Inviting criticism

THE unprecedented and unconstitutional intervention of the Moderator of the Church of Scotland inviting the Pope to visit Scotland, demonstrates that the Church which he represents is no longer a Protestant Church (your report, 16 February).

Far from speaking for all Scots, and certainly not speaking for Protestants in Scotland, John Chalmers represents a clerical class that courts political ­correctness as ardently as it has been abandoning constitutional securities for the Protestant and ­Presbyterian Church he claims to act for.

To an admittedly diminishing number of Scotland’s most loyal and patriotic Protestants, the Pope of Rome is not welcome in this country, either in a regal or pastoral capacity.

His office and organisation has no legitimacy in our national constitution or in scripture.

The formal creed of John Chalmers’ Church, and that of nearly every Presbyterian Church in the English-speaking world, identifies the Pope as “that Antichrist, that man of sin, and son of perdition, that exalteth himself, in the Church against Christ and all that is called God”.

The many Roman Catholics in Scotland who have suffered at the hands of an unscrupulous priesthood, deserve our sympathy. Some Protestants still offer them the benefits of Reformation from a system of spiritual and moral bankruptcy.

(Rev) David Campbell

Barnton Avenue West

Edinburgh

THE national Kirk Moderator, the Rt Rev John Chalmers, has met…wait for it… the Pope of Rome. In meeting the so-called Supreme Pontiff of the Roman Catholic Church, he seems to have forgotten the history of the Scottish Reformation and the darkness from which this country was mercifully delivered, under the hand of God, in 1560 – and shame on him.

It is a travesty for the Moderator to be visiting the Vatican and meeting an elderly, white gowned man, who claims to be God’s messenger and mediator on Earth, while at the same time maintaining that the teachings of the Church he leads are far more superior and loftier to those recorded in God’s own infallible and inerrant Word of truth.

Donald J Morrison

Old Edinburgh Road

Inverness

I TRUST that, in bidding each other farewell, the Moderator and the Pope recalled the example of Dr Archibald Craig and Pope John XXIII in 1961, when supposedly His Holiness laid a hand on Dr Craig’s shoulder, saying “Arrivederci, Erchie”, to which Dr Craig responded “Ca’ canny, Giovanni”!

John Birkett

Horseleys Park

St Andrews, Fife