The decline of the female religious orders has left many women feeling that they no longer have a central vocation in a church that has always revered femininity in the form of the Virgin Mary.
As the flight made its way to the Windy City, it appears that the female passenger, who was wearing shorts, awoke to feeling something brush against her thigh.
In that fractured, querulous, society religion and certain aspects of traditional culture (such as female purdah in the Pashtun areas) remain the great touchstones for generating fellow feeling or indeed outrage.