From Henri L du Plessis, Cape Town
I refer to your editorial of January 23. I never read websites so I am, I believe, approaching you without prejudice, as it were.
Yet I feel obliged to thank you sincerely for what I consider to be a very timely and elegantly written plea for civilised, especially Christian, attitudes when responding to criticism, whether directed at priests, churchgoers or churches, or at the way and manner in which the holy message is brought.
By the very nature of your Church, after a long period of triumph and failure as well as rapidly changing insights of the people it served over the ages, it is open to attack. Rather that, Sir, than being merely ignored.
This is what worries me.
I am convinced that should the Catholic Church as leader and other Christian churches of note continue bringing the unadulterated message of Jesus Christ, they will prevail.
But they must also be acceptable and socially active within society, although they need not conform to the negative.
For instance, I believe that Catholics should actively consider discarding all the vestments presently worn by the pope and bishops and others, clothing which appears to non-Catholics as (I’m sorry!) weird circus dress.
Why not urgently, for the love of Christ, the Church and its people, dress the pope, bishops, nuns and others in well-cut business-like suits, even sometimes in informal or sports clothes?
Why not abandon strange hand signals and overly timid voices, so that the message of Jesus Christ can be taken seriously?
Kindly accept this plea for the modernisation of the greatest Church of all time for better and more effective evangelisation so urgently needed in what is presently such a lost world!
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