Sir, – The responses (May 19th) to Fr Tom Kelleher would leave readers with a very inaccurate view of the man and his beliefs. I am not a parishioner in Ballinspittle but spend some time there each summer and have come to admire his faithfulness to his priestly vocation as well as his compassion and empathy for all his flock. Fr Kelleher is a “true servant” to his parishioners,travelling between two churches on a daily basis to administer the sacraments. For a man well into his 80s, his stamina is remarkable.
While his opinion(May 18th) is strongly articulated, nevertheless there is some inescapable truth within it. In his 1983 Templeton Prize lecture Alexander Solzhenitsyn tried to locate the root of the evils of the 20th century. What, he wondered, accounted for the fact that a century bright with expectation had, by its mid-point, produced two world wars, three totalitarian regimes, a Cold War that threatened catastrophe on a planetary scale, oceans of blood and mountains of corpses?
There were obviously many many factors at work, but beneath them all Solzhenitsyn discerned a profound truth “Men have forgotten God”. – Yours, etc,