Sir, In a letter (December 25th, 26th and 27th), Father Michael Campbell, CC, expresses his sadness and disappointment with Maureen Gaffney's chapter "A Crisis of Sexuality in the Church"in her book The Way We Live Now. I am not only saddened and disappointed, but also shocked by Father Campbell's letter.
He tells us that "the Church's doctrine on human sexuality is clear and wholesome, as is her teaching on other moral and ethical issues touched on in this particular chapter", and goes on to quote Scripture at length. Referring to Maureen Gaffney, he writes: "I disagree totally with her comments: `The Church is clinging to increasingly irrelevant pronouncements about what is good, bad and unmentionable and at times it looks as if the moral authority of the Church may also be swept away." This apparent quotation does not appear in my copy of The Way We Live Now. There are, however, two sentences which contain the quoted words. These sentences are as follows:
"A torrent of sexual scandals has hit the Catholic Church and it looks at times as if the moral authority of the Church, its traditional power to heal and console may also be swept away" (p. 208 par. 2).
"Yet if the Church is to retain moral credibility in relation to any of those matters, it has to be prepared to engage in a real discourse about the biological, psychological and social realities of sexuality in the modern world, instead of clinging to increasingly irrelevant pronouncements about what is good, bad and unmentionable" (p. 209, par. 3).
So is Father Campbell disagreeing with what Maureen Gaffney wrote, or what he claims she wrote? - Yours, etc.,
Tobernea Terrace,
Seapoint, Co Dublin.
