MY dear Pat Walker, your letter (CL 11/11/12) has made my day.
Years and years of letter writing to papers and in club newsletters have taught me that it’s like shouting into a void – no echo, no response.
The greatest hurt anybody can inflict on any writer is not to read his or her work.
Approval or otherwise of the writing contents is a distant second consideration.
So, Pat, thanks for your letter.
It’s so consoling to know that out there, for certain, there is one reader among all the thousand readers of the letters page in The Leader, who could be bothered to read my words let alone make the effort to write a comment.
I am even more grateful for your very kind opinion of me – “if I met you … I would see Jesus in your face”.
Alas when I showed my one, and only one, wife of 45 years, a picture of Jesus’ face and said “Pat Walker reckons that’s my face” she just couldn’t stop laughing.
Now to the more serious side – what I was arguing in my letter of October 28 is really beyond Vatican II, beyond half-full, half-empty glasses or wine vintage symbolism.
It is the intellectual and theological impotence of today’s Christianity, against the humanistic world view that powers secularism.
This humanism, supposedly based on science and reason, postulates that there are no rules of good and evil that humanity itself has not decreed, that there are no such things as divine or natural behavioural norms, and that it is mankind itself “who possesses legitimate and unlimited power to shape these norms” as it sees fit.
Such an outlook is just not compatible with anything that the Church has ever taught.
Humanism is now the creed of today’s elites in our western democracies.
Even some Christians are infected with it.
Aquinas I did not have to face such issues.
Hence my plea for Aquinas II.
GEORGE SZYLKARSKI
Graceville, Qld
