Madam, - Perhaps the Rev Ian Ellis will kindly allow the Catholic Church to decide which of her own pronouncements are infallible and which are not (Rite and Reason, March 3rd).
For Catholicism is. Protestantism is merely against it. Catholicism is absolute. It exists of and for itself. Protestantism is essentially nothing more than its opposite reaction, an entirely negative construct with a wholly external point of reference. Accordingly, when anti-Catholic polemic is suppressed (or disguised), Protestantism, as I fear Mr Ellis demonstrates, is simply left with nothing original or coherent to say. "Hence: "no ecclesiastical statement of doctrine can ever make such a claim \, precisely because the things of God are essentially incapable of full human definition" - as if, to say nothing of the appalling dualism, that were what infallibility meant!
In the same way Protestantism, once it has outgrown being hostile to individual Catholics, cannot comprehend why, as on the subjects of the invalidity of Anglican ordination and so-called intercommunion, Catholicism needs must be honest with individual Protestants regardless.
I never fail to be amazed at how utterly a reform movement born of the desire to banish obscurantism has at last, through various phrases of ideological decay, itself collapsed in a mire of paralysed verbiage. Once the Catholic Church was allegedly too arcane: now, apparently, we are too clear. - Yours, etc.,
REV FR DAVID O'HANLON, Kentstown, Co Meath.