catholicweekly.com.au 17 26, April, 2020 E ditorial & letters Dorin’s World Send your letters to:
[email protected] By the post: The Editor, Level 13, 133 Liverpool St, Sydney NSW 2000 AUSTRALIA Learn from St Therese on missing Mass, Communion I am encouraged by the article; When Obedience can save lives” ( Catho- lic Weekly 19 April), regarding the Church’s decision to not allow Catholics to attend Mass and Communion while the Coronavirus continues. It’s hard to not be able to receive Our Lord in the sacrament of Holy Com- munion at this time, but we can receive peace and consolation in the knowledge that God’s grace is always available as ‘nothing is impossible for God’ (Lk.1:37), and as the Catechism says; ‘God…is not bound by his sacraments.’ (CCC.1257). So let us be encouraged by the faith and example of St Therese of Lisieux who because of sickness, could not receive Our Lord in Holy Communion. She said: “No doubt, it is a great grace to receive the sacraments, when God does not permit it, it is good too. Everything is a grace!” Mark Nicholas Cherrybrook NSW Persecution by confusing Christian faith, teaching I n its newsletter of March 2020, Aid to the Church in Need reports on the watering down of Catholic Faith in South America. The article reports on a particular form of persecution making Catholic teaching unrecognisable. The Soviets used this method, and the Com- munists in China continue to do so. In Latin America, left wing authoritar- ian regimes are also seeking to wrest the “cultural hegemony” to themselves. In Nicaragua the regime is attempting to do this through a false, New Age ideology. The personal relationship with God promoted by Christianity is set against an impersonal and pseudo-scientific alter- native religion. Beneath the camouflage of seemingly Christian ideals, it presents itself as close to the indigenous peoples and their traditions and is aggressively promoted by the state-runmedia and so- cial networks. In Australia, radical politicians and fake catholic correspondents promote thoroughly anti-Christian policies, by starting confusing the teaching of Christ with Marxism. Robert Bom West Rockhampton QLD After farce of a trial, at least one winner is the law I t’s more than a conundrum that the first bishop of 5500 bishops in the Catholic Church worldwide recog- nised not only that children were being abused but, being Archbishop Pell he acted. Abuse ceased and he organised a scheme for the victims of historical abuse to receive compensation via the Melbourne Response. Despite this, he did not receive the fair hearing he voluntarily came back to Aus- tralia to face. Instead, he was jailed after a farce of a trial. It has undoubtedly been a long hard road for him. But at least there was one winner: Australian Law. Irene Shanks, Mareeba, QLD Thanks all round to Catholic Weekly and Channel 7 T hank you Catholic Weekly for con- tinuing to publish each week and making it available free online. It’s wonderful to be able to continue to read the paper each week. Thanks also to Archbishop Anthony and all those who made it possible, for the most wonderful Good Friday liturgy and Easter Sunday Mass televised on Channel 7, and for the other live streamed services. In these dark times it provided a glori- ous ray of hope, connecting us all togeth- er. I personally found it all greatly uplift- ing, especially the Archbishop’s homilies. I was so proud of our church - there on display for the whole country to see. God bless all involved for keeping the faith shining bright. Mark Wilson Woolwich NSW Catholic Weekly’s shoddy reporting on Cardinal I refer to The Catholic Weekly article by Fr Frank Brennan, ‘Cardinal Pell and the Victorian Criminal Justice system’ (20 April). Fr Brennan, (and others in the media) detail how the ac- cuser is sincere and has suffered greatly throughout. Fr Brennan goes on to explain in great detail the dire state of the Victorian Jus- tice system. What is disappointing is that alongside all this, the feelings of the central character receive only a passing mention. So, just to mention what the article omitted; we are talking about Cardinal Pell, an elderly man who spent over 400 days in a cell, falsely accused, his repu- tation now in shreds, and his life now at risk. The last two years have been at times, a misery for Catholics. We have witnessed the poorest journalism, and though this is not the worst example, The Catholic Weekly could do better. DMcIntyre Bowral NSW When some count more than others O ne of the interesting aspects to the coronavirus pandemic is the crevasses it has exposed in Aus- tralian society. This week