman

Sir: Michael Gove wrongs both Jeremy Paxman and Malvern College in referring to ‘Old Malvernian hauteur’. The school is incorporated by Royal Charter as a Church of England foundation. I prayed together with Paxman and several hundred other adolescents of varying degrees of spottiness every day for some years during the 1960s, so I cannot think that his sneer with Blair was anything to do with his views on communal worship. Far more likely that his ‘hauteur’ was derived from the prospect of two leaders of the free world getting down on their knees together to exhibit the attitude of prayer before embarking on a disastrous and, many believe, illegal war, as Gove later implies. By all means remark on Mr Paxman’s tone, but please do not ascribe it to our alma mater, which is a place of deeply held Christian convictions.