ON the evening of May 13 on BBC World Service Television, there was a programme about over-population, particularly in Mexico, and the attitude of the Catholic Church to this. I completely fail to understand how modern man can submit to a doctrine administered by that allegedly celibate and male dominated hierarchy and which originated in a time when over-population was not a problem. Preventative birth control methods are perhaps the only method of improving the lives of most of the under-privileged peoples of the world. To threaten images of eternal damnation on users of such methods is evil and barbaric and inflicts so much unnecessary suffering and often an early painful death on innocent children. Purveyors of such doctrines are, in my mind, no better than the zealots recently headlined in Waco, Texas, and they have no place in any society where people believe in a caring God. DAVID EDDY Kowloon
