Sir, - Fr Cullen (August 27th) asks why the Catholic Church is hated, and provides some rather strange and wrong answers to his own question.
A more accurate answer would include the fact that the Republic of Ireland, since its inception, was ruled as a theocracy where the links between the Church and State were organic and deeply entrenched. Catholicism informed every aspect of daily life from the songs sung in primary schools to foreign policy. People whose lives did not meet with theological approval were discriminated against, ostracised, hampered by outrageously restricted laws or treated horrendously in hideous institutions run by the Church and its minions - from the Magdalen Laundries to Goldenbridge.
Even now, the Irish Constitution is full of disgraceful anachronisms worked in by the officers of the Church, illustrating contempt for women, free thinkers and others. The Church kept contraception illegal; blessed the Blueshirts; created oppressive "blasphemy" laws; made into a pariah any woman or girl pregnant outside of marriage; built a bizarre and frightening network of taboos and rituals to be beaten into young children; established an unquestioned, absolutist hierarchy; anchored the country in a pre-Reformation clericalist fief and set the causes of freedom, progress and prosperity back by several decades.
That is why the church is hated, Fr Cullen, not out of some psychological disease but because its vicious majoritarianism brooked no dissent and allowed for no alternatives for those who wanted to live free of its superstition and unfettered by its restrictive, misogynistic mores. - Yours, etc., Ben Walsh,
Haight St San Francisco, California.