Madam, - As usual, the media have done their best to create a controversy where there is none. How the Pope restating the Catholic teaching on the Eucharist can be deemed controversial is a mystery. If a Manchester United supporters' club expressed continued support for Manchester United, would that be controversial?
Writers to your Letters page such as Angela Hanley and Clodagh Rolfe (April 28th) might benefit from reading chapter six of St John's Gospel. After Jesus tells his disciples that his "flesh is real food and blood real drink" many of his followers said: "This language is very hard; who can accept it?" We are told that "after this many disciples withdrew and no longer followed him". As it was with Christ so it is with the Vicar of Christ. - Yours, etc.,
CHRISTOPHER McCAMLEY, Drogheda, Co Louth.
Madam, - Critics have judged the Pope too harshly on intercommunion. Protestants and Catholics simply have different Eucharistic beliefs.
Most Protestants believe that the Eucharist is a sacrament, a sacred sign of Christ's presence, a special means of communing with him and his body, the Church.
Catholics go further. What Jesus meant at the Supper is that after consecration the bread may look, taste and feel like bread, but it isn't. Faith grasps invisible, intangible alterations. The bread is invisibly transubstantiated into the Body of Christ.
How can a man, not a manikin, be present in and through a piece of bread? How can a resurrected body be localised in this world? How can Christ be wholly present in a thousand hosts and in a thousand fragments of each? Why cannot a priest de-transubstantiate the bread by saying, "This is no longer my Body", when digestive juices can reverse this miracle of miracles? While reason is baffled, Catholics greet these mysteries of faith with joy.
Further, though Anglican prelates look, dress and pray like bishops, to the Pope's keen eye of faith, they are not. Their souls have not been invisibly changed like the souls of Catholic priests. They, therefore, lack the ability to ordain priests and invisibly change bread and wine into the invisible Body and Blood of Christ.
This is enough to show how much profounder Catholic teaching is. - Yours, etc.,
PETER DE ROSA, Ashford, Co Wicklow.
Madam, - Am I alone in finding a sense of unreality in this correspondence? On the occasions (few enough, but that's another story) when Christians of different churches get together, our thoughts are on the words of Jesus - "When two or three are gathered. . .Do this in commemoration of me. .. " - not on worries about the theological significance of our every move.
Is there not a possibility that the desire so many feel for sharing might be leading to church unity, rather than the other way around? - Yours, etc.,
PATRICIA DALY, Home Farm Road, Dublin 9.