McAleese's comment followed an interview Francis had with a US-based Jesuit magazine last month. Women are not being deprived by being denied the right to become priests, he told America magazine last month.

Emailing Francis via the Vatican, McAleese pulled no punches in her response to the interview.

"It was reassuring and gratifying to observe the utter impenetrability of the reasons you offered, their ludicrous lack of logic or clarity, in short the fact that you offered just more unlikely misogynistic drivel," she wrote.

"So nothing new then and nothing to fear.

"Thank you for giving us something to laugh at. If you ever come up with a serious and credible reason please do not hesitate to let us know.

"Meanwhile keep rambling on. It is such fun and the fun has almost gone out of faith! Best wishes and renewed thanks. She added her qualifications in canon law to her signature.

In the interview, Francis explained the call of women to priesthood was a theological problem.

"The Church is more than a ministry. It is the whole people of God. The church is woman. The Church is a spouse. Therefore, the dignity of women is mirrored in this way.

"And why can a woman not enter ordained ministry? It is because the Petrine principle has no place for that," he explained.

"That the woman does not enter into the ministerial life is not a deprivation. No. Your place is that which is much more important and which we have yet to develop, the catechesis about women in the way of the Marian principle."

It would pose a theological problem if a woman felt called to be a priest, Francis said.

"We amputate the being of the Church if we consider only the way of the ministerial dimension of the life of the Church. The way is not only (ordained) ministry."

The "Petrine" (from Peter) principle is that of ministry.

"But there is another principle that is still more important, about which we do not speak, that is the Marian principle, which is the principle of femininity in the church, of the woman in the Church."

There was also a third way, "the administrative way," Francis said.

"It is something of normal administration. And, in this aspect, I believe we have to give more space to women." At the Vatican "the places where we have put women are functioning better".

Francis went on to summarise his explanation, saying:

"So there are three principles, two theological and one administrative.

"The Petrine principle, which is the ministerial dimension, but the Church cannot function only with that one.

"The Marian principle, which is that of the spousal Church, the Church as spouse, the Church as woman.

"And the administrative principle, which is not theological, but is rather that of administration, about what one does."

Source

• Irish Times

"Anyone with two eyes in their head can see that renewal in our church is clearly and urgently necessary.

"The challenge is to find the good way of renewal," says Archbishop of Dublin, Dermot Farrell.

The Catholic Church in Ireland and across Europe is on "a journey towards another way of living, with God, and with each other," he says.

He was referring to insights gained from synthesising the diocesan feedback from of Ireland's synod on synodality. The synthesised report was sent to the Vatican on Monday.

The feedback called for several major changes.

These include: a greater role for women in the church, including ordination; removal of mandatory celibacy for priests; radical change in the Church's attitude to LGBTI+ and other marginalised people; a much greater role for the laity.

Campaigners for reforming the Catholic Church in Ireland are hoping the report will help bring about radical change to the Church.

As an institution it is increasingly out of touch, they say.

On Tuesday, Ireland's former president Mary McAleese described the National Synthesis document as "explosive, life altering, dogma altering, Church altering".

The document had come "not from the hierarchy, not from Rome, but from the people of God", facilitated by the "openness of the process" which "was never the case before," McAleese pointed out.

It illustrates "the momentum of the people of God for change," she said.

"Clearly there was a very, very strong movement for reform and change and this is reflected fairly and truthfully" in the synthesis document, she added.

"There's no denying those voices now.

"I hope when it is received in Rome it will be fully honoured."

She particularly referred to the LBGTI+ focus group, which prepared its own uncompromising report, published with but separate from the Elphin diocese report.

That report has since "gone viral," she said, while "its powerful voice drew particular attention in the national synthesis document".

In the letter sent with Ireland's feedback, Catholic Primate Archbishop Eamon Martin said it pointed "to many challenges for the handing on of the faith in this country".

