an open letter to father cyril lovett editor of far east magazine

Hey Cyril.

I came across the June edition of Far East magazine which you edited.

It had moments.
Some good. Some bad.

I'm glad you've retained the old Pudsy Ryan children's column which I remember from my own childhood. The idea still has merit and could legitimately return to its former full page glory. Pudsy is a Just William type character and this should be brought out more.

Emphasise the humour.

Let your writer have fun with it.

The educational angle, where readers can correct Pudsy's spelling, enthuses me no end.
I'm a sucker for the classics.

Adults as well as children would enjoy submitting corrected versions of Pudsy's misspelled stories as a competition.

I also liked the article by Sister Anne Carbon about a mental health centre she's running in Peru.

I would have been interested to know whether she was having any success with methods of healing involving God, counselling, befriending, music, nature, holidays in spectacular locations (nobody can tell me they're depressed until they've seen Rome), flights in helicopters (seeing the world in such a new way is potentially much more liberating than invasive surgeries such as electro shock therapy or lobotomy) and an appeal to the freedom of the patient to choose to be well.

I couldn't help wondering whether in the third world as in the first world, corrupt pharmaceutical companies are simply moving in on mental health facilities with offers of sponsorship in order to control them and thereby effectively prevent any alternative health strategies emerging, ie alternative strategies to giving billions of dollars to pharmaceutical companies so that they can drug patients out of their minds in perpetuity.

I suspect all healing depends on the patient somehow facing whatever his mind is telling him.

This would mean experiencing your mind in sleep without the obfuscatory effect of drugs in your system.

There must be no chamber of the mind we fear to go into.

We are made to be well.

All healing begins with acceptance of self.

I am postulating that when you're drugged you can't begin to experience yourself as you are.

Anyhoo.

It was an interesting article.
Another winner for which you should be congratulated.

I just found myself curious as to Sister Anne's views on the possibility of healing without pharmaceutical products.

Does it ever happen?

Am I deluding myself?

And so on.

There was an article on Japanese rice sculptures by Father Eamon Horgan which I also liked.

This would have worked well in any contemporary publication.
Kudos again to you and your contributors.

You published a number of poltical articles also.

As usual these were slanted leftwards in such a way that it was difficult to discern any Christian influence in them whatsoever.

I couldn't help wondering Cyril.

Are you a communist?

It's not such a terrible thing.

But you could reasonably stop posing as a Catholic priest if you are.

One of your leftist articles was a piece advocating sainthood for the Salvadoran Archbishop Oscar Romero who was murdered in the 1980's.

You think Oscar Romero is a saint.

I don't.

Perhaps we should let the church decide through her traditional procedures.

A second article, this time written by your self Cyril, suggests that the only reason China never converted to Christianity was because of the small mindedness of the Vatican and its missionaries in insisting in proclaiming the truth of Jesus the way it has always been proclaimed. You were critical of missionaries who had not dressed up the gospel in Chinese style, philosophy and customs. While praising the missionary Matteo Ricci, you scorned all those who came after him.

In doing so you sneered at the many Chinese and European Catholics who have been martyred so that ordinary Chinese people might hear the truth about Christ crucified.
Nice one Cyril.

Cyril, I know it's difficult for you to accept that the mayhem in China over the past four hundred years is the work of the devil.

I know you don't believe the devil exists.

I know you prefer to blame the Vatican.

So you think China's feudal rulers would have ended their three thousand year oppressions of the peasantry, if only Christians had spouted a bit of Taoism?

So you think Chairman Mao's 70 million murders could have been put on hold if only the Catholics were a bit more down with the proles?

So you think the modern Chinese government's extermination of millions of unborn babies might not have happened if only the Vatican had been a bit more groovy?

Cyril you are terribly wrong about these matters.

You published a second article about China which was written by Father Sean McNulty.

Father Sean McNulty writes from a similarly deluded though more blatently and wilfully blind left wing mind set.

Incredibly Father Sean McNulty in a haze of environmentalist folly and arrant anti western prejudice, advocates China as a model for world development.

His argument seems to be driven by the endemic corruptions in large western corporations and governments.

He's right about those, incidentally.

He's wrong about everything else.

Your by line points out that Father Sean McNulty has lived in China for twenty years.

Father Sean McNulty has lived in China for twenty years and seems to have no problems with the Chinese Communist government's compulsory abortion programmes where women are compelled to witness the drowning of their own babies in buckets of water in makeshift operating theatres having been operated on without anesthetic.

Father Sean McNulty has lived in China for twenty years and seems to have no problems with the Chinese Communist government's arbitrary detention and murder of democracy advocates.

Father Sean McNulty has lived in China for twenty years and seems to have no problems with the Chinese Communist government's reduction of Tibet to a feudal vassal State.

Father Sean McNulty has lived in China for twenty years and seems to have no problems with the Chinese Communist government's maintenance of North Korea as an unofficial province of China, functioning as a nuclear armed psychopathisised terror regime to destabilise democracies in the region, while the people of North Korea themselves are let starve by the roadsides.

Father Sean McNulty has lived in China for twenty years and seems to have no problems with the Chinese Communist Government's sponsorship in Africa of Sudan's Arab Islamic dictatorship which has killed in the region of three million Christians in a thirty year long civil war and has recently managed to rack up another two hundred thousand murders, this time of Muslims who apparently weren't Arab enough, in its Darfur region. 

Father Sean McNulty has lived in China for twenty years and seems to have no problems with the Chinese Communist government's attempts to subvert Catholicism by subsuming it into a communist party run church.

Father Sean McNulty's advocacy of China as an alternative societal or economic model for the world is pure lunaception.

Father Sean McNulty's claim that China is multicultural in any positive sense is crass in the extreme.

All cultures in China are subservient to the Han Chinese majority culture, and the Han Chinese are grotesquely cowed and enslaved by the Chinese Communist Party.

I know Father Sean McNulty is an individual and I shouldn't really saddle him with the Catholic priest label, but, well, for a Catholic priest to exhibit such soul dead slavish surrender to the evils of communism in his description of China is quite quite horrifying.

Thanks for your time Cyril.

If you guys at The Far East ever decide to convert to Christianity please let me know.

James Healy