Sir, - Rev Dominic Johnson, OSB (November 4th) tells of his righteous, iconoclastic tearing-up of the photograph of himself and the former President, Mary Robinson, as a protest against her viewpoint, quoted from her authorised biography, regarding the right to the availability of abortion "in limited circumstances". He leaves no doubt as to his views on the impermissibility of abortion under any circumstances whatsoever. In this he is at one with the teaching of Rome regarding abortion. This has it that all zygotes/embryos/foetuses are "human beings with the basic human right to life". Where then does that leave an ectopic pregnancy? I have never heard the Roman Catholic view expressed that surgical termination of such an unfortunate pregnancy is illicit.
What, then, of Fr Johnson's religious forebears, when they authorised and encouraged the Crusades, the public torture and burning alive of "heretics and Jews", when they condemned Galileo for questioning the geocentric doctrine of the universe? Where were the voices of dissent against the anti-Semitism practised and encouraged for so long by Rome, and only now receiving a belated apology?
Rome got it wrong in all these matters. Could it be that Rome - and Dominic Johnson, OSB - might conceivably have it wrong also in this? Authoritarian and dogmatic absolutism over the millennia has been the cause of untold human suffering. Perhaps it's time to reconsider. - Yours, etc., David Grant,
Mount Pleasant,
Waterford.