Letters should include a genuine postal or email address, phone number and the style or title of the writer. Email: [email protected]
Due to space constraints, please keep correspondence below 250 words, longer letters may be published online
SIR – Amid the clamour to condemn President Donald Trump for wanting to move the United States embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, thus recognising Israel’s claim since 1949 for Jerusalem to be its capital city, no one questions how absurd it is for all of these world embassies to be in Tel Aviv – as it is not Israel’s capital. That would be like insisting on having an embassy in Birmingham instead of London, or in Ireland’s case, in Limerick instead of Dublin.
The Palestinian Arabs (as Jews were “Palestinian” too before 1948) claim the Old City of Jerusalem as their “eternal” capital of a future Palestinian (Arab Muslim) state as if it was their divine right, when in fact there never existed an Arab Palestinian capital there, never mind an Arab Palestinian state.
The geographical area of biblical Israel, renamed “Palestine” by the Romans as a slur against the Jews after they forcibly ejected them in 135 AD, was occupied by various foreign forces, including the Turks, for 400 years until 1917. Then the British until 1947; and then Jordan illegally occupied East Jerusalem until 1967, when Israel miraculously won a war in six days with multiple Arabs armies arrayed against them. None of these governances were Arab Palestinian, but 3,000 years ago you have records of King David ruling Jerusalem as a Jewish city.
The Bible predicts that Jerusalem would be at the centre of the world’s attention with the solemn warning found in Zechariah 12:2: “Behold, I will make Jerusalem a cup of trembling unto all the people round about, when they lay siege against Judah and Jerusalem. And it shall happen in that day that I will make Jerusalem a burdensome stone for all people; all who would heave it away will be cut in pieces, though all nations of the earth are gathered against it.”
We could be living in the days of Armageddon.
Colin Nevin
Bangor, Co Down
SIR – I note that Jack Robbins’s letter (December 8) asking for “many more” married priests ignores Fr Hellyer’s powerful theological reasoning for celibacy (letter, November 24).
It seems that proponents for change aren’t interested in the deeper reasons for the Church’s unique vision of celibate love, dismissing it as merely a pragmatic discipline. St Peter’s mother-in-law is mentioned, but never his remark “what about us who have given up everything for you” (and where is his wife even named?)
There appears often to be a starry-eyed fixation on marriage as a solution to the present crisis. Who would not argue that marriage is a vital and beautiful vocation? But let’s not imagine it is somehow an easier, more manageable option, especially if we are to be faithful to Catholic teaching.
In our morally chaotic era of Hugh Hefner and Harvey Weinstein, where even devout teenagers are drawn into online pornography, a fresh witness of true love is desperately needed; that it is love – not sex – that fulfils us as human beings.
In fact, this truth is surely the one answer to all the hot-button issues of our time: Communion for the remarried; same-sex attraction and the challenge of contraception within marriage.
A bold and radical turning back to Jesus and the Gospel calls for a rediscovery of the unique and positive power of chaste love. In fact, we need the witness of priestly celibacy more now than ever.
Fr Chris Findlay-Wilson
Parishes of St Joseph and St Walburga and Our Lady of Fatima, Poole, Dorset
SIR – As one who for a long time taught English to trilingual students in Lebanon and has trilingual children and grandchildren, I warmly applaud Pope Francis’s appeal for youngsters to learn Latin. Centuries ago, students naturally spoke Latin and there were grammar classes to ensure that they wrote it well. But when I was at school (1931-1942) only the grammar remained. Without illustrated books, questions and answers and conversation, the study of Latin was tedious and useless. Teaching by translation made matters worse. No wonder Latin faded out of programmes.
Like the books teaching English as a foreign language, Latin books should have questions and answers based on illustrations. As the terms of grammar are much the same in Latin and most European languages, it would not be difficult to explain Latin grammar in Latin, thus at the same time giving practice in the language.
Translation should be taught only when the target language has been already mastered, when one can already think in it without effort. Teachers should give instructions (“Open the window, please … Open your books at page …”) in Latin.
I have seen leaflets from universities in Britain and America advertising summer courses for English for foreign students. These very leaflets were full of verbose bad English. Evidently the authors had not learnt Latin.
Kenneth Mortimer
By email
SIR – After Allan Massie on Muriel Spark’s novels (Chapter & Verse, November 17), and Fr Michael Murphy on her response to Newman (letter, November 24), nothing seems wanting. But Massie only notes that Spark saw herself as a poet. The universalising paradoxes in her novels are signs of a poet at work. In fact, her poet’s adventurousness has directly affected us all, every English-speaking Catholic.
The poems are singular, often hilarious and always disconcerting, of course – Spark is Spark. Some, like “Leaning Over an Old Wall”, are possessions to treasure; “The Ballad of the Fanfarlo” is the best known.
In a few, however, she translates Latin poetry, Horace and Catullus. Her constant challenge, as for other translators of Latin poetry, is to illuminate the essential poem within the mass of cultural allusions that sparkled for the ancient mind.
In these translations Muriel Spark experiments, trying to disentangle the unique message from now distracting allusions.
It is known that the 1975 liturgy in English owed its polished rhythms and phrasing to Muriel Spark. She loved the Knox Bible and attended to Knox’s warnings against translationese, faux amis and wrong traditional renderings. But there is no echo of Knox.
Spark the novelist had a wickedly fine ear for English usage. Spark the poet could feel each nuance of meaning. That pure English liturgy, free from alien syntax and idiom, must surely owe something to her adventurous poetic practice – and individual voice.
Tom McIntyre
Frome, Somerset
SIR – Reading John Barrie’s letter (November 24), concerning a TV reply to a question on Christian knowledge, I wonder if he saw a young man on a recent quiz show who, on being asked whose head was presented on a plate to King Herod, replied: “Err … Jesus’s?”
Prior to answering, he had rolled his eyes, shrugged and smirked – wearing his ignorance as a badge of honour.
Hillary Blake (Mrs)
Folkestone, Kent
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