There is "a need for inner healing and hope, especially among those who have suffered abuse by church personnel and in church institutions".

Fresh models of responsibility and leadership are needed, he wrote. These will especially recognise and facilitate the role of women, as well as men.

"Our listening process has identified the need to be more inclusive in outreach, reaching out to those who have left the church behind and, in some cases, feel excluded, forgotten or ignored."

Source

• Irish Times
• Irish Examiner
• Irish Times

The Catholic Church is at a critical crossroads in its history. If it fails to choose the right path "it risks an enduring permafrost", she says.

"Many of us are in growing despair of our Church's inability to turn a critical spotlight on itself while shining a critical spotlight on the world at large."

Explaining her concerns about lay Catholics' exclusion, McAleese references the Church's "controlling clericalism, its cavalier misogyny, its evil homophobia, its institutional and clerical child sexual and physical abuse, its episcopal cover-ups that protected criminals and ignored victims, its lack of financial transparency and accountability".

Besides these, she pointed to the Church's "relentless external advocacy of the right to life of the unborn while hypocritically ignoring the fact that the Church, whose primary mission is salvation, itself teaches that it cannot guarantee a right to eternal life for the 80 million babies annually who die unbaptised through natural miscarriage, abortion and still-birth".

Added to which was "the social and financial waste caused by the enormous stockpiled portfolio of unsustainable, underused and unused property owned by the Church, the biggest non-governmental owner of private property in the world", she said.

McAleese says lay Catholics "would like to freely discuss these things and contribute to their resolution in an official standing inclusive forum within the Church for the good of the Church. No such forum exists."

In her view, Pope Francis' notion of such a forum or synod which one seemed to favour an "all-inclusive Church debating structure now seems bent on preventing it at worst, micro-managing it into irrelevance at best".

McAleese's comments were made in her keynote address to last Friday's Catholic lay-led Root and Branch Synod in Bristol.

She said it is a "shocking reality" that lay participation in the Church had been "consistently frozen out and episcopal power even more strongly consolidated during the 20th and 21st centuries, the very centuries that have seen the emergence of a massified educated laity and which were supposed to see a wide conciliar embrace of the lay charisms".

Despite the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, McAleese says the Church continues to teach "that the magisterium [Church teaching authority] has the unchallengeable right to restrict your rights and mine as Church members".

She says the Church can legitimately do so because personal promises we made at Baptism impose compulsory life-long obligations of Church membership.

McAleese is advocating "to make the case that fictitious baptismal promises made by non-sentient babies ... and even actual promises made by adult catechumens can no longer be relied on to justify depriving Church members of their inalienable human rights."

She told the Root and Branch conference that the man-made consequences of baptism found in canon law were "bolted onto" the sacrament.

This is "to compel enrolment as life members of the Catholic Church and to impose a once-and-for-all acceptance of the extensive obligations of membership, which the vast majority of us lack the capacity to evaluate until it is too late," she explained.

Source

• Irish Times
• Image: Irish Times

Mary McAleese thinks the Church needs to overhaul the practice of baptising babies. She says it violates 21st-century human rights.

In an address to Oxford University, McAleese said canon law claims the Church is entitled to limit, compromise and control church members' rights.

This entitlement is tied into the "christening contract which most of us slept or cried through," she said.

Her talk - entitled ‘Baptismal obligations? Revisiting the christening contract - a necessary prelude to any synodal journey' - called for a change in two aspects of infant baptism.

McAleese told her audience that she - and an increasing number of educated laity - would like changes made to the way baptism imposes lifelong obligations and compulsory obedience to church teaching.

Babies cannot understand what is being promised on their behalf, she explained.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church says "having become a member of the Church, from now on, he is [we are] called to obey and submit to the Church's leaders."

There's no way in canon law the 37,000-per day infants baptised into the church can "escape even when they become capable of understanding their implications," she said.

An alternative to the christening contract could be developed, McAleese suggested.

