This letter is regarding "WRC opposes the Catholic mission," Sean Vinck (Nov. 17, The Observer).

Although I graduated from Notre Dame in 1990 and have only been back to visit for my siblings' graduations, I am shocked and appalled that the kind of gratuitously violent and ill-informed commentaries are being published in The Observer. I assume that it is still the main source of information over lunch for students as it was in my day.

I am first of all delighted to learn that a women's resource center exists and is even in LaFortune! Mr Vinck, however, would apparently like this center to be turned into some kind of pre-training center for living one of the two Vatican approved lifestyles for Catholic women: celibate nun (or lay missionary) or married wife and mother. His attack on the center for rightfully recognizing that women are whole persons with many facets, including problems related to sex and pregnancy (let us not forget the campus problems of binge drinking and the lakes) is a shallow attempt to promote a viciously narrow and demeaning limitation on women's mutual support through information.

Secondly, experience of studying at a world-class university should have taught Mr. Vinck better than to impute the views of a NOW pamphlet to the organizers of the center. Anymore than the discovery of "Mein Kampf" in his own dorm room should brand him a Nazi. In these days of the defense of Notre Dame's academic freedom, the Notre Dame community should band together to ensure that all members of the university be protected from censorship of expression and information.

Mary Ann Hennessey-Gopaul

Class of '90

France

November 17, 1999

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