Less of a crisis

Professor Tom Devine is being disingenuous in his article (Perspective, 12 March). He was widely quoted on 26 February as saying, “This is probably the gravest single public crisis to hit the Catholic Church in Scotland since the Reformation and its ­effects in the short term are ­incalculable.”

Now he has significantly changed that over-reaction by replacing “public crisis” with ­“internal crisis”.

More damaging to Roman Catholicism in Scotland than the Keith O’Brien ­affair will ever be were surely the Act of Settlement of 1690 which established the Presbyterian Church, the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species in 1859 which undermined the Church’s authority here and elsewhere, the success of Billy Graham’s evangelistic crusades in Glasgow in 1955, the sudden availability of birth control pills in the 1960s, Richard Dawkins’ recent personal promotion of atheism and the disproportionate influence of current homosexual political ideology. One man’s sins do not compare.

(REV DR) ROBERT ANDERSON

Blackburn