Madam, - There is something attractive in the view expressed by Pádraig Ua Corbaidh that we should simply believe as our forefathers believed "because the truth does not change" (June 15th). But what is the nature of this unchanging "truth"?
Surely it is of supreme importance to distinguish the eternal truths about God and His dealings with humankind from those ideas which seem at one time to be truths but which, centuries later, as a more enlightened and Christ-like understanding of the divine being emerges, are seen to be errors or at best half-truths.
For example, those who perpetrated the horrors of the Inquisition instituted by Pope Gregory IX in 1233 - and for which the present Pope recently asked forgiveness - no doubt did so in the sincere but mistaken belief that in so doing they were acting "in the service of truth".
On the other side of the denominational fence, in 1649 a group of leading Protestant clergy and scholars drew up a confession of faith - later to become the doctrinal statements of the Church of Scotland and the Presbyterian Church in Ireland - which, incredible as it sounds to us, included a sentence referring to the Pope as "that anti-Christ".
It was not until its 1988 meeting that the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland resolved that such an absurd travesty of the truth was not scriptural.
We do well to focus on those unchanging core truths of the Christian faith (as summarised in the Apostles Creed) which unite the three main branches of Christ's Church on earth - Roman Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox - in the one family of God.- Yours, etc.,
Dr D. BROWNLIE, Moyne Park, Belfast.