Dear Editor: The comments of Ernie Terga (Readers’ Forum, “Pay Attention to Women,”June 20) are disrespectful to women and the Church. He is wrong to insist that the Church has ever said, in any capacity, that “men have a monopoly on piety.” Does the Church say that the women she canonizes or elevates to Doctors of the Church have no piety? Does the Church venerate Mary with the claim that she had no piety? Does Catholicism believe the Mother of God was an atheist?

Mr. Terga is wrong to suggest that the Church has ever authoritatively declared Mary Magdalene a prostitute, something we all need but only progressives deny. Her ecclesial importance, and that of the other women present at the Resurrection, is a matter for the magisterial authority of the Church endowed by Our Lord to decide, and that authority has venerated their humble witness for 2,000 years, contrary to Mr. Terga’s insistence that the Church has yet to notice.

The real war against women, and their children, is the radical feminism that insults human dignity, accepted by many Catholics too enthralled by pseudo-intellectual trends not to see this, yet never inhibited from taking it upon themselves to talk down to their Church whose eternal respect for women even has her using feminine pronouns in self-reference. The Church Jesus founded has given women their complete, authentic dignity of which those avoiding Catholic truth refuse to understand and are not capable of providing.

LOUISE CURCURATO
Park Slope