Sir, - Has the Bishop of Killala any idea how hurtful and insulting it is to refer to abortion as a form of "capital punishment"? He implicitly calls all the tens of thousands of Irish women who have had abortions, self-induced or in foreign clinics, "murderers". In the past the clergy picked on "fallen women". Now they pick on women, even teenaged rape victims who take the morning-after pill, to stigmatise them as executioners of their babies.
Doesn't Dr Finnegan know the great tradition of his own Church? Ensoulment does not begin at conception. Not all abortions can be called murder. Read its greatest teachers over 1,500 years: Augustine, Gregory the Great, Innocent III, Aquinas, Bonaventure, St Alphonsus. Moreover, if a human being exists at conception and most conceptuses are naturally and unknowingly aborted, on the bishop's premise God is the greatest of all abortionists.
The bishop's remarks are just one more example of the sexual fanaticism of the present Roman regime. Women are nearly always its chief victims. No condoms even for AIDS sufferers, no contraception even for couples with serious illness in the family and a dozen kids already, no in vitro fertilisation for otherwise childless couples, no divorce even for a teenaged girl or boy abandoned soon after the wedding. The list goes on and on.
One wonders if the present Hierarchy are determined to throw away the last vestiges of respect that Irish people, especially Irish women, have for them. - Yours, etc.,
Peter De Rosa, Ashford, Co Wicklow.