Madam, - With reference to your recent reports about the multitudes not knowing about Easter or Bethlehem or the Ten Commandments, let me broaden the picture of the task confronting schools in the Western world today. An American Ivy League university professor was recently reported in The New York Times as telling his students that "if they are not more confused and uncertain at the end of my courses than they are at the beginning, I have been a failure". This illustrates today's obsession with diversity and pluralism.
Of course all these institutions have so-called "mission statements" of ever increasing vagueness and generality, in harmony with the current, seemingly all-pervasive institutional and ideological dynamics. But because of their innate hard-wiring, the way our minds operate and their search for transcendent meaning in life, we are always driven to Good Friday and Pontius Pilate's question: what is truth?
The Church serves the great good of diversity and pluralism on earth, not by adapting her message to the gospel of new-age self-esteem, happiness and prosperity, but by constantly proposing the truth she believes she has received from her founder. She does not mimic the false pluralism and diversity which pretend that our deepest differences make no difference. Rather she engages with all cultures and within the bond of civility the differences that make the deepest difference. Her conviction about truth, all truth, is that the author and the end of truth is one.
- Yours, etc,
Fr TOM KELLEHER, Kinsale, Co Cork.