Threatened Christians
Sir: Douglas Davis’s article on the plight of Arab Christians (‘Out of the east’, 7 April) raised a very important issue. What a shame he cynically exploited their misery to perform a clumsy character assassination on Muslims generally. Conjuring sensational phrases like ‘judenrein’ to raise the spectre of 1930s German fascism, was not only utterly irrelevant; it reminded the reader of Mr Davis’s highly partial agenda.
He doesn’t mention, for instance, that the Syrian Christian community’s plight is bound up with their perceived tactical support for the repressive Assad regime. It’s indisputably tragic, but it is not black and white. Secondly, last time I was in the West Bank, it was not the Muslims who were making life deliberately untenable for the ancient Christian communities around Bethlehem, but Mr Davis’s former readership up the road in Jerusalem. At that time the village I visited was being rendered non-viable by Israeli wire fences that girdled and bisected it. And Palestinians do lots of nasty things too, we know.
Guy Harris
East Sussex
Sir: The closer to the neoconservatives a Muslim country is, the more it persecutes its Christians. Look at Pakistan, or, insofar as there are any Christians there, Saudi Arabia. Look also at Turkey, founded on the bloody mass expulsion of huge numbers of Christians.
Iran, on the other hand, has reserved parliamentary representation for two ancient Christian communities, the Armenians and the Assyrians, as well as for Zoroastrians and Jews.
David Lindsay
County Durham
The trouble with Zimbabwe
Sir: Matthew Parris (7 April) claims that ‘Zimbabwe will all come right and … neither the country nor its people are on their knees’. This may be true as far as it goes. But it is not the whole story. Zimbabwe may look peaceful on the surface and may be a fine place for a holiday but it’s still a vicious police state and the people are ruled by fear of summary arrest and brutality.
Although in time there may be a brave new world for the young — and we can hope that some of the four million mainly young Zimbabweans who have left the country may in time return — it’s of course far too late for the very old. The debauched currency has indeed given way to the SA rand and the US dollar, and the shops are full of goods, but the ruined pensioners served by ZANE: Zimbabwe A National Emergency right across the community live outside the economy and will never recover. They have been rendered wholly destitute by the theft of their assets, savings and pensions from inflation and they cannot afford to buy anything on offer.
Tom Benyon
Director, ZANE (Zimbabwe A National Emergency), Bladon, Oxfordshire
Claims to Catholicity
Sir: I can only assume that Professor Ward decided to sacrifice accuracy for the sake of brevity in his article in which he claimed to unearth three ‘forgotten truths’ about the Church of England (‘Lost faith’, 31 March).
The first of these is that our national church is Protestant. On this, we must all agree, though only in the limited historical sense that we are not Roman Catholic. To argue, as Ward does, that this entails self-exclusion from the Catholic Church as a whole contradicts not only the most unabashedly Protestant of Anglican divines, but even the Prayer Book itself: there one will struggle to find the ‘P’-word printed, but every act of worship therein enjoins the faithful to proclaim their belief in the ‘Holy Catholic Church’.
Ward argues that the (relatively recent) Roman Catholic denunciation of Anglican orders makes any Anglican claim to Catholicity delusional. A Roman Catholic may concur, but Ward is an Anglican. So his own Prayer Book’s service of ordination of priests and bishops to orders in the one ‘Church of God’ surely make his position rather difficult. If Ward’s own church’s doctrine does not satisfy him that a Protestant church may claim to be no less Catholic for it, perhaps some words of the Calvinist Karl Barth may: we are ‘Protestant insofar as we protest for the Catholic Church, not against it.’
Thomas Plant
Selwyn College, University of Cambridge
Sir: Keith Ward wrote what I wish I had been capable of articulating. But I think he errs in not valuing the importance of ritual. It is the ritual in religion, the repetition, the sameness, something that is always there, unchanging, that promotes healing of the soul, comfort, solace and peace. We need this anchor in a turbulent world, as our forefathers understood well.
Pam Maybury
Bath
Age-related injuries
Sir: Round one to Daniel Knowles and youth (‘Battle of the generations’, 31 March). Carol Sarler, for the baby-boomers, barely laid a glove on him. But ‘intergenerational fairness’ is not about blame and recrimination, and pitting one generation against the other. It’s about insisting that policy makers, when they cannot count on generating future resources, never again resort to mortgaging the future and future taxpayers for short-term advantage, by taking on badly negotiated PFIs, a massive university loan book, overgenerous public sector pensions, and an unsustainable national debt.
Antony Mason
The Intergenerational Foundation, London SE24
Young drunk
Sir: Francis Church (Letters, 7 April), taking exception to Toby Young writing about drunkenness, wonders if he is ‘a prig’. I’m afraid he is. No other word for it.
T.E.Hinde
Hants
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