This should offer members an opportunity for expressing a voluntary commitment to these obligations when they are mature enough to do so.

Contemporary understanding of human rights, as set out in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, have overtaken Canon Law's limits on people's freedom of conscience, opinion, belief and religion, she said.

In her opinion, Canon Law and the Catholic Church are at a "crossroads".

McAleese, who is a canon lawyer, said and there was "evidence of panic" at the top of the Church "and a familiar degree" of denial.

"Some old and some new enemies are blamed for the serial crises in the Church; secularism, relativism, feminism, gay cabals, atheism, selfish individualism, sectarianism, a hostile media," she said.

The Catholic Church's "imperial top-down model of control" which centralises power in a clerical elite and "obliges unquestioning loyalty from the lay and paying masses" is not simply outmoded, it is no longer fit for purpose and never was, she said.

It has damaged itself by its own mistakes and has shattered its reputation by abuse scandals.

The Church is hollowing out faith from the inside and its control system had skewed relationships between the laity, the clergy and the hierarchy making the laity been unequal Church citizens, excluded from discernment and decision-making.

"So, we can say truthfully of Church teaching it has been a case of ‘everything about us - without us'.

"It still is and will remain so regardless of synodality," she warned.

In March, the Irish bishops announced they were planning for a national synod for the Church in Ireland.

Source

• Independent
• Image: The Irish Times

They are tired of "little old men" who continue to "beat the drum of obedience," she says.

"I am a person of faith but I am also a person with a thinking brain."

The hierarchy of the Church is a small, self-serving hermetically-sealed group of men, she says.

Ireland's former president has vowed to spend her retirement challenging the Magisterium of the Church. It is "essentially the male bishops who regard themselves as the arbitrators of the Church's teaching," she says.

"Large chunks of that teaching are appalling... its appalling history of anti-Semitism."

"It has resiled from anti-Semitism ... sooner or later they will resile from sexism and homophobia because science and human rights will interrupt the integrity of their narrative, it no longer has any integrity for me."

"For me these are issues of human rights, I have a voice and I am going to use it for that purpose."

A longtime critic of the Church's position on human sexuality, McAleese says she voted to change Ireland's constitutional prohibition on abortion in a 2018 referendum.

She says she will continue to challenge Church teachings on homosexuality and women, adding: "What else I am going to do in retirement except make myself useful in that regard?"

McAleese was banned from speaking at a 2018 conference on women at the Vatican, an exclusion that occurred during the papacy of Pope Francis. Both his predecessors had welcomed her to the Vatican.

McAleese - who is a licensed canon lawyer and civil lawyer, has spoken out frequently against misogyny in the Church to no avail.

"I am ignored completely by the Church's hierarchy. Utterly, absolutely ignored. But that's ok because they're only a tiny proportion of the Church. They're desperately powerful, yes, and they make the rules, yes, but the Church is 1.2 billion people which is why I stay."

Spirituality is a "deeply beautiful thing" that shouldn't be tainted by "exclusivity and elitism," she says.

As the biggest NGO in the world, the Church is hugely influential and a permanent representative at the UN. "No other faith system has that power and influence in the world."

Ireland's former president hopes that by staying in the Church, one day her "tiny little voice" will permeate upwards, along with that of many others who, not satisfied with blind obedience, are speaking out.

"The truth of the matter is, people are walking away in droves. They are tired of these old men, trying to beat the drum of obedience, being obedient to teaching that is long past its sell-by date and needs to be revised, needs to be critiqued."

"We belong to a Church that is wonderful at talking out to the world from its moral pulpit. Wonderful for example on climate change...Pope Francis on migrants. Excellent. On outreach to the poor. Excellent."

"On women, atrocious. Women in the Church, atrocious. On protections for children who are abused, very weak and lacking in credibility still."

