Sir, - Contrary to the opening assertion in Vincent Browne's column of September 13th, the Irish Catholic bishops have not decreed that certain New Testament passages are no longer to be read aloud as part of the liturgy of the Catholic Church.
What prompted his assertion was presumably media coverage of a document on domestic violence, issued jointly by the Irish Commission for Justice and Peace and the Pastoral Commission of the Irish Bishops' Conference. "Domestic Violence" recommends that a small number of New Testament texts would be better omitted from a new edition of the Lectionary, currently being considered for reprinting, on the grounds that they are liable to give contemporary society an undesirably negative impression regarding women, and if quoted in any context they should be suitably commented on in the light of contemporary Catholic teaching.
So we are dealing with a recommendation, not a decree, and by two bodies of the Bishops' Conference, not the conference as a whole.
For the record, following a request from the Irish Bishops' Conference in the early 1990s, the Vatican's Congregation for Divine Worship in 1994 has already approved shorter alternative readings for two of the four New Testament texts referred to in "Domestic Violence" and which are included in the current Lectionary.
Mr Browne asks, with no little sarcasm, whether the inspired word of God is to be compromised by the demands of political correctness. The Old Testament passages which he quotes are only some among many scriptural texts which modern sensibilities might find off-putting, objectionable or difficult to understand. Mr Browne, however, is hardly the first, believer or unbeliever, to stumble across them. Unless one espouses a literal, fundamentalist reading of the Bible, questions of meaning, interpretation, context and culture are inseparable from reading or hearing it.
This is scarcely anything new. In the Catholic Church the principle of selecting texts for liturgical reading is long established and not in dispute - the Lectionary itself is already the outcome of a process of selecting biblical texts. The point at issue is rather what specific texts should be put into or left out of the Lectionary, and on what criteria. This is an ongoing matter. The fact that some changes are being considered for a new edition of the Lectionary is an acknowledgement that the current selection of readings may need to be reviewed on various grounds, of which sensitivity to gender issues is one.
Incidentally, none of the four texts quoted by Vincent Browne is included in the present Lectionary. - Yours, etc.,
Jerome Connolly, Executive Secretary, Irish Commission for Justice and Peace, Booterstown Avenue, Blackrock, Co Dublin.