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Madam, – Patrick J Pyne (July 2nd) believes that the Civil Partnership Bill is a symptom of a decaying society and that “discrimination”, “equality”, and “human rights” are merely “shallow nonsense” To support this he quotes one Archbishop Fulton J Sheen writing about 50 years ago. The archbishop writes: “It is a characteristic of any decaying civilisation that the great masses of the people are unaware of the tragedy. Humanity in a crisis is generally insensitive to the gravity of the times in which it lives. Men do not want to believe their own times are wicked, partly because they have no standard outside of themselves by which to measure their times.”