Sir, Your correspondent Fintan O'Toole continues his campaign to misrepresent the Catholic Church, its structures, and particularly its bishops. One of the risks of this kind of approach to any subject is to forget the existence of that renowned hazard, the banana skin. And, of course, it is widely known that that particular hazard is all the more likely to be encountered on paths uncharted by the uninformed stroller, who does not even suspect what may be around the next corner.
Fintan, in his article in your issue of April 11th, has totally forgotten about the banana skin. It would bore your readers if I were to follow him down all the labyrinthine paths upon which he has chosen to stroll. Let me glance at just an exemplary few, all of which are, as far as I know, fairly liberally strewn with skins for the uninitiated.
The most obvious example is Mr O'Toole's failure to distinguish between impotence, which by its very nature does preclude marriage, and sterility which does not (as the current Code of Canon Law, in keeping with its legal tradition, expressly states in its Can. 1084 3).
To come closer to his own exposition, the picture is even more bleak. Blandly, he tells us "In 1944, for instance, the Church decreed that a man who had been forcibly sterilised by the Nazis should not be allowed to marry.
That is simply not true. From the very early years of the Nazi regime in fact, from 1935 and all through the following decades, in various replies by the Sacred Congregation of the (then) Holy Office, the Church said the very opposite. In fact, it is precisely that position which was encapsulated in the Roman decree of May 13th 1977 a decree which Fintan O'Toole caricatures by saying that "until 1977 the Catholic Church officially refused to marry any man who could not produce `real semen' in other words, seminal fluid containing sperm."
I pass over the jibes in which Mr O'Toole's article abounds, and even over the fact that having, as he tells us himself, "suffered" a vasectomy, he would appear to claim to be in some way an authority on this matter. But I do have to say to him that there still are paths which even angels fear to tread and, as he possibly knows, their knowledge of banana skins is almost infinite.
If he wishes to continue his diatribe against the Catholic Church he really must try to get all his facts right. As Mr O'Toole himself reminds us, notions that were thought up yesterday (or perhaps on Thursday of last week?) are quite likely to be nonsense. Yours, etc.,
Dublin Regional Marriage Tribunal, Diocesan Offices, Archbishop's House, Dublin 9.