Source

• Crux Now
• The Tablet
• Image: Extra.ie

In her letter to the pope (which she published on her personal website on 26 February) McAleese said she was "disturbed by aspects" of the L'Arche investigation into Vanier which "implicate the Holy See in a way that demands explanation."

She pointed to Vanier's relationship with Father Thomas Philippe OP, who was implicated in the sexual abuse of women during spiritual counseling from the 1950's.

"Given that vulnerable men and women were the intended beneficiaries of L'Arche and that Vanier was consistently lauded by the Church at the highest level without the remotest suggestion that there was anything worrying in his character it is essential that the Holy See now explains how it came to so publicly commend a man whose predatory proclivities it was aware of," her letter says.

"What steps if any did the Holy See take to interrupt the growth of the powerful cult of Vanier by warning the many good men and women who trusted him in good faith that he had an alarming past?"

"I have no doubt that L'Arche will recover and continue its great work for it has its owns integrity which is more than capable of transcending the Vanier betrayal. I am not so sure about whether trust in the Holy See will recover so easily," she said.

"Many times in recent years I have had reason to despair at the failures at papal, episcopal and Curial level regarding the protection of vulnerable children and the vindication of victims. Rebuilding trust is a work in the very early stages of progress."

"If ... the Holy See failed to act to protect members of the L'Arche community by alerting them to the known predatory activities of Vanier and Philippe ... this will be my final line of least resistance."

"I could not in conscience continue to support an institution capable of such gross negligence."

McAleese has a canon law degree from Rome's Pontifical Gregorian University.

Vanier founded L'Arche in 1964 to work with the intellectually disabled.

He developed a community model where people with disabilities lived with the people who assisted them.

Although Vanier was a Catholic, L'Arche isn't affiliated with any religious denomination.

After Vanier's death last year, Francis thanked God for his ministry and called him a "great witness."

Late last month, L'Arche International announced that credible complaints has led them to believe Vanier had sexually abused at least six women under the pretext of spiritual counseling.

Source

• Crux Now
• Image: The Irish Times

Indeed, the institution Archbishop Okolo represents displays a breathtaking disrespect for human rights, trampling on them and believing it has the right to do so with impunity, even going so far as to threaten the victims of such gross violation of human rights that if they tell anybody about it, the punishment will be even greater.

Such was the situation of Fr Seán Fagan, a Marist priest who died in 2016.

Over his 60-year priestly ministry, Fr Seán Fagan's service to all God's holy people earned him the lifelong gratitude of those he helped.

Fr Fagan was a priest committed to the service of those he called "God's holy people".

Ambition-fuelled advancement within the church - careerism - was never his driving force - his whole focus was on mediating the prodigal love of God to all comers.

Over his 60-year priestly ministry, this service to all God's holy people earned him the life-long gratitude of those he helped, but also a fat file in the Vatican's doctrinal department, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF).

Fr Fagan never knew for sure who kept the CDF supplied with copies of his writings, comments, details of broadcasts, etc, from Ireland. But whoever they were, they were assiduous in keeping Rome appraised of the pastoral efforts of this Irish priest and not for any positive, affirming reasons.

Transgression

This exercise in spying and reporting went on for many years until 2008, when the CDF lost all reason and pursued Fr Fagan with a determination that trampled all over his natural and objective rights.

His transgression? In a letter to the editor of this paper, he tangentially touched upon the matter of women's ordination as one of several solutions to the shortage of priests.

But this was only one transgression in Fr Fagan's list of "sins".

He believed in the full acceptance of LGBT people, sacraments for married couples in second relationships, the right of couples to decide on the most helpful form of birth control, the full participation of women in church life and continual ecumenical dialogue.

As it is unlikely the prefect of the CDF was reading The Irish Times, the Irish spy was very active and attentive in supplying copies of Fr Fagan's work.

But Fr Fagan was a bigger and better man.

He refused to be browbeaten.

For him, consistent with the church tradition, conscience reigned supreme.

