Sir, - Regarding Mr Gary Byrnes's emotional tirade (May 23rd) against the teaching of religion in schools: Napoleon could not be called a vivid Catholic, but he had common sense. In an address to the Council of State in 1804, he stated: "I prefer to see village children entrusted to a man who knows only his catechism, and whose principles I know, than to some half baked intellectual who has no basis for his ethics and no fixed principles.
Take away a people's faith, and you end by having nothing but highway, robbers."
It is plain that the more we Irish abandon our religion, the more savage we become. Abandon it altogether, and mere anarchy is loosed upon our world.
Yours, etc.,
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