Madam, - Angela Hanley (August 18th) grasped the nettle of Irish women and their loyalties. She provides data showing that Irish women are very keen to sign up to courses on theology when they are denied any formal outlet for such training, ie, membership of the priesthood.
I think that the insights, written more than 50 years ago, by Simone de Beauvoir are still pertinent to many Irish women's behaviour today. "Men cannot kneel with complete conviction before the idols they have made; but when women encounter these mighty statues along the road, they think they are not made with hands, and obediently bow down."
Sartre, her good friend wrote something very similar, quoted in a footnote to this, to back her up. "They need props, you understand, they are given ready-made ideas, then they believe in them as they do in God."
We must encourage more thinking, getting together and communicating directly with each other, to come up with our own ideas to believe in. - Yours, etc,
LAURA O'SHEA, Dún Laoghaire, Co Dublin.