Madam, - The question is not, as Ian Kennedy (September 2nd) would have Rome answer, whether the Evangelist "got it wrong" about Our Lady's perpetual virginity in St Matthew, 1:25, but whether all those who read his Gospel for the first millennium and a half of the Christian era "got it wrong" believing in that virginity all the while; indeed, whether Mr Kennedy's rather obvious misinterpretation has never occurred before to any of us who continue to believe in that virginity.
In the semitic usage of the Bible, of course, "until" often means simply "before" with no implicit reference to anything that did or did not come afterwards, just as "first-born" was also, with a charming, if tribal, optimism, once the Jewish way of saying "only child".
We can hardly expect Scripture to spell everything out for us in contemporary terms, especially parallel terms only subsequently found precisely to explicate its original meaning. The New Testament, after all, was written by the Catholic Church. It is really up to her to tell us what she meant. - Yours, etc.,
Rev Fr DAVID O'HANLON, Kentstown, Co Meath.