Sir, - Why did you choose to give full-page treatment to Terry Eagleton's ribald mockery of Carmelite nuns ("Keeper of the Gate", Weekend, November 24th). Was this extract somehow more interesting than anything else in the rest of his memoirs? I found its tone, with its lewd humour, grossly offensive. It used ridicule, the most hurtful of all weapons, to attack this community of harmless women. I looked for some redeeming touch of affection or grudging respect. I found none.
What had these women done to deserve such treatment? Their only crime was to have chosen to live what some would consider the most radical of Christian lives, giving themselves totally to prayer and sacrifice for the Church and the world. Eagleton's petty, mean-spirited approach is matched, inversely, by the nobility of the nuns' calling.
It is all an attack on the Catholic Christian Church, of course. Is this why it found its way on to your front page? - Yours, etc.,
Hilda Geraghty, Corbawn Lane, Shankill, Co Dublin.