I WAS SHOCKED to hear Fr Gerry Ennis, appointed to run the Westminster AIDS Centre, say on television that the Centre will counsel those with the HIV virus who insist on having sexual relations to use a condom as the "lesser of two evils". In 1988, Cardinal Angelini, president of the Pontifical Council for Health Care, wrote to me that "the only legitimate course in such circumstances is abstinence."
KP Platt Sanderstead, Surrey
WE ARE SO LUCKY to have had a Bede Griffiths in our lifetime. His scholarship, experience of the East, and his capacity to write, are a rare combination... It seemed to me that not only is he the key that can open so many doors for us Westerners into the riches of God's gifts to the mystics of the East... he also opened the Eastern mind to the West.
Andrew McMahon OFM Wickham Fare/tam
THE QUESTION FOR our time: will our beloved Catholic bishops be expected to take their places beside their Anglican counterparts in the House of Lords? y Missett
Liverpool
I CAN'T IMAGINE why Alice Thomas Ellis (Catholic Herald, 18 February) thinks "you can't go around denigrating people and then expect them to marry you". Men have been doing it for centuries. y E Howard
Bedford
ALICE THOMAS ELLIS IS a great asset to the paper always entertaining, and often very much to the point in her ridicule of the trendy. I read her column first!
G M A Beck Guildford, Surrey
DOES ETERNAL damnation
make Christianity unacceptable? To Bishop Jenkins, eternal damnation is incompatible with a God of love. Certainly Jesus uses language to suggest eternal punishment for unrepentant violators of love. Yet I believe Jesus uses hyperbolic language to show the enormity of the offence o rejecting the all-loving God, and also to urge humans to repent. In 2 Peter, it is stated: "It is not his will that any are lost, but that all should come to repentance. Andrew Harvey Duranhill