Madam, - Any pro-life groups intending to complain to the Vatican about Cura are missing the point.
The real question is not whether Cura has the right to the title of being a "Catholic" agency, but rather whether the Crisis Pregnancy Agency should have the right effectively to force an agency it funds (with public money) to act against its ethos in giving out details of other agencies which regard abortion as just another "pregnancy option".
This situation also raises the question of what precisely the Crisis Pregnancy Agency's remit should be.
It would seem to many at the moment that the CPA is essentially a pro-choice agency receiving public money from a nominally pro-life Government and using it to coerce pro-life pregnancy advice agencies.
It would be much more in keeping with a pro-life ethos (to which, I believe, many in Fianna Fáil still subscribe) for the CPA to provide funding only to agencies which provide advice on alternatives to abortion.
If other organisations wish to provide information on abortion, they have a constitutional right to do so, but they should not be funded with public money.
Finally, for those pro-life people who wish to press this issue, may I suggest it would be more profitable to direct their protestations to St Luke's in Dublin rather than St Peter's in Rome. - Yours, etc,
D.J. MOORE, Green Road, Carlow.
Madam, - The Pope Benedict XVI era has been very quickly unveiled by the Archbishop of Dublin, Dr Diarmuid Martin. I refer to his request for more detailed information on the policy of the Catholic Church's crisis pregnancy counselling agency, Cura, to be provided at the next meeting of the Irish Catholic Bishops' conference next June. (The Irish Times, May 9th).
It seems that Cura is being subjected to the Grand Inquisition not because it promotes abortion but because it has adopted a pragmatic approach to the situation facing very many Irish women who find themselves with a crisis pregnancy. It is obvious the Catholic agency was not promoting abortion but in a very effective way was now reaching out to all women in a crisis pregnancy situation, not just Catholics.
In Germany last year the Pope, in his former role as "grand enforcer", made the German hierarchy bow under in a similar situation. It is time that Catholics who want their faith to be a dynamic force in this century and who want no part in this rearguard action unleashed by people who want to be seen as more doctrinally pure than the Holy Office to assert their role and voice within the Church.
I hope Cura will not allow itself to be sacrificed at the altar of a theology which is entrenched in neo-scholasticism and which judges the non-Catholic world as suspect and downright dangerous. - Yours, etc,
BRENDAN BUTLER, Swords, Co Dublin.