a Perth grandmoth- er discovered what it feels like to fall into one of those crevasses. As reported on Page 1 of this edition, a woman who had recently returned from an overseas cruise found that she had contracted coronavirus. On admission to Sir Charles Gairdner Hospital in the leafy suburb of Ned- lands, she reports, she was asked if she wanted a ‘do not re- suscitate’ instruction placed on her medical records should her condition worsen. She declined. After recovering, however, shewas shocked to find her discharge papers recording the opposite: that she had told admitting staff she did not want resuscitation measures should her condition become life-threatening. It may - perhaps - have been an horrible error, an honest mistake. But the circumstantial evidence invites scepticism. Admission details in hospitals are meticulously compiled. They have to be. They have to record information such as allergies and existing medical conditions which are vital to the treatment of an individual. Getting even one small piece of information wrong - a blood type, a condition such as diabetes, a reaction to a particular antibiotic, for example - can mean all the difference between life and death for a pa- tient. Over decades, hospitals and healthcare systems have ironed out meticulous approaches to the collection of such information precisely because of the accidental tragedies that have occurred. What arouses suspicion is Charles Gairdner’s carefully calibrated response (undoubtedly prepared by an expe- rienced practitioner of public relations) which seems stu- diously nonchalant once the news is in the public sphere: “The clinician documented that Ms Lewis was accepting of the proposed course of action, when she may not have been at the time,” the hospital said in a statement. ‘May not’? Mrs Lewis is quite explicit about what she said to admitting staff. She would know. Telling someone whether you want life-saving treatment is not something one tends to forget that easily. Yet the best the hospital’s ad- ministrators and communications staff can do is to blandly state that “she may not have” communicated her desire for someone to save her life. The hospital’s statement is disin- genuous, bordering on deceitful. On close analysis, meanwhile, the admission is shocking, not just for what it appears to reveal - that a staff member falsified information on the basis of a patient’s age - but the subsequent attempt by the hospital’s administration to bat away what really happened as nothing particularly remark- able. Yet at it’s most essential, the hospital’s statement is analogous to someone saying something such as ‘well, the individual said she didn’t want to die - but we decided it would be the best thing to do.’ Advocates for the disabled and for life have rightly seized on what is so terribly wrong with Charles Gairdner’s appar- ently disingenuous response: technicians (which is really all that doctors are) arbitrarily exercising the power of life and death over an individual - without regard for their wishes. It is no accident that both the bishops’ conferences of England and Wales and of Mexico (see reports on Page 15) , alert to the dangers and the growing budget-driven and utilitarian mentality in modern healthcare systems have warned precisely against categorising patients on the basis of factors such as age and disability. On the other side of the world to Perth, coincidentally, the Dutch Supreme Court has this week, legitimised the euthanasia of patients with dementia (see report Page 24) . The trends which see a Perth grandmother medically relegated to having no further use- ful contribution to make to society and, indeed, being re- garded by healthcare administrators as nothing more than human burdens on their budgets, are becoming even more entrenched. Specifically, the problem can be diagnosed as a growing practice inmedical administration of a new brutal- ism: that some individuals do not count morally as much as others. This attitude is driven by the degringolade of moral consensus in modern societies driven (usually) by things such as sentiment, myth, access to material wealth and budget pressures. Some human beings count more than others. If Mrs Lewis had been a young glamorous movie star, or super model she could well have been treated very differently by Charles Gairdner - as someone who counts. What she experienced instead is the sharp end of a gener- al trend over decades: rejecting the spiritual and moral as having any sustaining importance or value to the life of the nation has real, deadly consequences. This invisible little vi- rus is revealing much. LETTERS