Sir, - Before making his ill informed attack on vasectomy Bishop Boyce of Raphoe should have reflected on his own Church's practice for hundreds of years of castrating choirboys in order to provide female sounding voices for the Sistine Chapel when they grew up. There is no point either, in any claim that this was some sort of barbarous medieval practice, as the Vatican was still snipping away when Garibaldi entered Rome. The last Papal castrato, Allesandro Moreschi (1858-1922), retired only in 1913, having made a number of historic recordings and having sung at the funerals of two Italian kings.
Now that so much has been revealed about episcopal sexuality, the mind can only boggle as to the goings on with the Pope's eunuchs for centuries. May I advise his Lordship that priests in glass houses should not throw stones, though one might hazard a guess as to what they once may have used to break the panes. - Yours, etc.,
Rathgar, Dublin 6.