A109 Light Utility Helicopter flight with mayor Gisborne City from the air in November 2023.
Opinion
Re: ‘Murder’ never acceptable, July 5 letter.
I read Ken Orr’s comment of July 19 on exactly the same day as I read the article “Missing the bus” in La Croix International.
Written by theologian Fr Eric Hodgens, who serves as a senior priest in the Archdiocese of Melbourne, I
see that his viewpoint is almost diametrically opposed to that of Mr Orr on the matter of assisted dying. Fr Hodgens accepts its (sad) necessity, as do many mainstream Catholics.
He explains that the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965) was supposed to regenerate the Catholic church into a gentler form of itself — humanist and understanding instead of dictatorial and driven by dogma. But that didn’t happen. Instead, the Vatican was seized upon by “Restorationists” who doubled down even more severely on the laity and drove even more adherents away from the church as a consequence.
The Catholic church is in “freefall”, he says. It has become irrelevant to the lives of people.