A formed and informed conscience was the continuing work of a mature adult, not the infantile uncritical appropriation of what the "pope says" or "the church says".

Conscience

He refused to write to The Irish Times and withdraw his comment, as the CDF directed, because, in conscience, he could not.

For his fidelity to conscience, he was coerced into silence for the remainder of his life with the threat of dismissal from both priesthood and his congregation if anyone found out, even without his co-operation. Continue reading

• Angela Hanley is an author of What Happened to Fr Seán Fagan? Published by Columba Books

She told the prelates, including the Papal Nuncio, that her critics had taken out of context her recent comment that the Catholic Church was deliberately making women powerless and that it was using a logic comparable in certain respects to that of a rapist. Continue reading

The award will be presented to Dr McAleese at a ceremony at the University of Tübingen in Germany on 30 October.

Leading US moral theologian Professor Hille Haker of Loyola University in Chicago will deliver the commendation in honour of the former president at the ceremony.

The award honours people who have distinguished themselves through a special ethical commitment in the religious, scientific or social field. Read more

Focusing on homosexuality, she says she cannot go to the World Meeting of Families when the Pope visits Ireland in August, as it does not include LGBTI people.

In her view, the Church's "evil" teaching on homosexuality gave rise to homophobia, ruining people's lives and causing them "to live in dark shadows."

"[The] World Meeting of Families, here was he [the Pope] saying it was for all God's family no matter what you believe, no matter what your set of circumstances, whether you're LGBTI, whether you're divorced and remarried ... you're welcome.

"And if you're like us, a family with two heterosexual children and one homosexual son who's married to his husband, you're in, you're members of God's family, come along."

However, the Meeting of World Families has moved from being a potentially inclusive event to an exclusive one, where her family no longer felt welcome, she says.

"Suddenly we were in the hands of a Church that is exclusive, that holds on to that book of laws and hits you over the head with it, uses it to exclude some and only include the chosen and I lost faith in it then ..."

McAleese says she was "heartbroken for the children that I have, that can't go now, who feel they are not wanted because we feel not wanted ... I think that's a pity because it could have been and still could be so great if they had got their message right."

Speaking of women and the church, McAleese commented the current Pope is no different from any of his predecessors when it comes to gender equality within the church.

"He's a disappointment ... he's made a few more appointments, but ... you know they increased visibility, not voice."

When it comes to the "issue of women in the Church," this is where "the curial, magisterial Church is so far behind the curve it is embarrassing" and arguments against the ordination of women as priests were "ultimately untenable," McAleese says.

Source

• Belfast Telegraph
• Irish Examiner
• Independent
• Image: joe.ie

By baptising children before they have reached the age of reason, the Church is creating "infant conscripts who are held to lifelong obligations of obedience," she says.

"You can't impose, really, obligations on people who are only two weeks old and you can't say to them at seven or eight or 14 or 19 ‘here is what you contracted, here is what you signed up to' because the truth is they didn't," she says.

McAleese says the current model of baptism "worked for many centuries because people didn't understand that they had the right to say no, the right to walk away."

"But you and I know, we live now in times where we have the right to freedom of conscience, freedom of belief, freedom of opinion, freedom of religion and freedom to change religion.

"The Catholic Church yet has to fully embrace that thinking."

McAleese is a practising Catholic who holds a licentiate in canon law from the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome.

In 2012 she published a book - "Quo Vadis? Collegiality in the Code of Canon Law".

McAleese is also a vocal opposer of Church teachings on homosexuality and women's ordination.

Speaking at a We Are Church event at Gonzaga College in Dublin on June 16, said she had voted Yes in the May 25 referendum that removed pro-life protections for the unborn from the Irish constitution.

In the past she was firmly pro-life. She says her vote was "not a sin," despite a bishop's remarks that Catholics who voted Yes needed to go to confession.

