Sir, - Niall Coll is right to point out that Jesus in all probability was a historical person. But we know very little about him. As Angus Wilson pointed out in his biography, what is most likely to be true in the Gospels is whatever no religious person would conceivably subsequently invent.
I submit therefore that the three most certain things about Jesus are that he liked wine (Cana, the Last Supper), that he abhorred sectarian bigotry (the parable of the Good Samaritan) and that he was born to an unmarried girl (not a virgin as the Church subsequently decided without any scriptural authority).
Putting the Angelus on radio and then on television was an act of triumphal sectarianism. It is disingenuous for apologists for the Catholic Church to claim otherwise. Using Angus Wilson's rule of thumb, I think we can assert with some certainty that Jesus would have disapproved.
At the same time as the Catholic Church was foisting the Angelus on the national airwaves, it was incarcerating contemporary unmarried mothers in the Magdalen laundries and sometimes in mental hospitals. I think we can again be certain that Jesus would have disapproved.
One wonders what the young madonnas of the Magdalen laundries thought as they watched the Angelus in the 1960s and 1970s.
Each night the Angelus would show a new idyllic scene of an unmarried mother and baby, a scene that they might have enjoyed and wished for, had the Catholic Church not separated them from their infants. - Yours, etc., Tim O'Halloran,
Glasnevin, Dublin 11.