Let's have an ecumenical movement in the Church

IS it not time that we started an ecumenical movement within the Roman Catholic Church? I ask this because some of the readers whose letters you publish display an extraordinary unwillingness to give charitable and attentive hearing to Catholics with whom they happen to disagree. Let me give you an example. I recently contributed to your columns an article on the Catholic Church in Holland. In this I said that the avant garde movement there seemed to me to be "shot through with faith. hope and charity"; but at the same time I described the bewilderment the movement was causing among traditionalists.
I made no judgments at all, but commended the Dutch Church. in the person of the Bishop of Haarlem, to the prayers of your readers.
One of your correspondents, Peggy Thomas, wrote (March 28) that it was "utterly indefensible" that you should have published "such prejudiced. irresponsible and sensationalised reporting." Indeed, she began her letter with the words: "So once again the ghost of Dutch Catholicism rears its head the CATHOLIC HERALD —as though Dutch Catholicism Were so sacred that it was blasphemy even to name it.
My "inaccuracies," as she terms them, do not, in actual fact amount to much. 1 said that auricular confession was dying out in Holland, to which she replies that it is dying out in England too. (It is, but not so fast.) She asks whether it is wrong to learn a new set of categories if it leads to a better understanding of the Christian faith. I never said it was.
I reported that in the Amsterdam students' chapel there were "none of the normal symbols of Catholic piety," whereupon she asks me whether I like "hideous sugary statues." I don't.
As for my statement about the falling off in church attendance, it was based on official figures and not on chance visits to churches in The Hague, Utrecht and Zeeland.
But these are rather boring debating points. What worries me is Peggy's personalisation of the whole issue — "Oh, come, Mr. Brown," and so on. Can't we discuss these matters on a more fruitful level? I should like to hear from Peggy a sober account of what she finds valuable in the avant garde movement in Holland. I realise that it is very dear to her, but there are certain things about it that she would need to explain to an outsider like me.
If she would lower her voice, 1 should listen to her with respectful attention.
Douglas Brown London, S.E.3.
AY I compliment Mr. Douglas Brown on his article of March 14 on Dutch Catholicism? It gives a really objective picture of the sad situation in our country—so sad that very many Catholics are terribly unhappy and upset about it.
The things Mr. Brown did not see right are almost negligible. Hassocks have not been removed from most churches but from several churches. Religious controversy among Catholics is not altogether free from bitterness: Mr. Brown does not seem to have seen Confrontarie and the publications of the Legion of St. Michael.
Does he know that the media of publicity are almost entirely in the hands of what I should like to call the NeoModernists? Does he realise that everybody avoids the word schism but that there is a gulf so deep that it is more than a schism?
Frans Van Rynland (Dr.) Voorburg, Holland.