Letters

Spectator, The, Oct 21, 2000

Life starts at conception From Mr M.G. Sherlock

Sir: In 'A tale of two Churches' (14 October) Melanie Phillips tries to explain away the Catholic position on abortion as a misinterpretation of Old Testament texts.

If, in fact, the Church, or others opposed to abortion (they are not all Catholics, or even Christians), based their position on ancient religious writings, they might not find much support there. The mediaeval theologian Thomas Aquinas ruled that terminating a pregnancy before the 40th day was not a serious sin, as ensoulment had not yet occurred.

How he reached that conclusion is unclear. But it does not matter. We can argue about the existence or otherwise of the soul, but in the face of modern embryology and ultrasound techniques we cannot deny the presence of a body, however small and rudimentary. If that is destroyed, a life is gone; a life that might have lasted for the best part of a century. Life starts at conception and ends at (natural) death; sabotage of it at any stage between those two points is killing. Everyone knows this, though those of a 'liberal' abortion stance skate uneasily round it.

The Catholic Church continues to be in the forefront of opposition to legalised abortion. But the issue is less one of religious dogma than of plain logic.

M.G. Sherlock

London SW1

From Mr Charles FitzGerald

Sir: Melanie Phillips, with respect, seems ignorant of this country's history. The title so proudly claimed by every English monarch since Henry VIII (if, perhaps, to be relinquished by the next in line) is Fidei Defensor or Defender of the Faith. Not, let it be noted, defender of the `Protestant Faith' as she claims, but actually of the Catholic Faith or Church Universal itself. It was, after all, a pope who bestowed it on the present Queen's predecessor. A paradox, no doubt, but then so much of human existence is best explained in paradox.

Cardinal Ratzinger (with the Pope's blessing, incidentally) has set out to clarify Rome's position with regard to the holding of Christian religious truth and authority. Either you believe in the apostolic succession and the sacramental nature and function of the Church, or you do not. The `blessed vapidities' of modern Anglicanism can, I fear, no longer be a refuge for the orthodox Jew in this country precisely because, as Melanie Phillips has recognised, they are indeed but 'vapidities'; and nobody's faith can be sustained for long on vapour.

Charles FitzGerald

Forton, Hampshire

Rhyme and unreason

From Mr Philip Hensher

Sir: Much as one admires Michael Horovitz for not only reading and remembering a lot of aimless free verse about apple trees (Letters, 14 October), but also actually claiming to like the stuff, he's on to a bit of a loser enlisting the illustrious ancients to his cause. If he thinks that Beowulf is written in a free metre, he can't possibly have read it. The Psalms and Whitman's Leaves of Grass aren't free verse, any more than Blake's Jerusalem is. Milton disapproved of rhyme, but nothing could be more strictly metrical than his verse. Keats wasn't arguing for vers libre when he recommended the appearance of spontaneity. And Maya Angelou isn't a `universally acknowledged "true voice of feeling"'; she is a harmless whitterer who never wrote a decent poem.

Anyone who has taught literature will have grown used to pupils claiming that anything which doesn't rhyme - a Horatian ode by Auden, Paradise Lost or a passage of Shakespearean blank verse - amounts to free verse, but I'd never thought to hear the proposition from a poet. Nothing in Horovitz's letter would be worth commenting on otherwise, and you have to ask: if he can't hear the metre in Ted Hughes, what is stopping him putting down any old rubbish and calling it poetry?

Philip Hensher

London SW8

Briefs encounter From Susan Crosland

Sir: In her as usual entertaining column (Singular life, 14 October), Petronella Wyatt (or was it Alan Clark?) ranked Porfirio Rubirosa as number one great lover. My acquaintance with him consisted of an interview for John Junor's Sunday Express - plus several subsequent telephone calls he made to my home. The interview was conducted over lunch in his room at the Savoy. At its completion I retired to his bathroom to freshen up. On emerging I encountered a grinning Mr Rubirosa in his boxer shorts, through which stood a donkey-style member. He threw me on to his unmade bed and a wrestling match ensued as this grotesque thing swung about. Being a self-reliant American, I extracted myself unscathed, picked up my notes and made my departure. Adding to the absurdity was the neat little P.R. embroidered on his underpants.

Susan Crosland

London SW7

Untruths about the US

From Mr Tim Mitchell

Sir: Peter Hitchens's article (`Land of the free, home of the British', 23 September) is absolute tosh and I deeply resent any of my subscription movies being used to pay him for it. As a Brit living in the USA, I can assure him that we do indeed have both one-- and two-dollar coins in circulation, despite his statement that the dollar bill `has yet to be replaced with a pocket-destroying coin'.