The modern heresy exposed by terror

SIR – In his searching article “Can jihadists be rehabilitated?” (December 6), Tim Stanley says: “Many of us have been taught to think that man isn’t born bad and even when he becomes bad he can be turned back …”

Mr Stanley surely puts his finger here on a core modern heresy. The Catholic Church teaches something rather different. That we are made in the image of God is true, but it is also true that, even from birth, that image has been damaged by our inheritance of original sin as a result of the turning away from God of our first parents, leaving us with a fundamental tendency to sin.