Sir, - Dr Cathal Daly (January 15th) defends some Church leaders against the accusations of an anti-woman bias in the early Church. He quotes the fourth-century St Jerome as having deep spiritual relationships with several women, especially with Paula and Eustochium. This is so; but Paula and Eustochium, saintly as they were, were the most extreme ascetics of the ascetic groups in Rome at that time. Jerome describes Paula to an ascetic friend as his ideal Christian woman, being "one who mourned and fasted, was squalid with dirt, her eyes dim with weeping" (Letter XLV.3 to Asella).
In my thesis on Jerome's Letter to Eustochium, I read many of his 150 or so surviving letters and some of his most important treaties in order to get a reasonably balanced view of the author. Most of his 34 letters to women were to virgins or chaste widows. Those who were recently widowed were exhorted to embrace asceticism as quickly as possible.
Although Jerome believed that women had rational minds like men - a view not always held at the time - he nevertheless could relate to females only when their bodily image was blotted out. Hence his deep spiritual relationship with Paula and her daughter, Eustochium. - Yours, etc.,
Cypress Road, Mount Merrion, Co Dublin.