Source

• Irish Times
• Crux
• Irish Times
• Image: Baby - LoveToKnow

Mary McAleese says women's exclusion from decision-making roles "has left the church flapping about awkwardly on one wing." Read more

Prepared by independent think tank the Wijngaards Institute for Catholic Research, it will be published in New York tomorrow at an event hosted by the UN Population Fund. Read more

Artificial contraception ban challenged]]> 87267 https://cathnews.co.nz/2016/07/22/late-marist-priest-broken-vatican-former-president-says/ Thu, 21 Jul 2016 17:15:58 +0000 http://cathnews.co.nz/?p=84844

A Marist priest and theologian who died last week in Dublin had his heart and spirit broken by the Vatican, a former president of Ireland has said. Mary McAleese was speaking of the late Fr Seán Fagan, who died at St Vincent's Hospital in Dublin last Friday. For many years he was critical of Vatican Read more

Speaking in an interview on the Crux website, Mary McAleese said Ireland had, at least in part, been dissuaded from anti-immigrant movements because of its rich Christian culture.

She was asked if that would change because of the increasingly secular nature of modern society in Ireland.

Mrs McAleese said she thought this would not be the case, and she rejected the overuse of the term "secular" in the Irish context.

"Ireland has an extraordinary story to tell of a country that was, for a very long time, in the grip of a form of clericalism which saw every form of dissent as ‘militant secularism' when, in fact, a lot of that dissent actually was in opposition to clericalism, not Christianity, and was, in fact, infused with a love of the Gospel," she said.

"It was a determination that the Gospel would be experienced in a way that was not overwhelmed by rule books or people banging them over the head with the codes of canon law, but that people would experience an accompanying God who was deeply personal and who was like a parent or grandparent to them, who just watched over them, and smiled no matter what they did, and accompanied them in their life, and nudged them in the right direction, but never gave up on them, no matter what."

For Mrs McAleese, the arrival of secondary education in Ireland, with the help of religious congregations, led the Irish to question clericalism in the structures of the institutional Church.

The values of Christian faith remained with them, however, and will always be a part of any decision that they make as a constitutive element of the culture.

"(Christian Faith) is always going to be infused, it's always going to inform secular thinking," she said.

Sources

• Crux
• Image: Irish Independent

Ms McAleese's revelation that she did this came as Ireland's parliament last week removed the common law defence of "reasonable chastisement" of children.

In an interview, the former Irish president said she raised with the Pope "the Church's support for corporal punishment of children, which is set out in the catechism and which the [UN] Committee on the Rights of the Child regards as a violation of children's rights, under the Convention on the Rights of the Child to which the Holy See is a state party".

She said that Pope Francis has set up a working party on corporal punishment under the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors.

This working party is chaired by UK child abuse survivor Peter Saunders.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church states parents must regard their children as children of God and must respect them as human persons (CCC #2222).

But it also cites the passage from Sirach 30-1-2: "He who loves his son will not spare the rod . . . He who disciplines his son will profit by him." (CCC #2223)

This is set alongside St Paul's saying in Ephesians 6:4 "Fathers, do not provoke your children to anger, but bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord."

In May, the Council of Europe released a statement condemning corporal punishment against children.

This was after Ireland was found to be in violation of a European charter which forbids the practice.

Ms McAleese said she has communicated with Pope Francis "occasionally".

Among the subjects she has raised are problem of youth suicide and self-harm, since the Church provides educational services to a majority of children in Ireland.

She also said she sees her Church as "a major conduit for homophobia which is toxic, a form of hatred that has nothing to do with Christ and is unchristian".

Sources

• Irish Times
• UN Tribune
• Irish Mirror
• Catechism of Catholic Church
• Image: 2GB

Archbishop Charles Chaput of Philadelphia spoke to media about Ms McAleese's recent claim that the Church's description of homosexuality as "instrinsically disordered" with a tendency to "evil" led to homophobia.

The archbishop stated: "I've read the documents and the Church has never said that homosexual persons are disordered."

