Sir, - Although it's hard to say exactly what Nuala O'Faolain is getting at (July 29th), it seems that she thinks Mrs Gallagher of Achill should be given the benefit of the doubt. "Messages between deity and person don't need an institution such as the Roman Catholic Church, because they don't need mediation," she says.
I exchanged my lapsed Roman Catholicism for relatively active Anglicanism at the age of 21, and I recall that Church approved apparitions, emphasis on the Virgin Mary, the ban on contraception and the marginalisation of the laity were major factors in my decision to strip away, as I see it, the accretions of centuries of superstition. The Church of Ireland is far from perfect but, for me, it has been a step in the right direction.
As a fairly detached observer I have read newspaper accounts of the Achill affair. It strikes me that whatever messages Mrs Gallagher claims to receive from Mary are strikingly doom laden. We are asked to repent, I gather, and I've no doubt that there's much we should atone for. However it would appear that Mrs Gallagher's Mary is not at all happy about our recent decision to introduce divorce and the fact that we have, at last, developed a grown up attitude to family planning. I suspect she is none too keen on women priests either, and I seem to recall that she believes that Maastricht has something to do with the Antichrist.
Now my notion of God may be vague (and developing) but I am quite certain that if such a being exists she or he (or both) would have a more positive view. The senior Irish churchman whom Nuala recalls asking a Medugorje "visionary" if unbaptised children go to heaven, must be a very sad case. Surely anybody who believes in a loving God can be in no doubt about the issue. (I wonder, incidentally, what answer he received.)
As a member of the Church of Ireland I am amazed at the cult of Mary, which seems to be based much more on tradition than Scripture, and rather saddened at how women are still marginalised in Roman Catholicism. They are not permitted to be ordained because Christ was a man, ergo women can't be priests. Shouldn't that be: Christ was human, ergo priests must be human?
Christianity is meant to be inclusive. Too often, the Christian churches and sects seem to define themselves by excluding people and I get the impression that Mrs Gallagher's "messages" are not exactly pluralist in tone.
Yours, etc.,
Belgrave Square,
Monkstown,
Co Dublin.