He said the Church states "that being attracted to a person of the same gender sexually is a disorder of our sexual nature".

"A lot of people have disorders. In fact we all do. Some of it would be less serious than sexual, like me and glasses or not being able to hear well, or having a tendency to overeat, those are all disorders that a person may have but it doesn't destroy their dignity."

Ms McAleese cited the 1975 CDF document Persona Humana to support her case.

She also cited a 1986 statement from Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger and a 2005 statement by Pope Benedict XVI.

Ms McAleese said: "Now if as Archbishop Chaput says the Church teaches that homosexuality is no more ‘disordered' than myopia or being hard of hearing then I would be happy to be directed to those Church documents which say so."

"I have not been able to find them."

Archbishop Chaput said Ms McAleese was trying to control the faith of the Church.

She had "a very narrow point of view that's trying to control something she shouldn't try to control, that is the faith of the Catholic Church", he said.

Ms McAleese said Archbishop Chaput's statement is "slightly hysterical".

"I acknowledge I like many others wish to see my Church's teaching on this subject change before it causes any more damage," she said.

Ms McAleese has a son who is homosexual.

Addressing the synod on the family on Saturday, Archbishop Chaput warned of the dangers of disunity in the Church.

Sources

• Irish Times
• The Tablet
• Persona Humana
• Irish Times
• Catholic News Agency
• Image: Irish Independent

Speaking ahead of the synod on the family in Rome, Bishop Peter Doyle of Northampton said "there is a bit of an issue".

"I thought I understood marriage and family life because I come from a family, because I've ministered for 37 years in a parish," Bishop Doyle said.

"When I got involved in marriage and family life, I suddenly realised that there was a whole world there that I didn't know."

Bishop Doyle was responding to a media question about concerns that a meeting focused on family is largely being conducted only by men.

Some 279 male priests and prelates have been appointed by Francis as the voting members of the synod.

While there is a small group of women taking part in the discussions as collaborators and auditors, they are not allowed to vote on any final documents or issues.

At the same media conference, Cardinal Vincent Nichols of Westminster said the synod " is not an exchange of opinion among male celibates".

"This is a period of prayer and reflection among the shepherds of the people."

The cardinal noted that there will be 17 married couples presenting testimonies to the synod, which has more time for small group discussions than in previous synods.

"There will be in every small group married people and women," Cardinal Nichols said.

Before the synod, former Irish president Mary McAleese said if she wanted expertise on the family, she wouldn't be calling hundreds of celibate prelates together.

"Let me repeat a question I asked last year when I saw the Vatican's lengthy pre-synod questionnaire, namely how many of these men have ever changed a child's nappy?" she said.

Sources

• Irish Times
• National Catholic Reporter
• Image: Catholic Women's League

Mrs McAleese said her son Justin was a "willing and happy" altar boy and an enthusiastic member of his local Catholic youth club.

But he went through "torture" when he discovered what his church taught about homosexuality, Mrs McAleese told the Irish Times.

"When our son came out to us at the age of 21, we at that stage were just broken for him that he, in a gay-friendly household, had not felt able to confide in us his loneliness, the bullying that he was exposed to," she said.

Mrs McAleese said she had spoken to other parents of gay children "coming from the mortuary" after their children had died by suicide.

Friends of hers had found out their children were gay the night the child had attempted suicide, or were attending the doctor with depression.

She said there was "a lot of homophobia still out there", but it was a "fading reality".

Ireland is holding a referendum on legal same-sex marriage on May 22.

The Catholic Church's teaching on homosexuality made it "difficult but not impossible" to be a committed Catholic, Mrs McAleese said.

She praised the "phenomenal leadership" shown by a number of Church of Ireland bishops.

The thought of leaving the Catholic Church had come into her mind from time to time, but what had kept her from ever really seriously considering it was the "truly wonderful" late Archbishop Dermot Ryan.

"I detect that same openness in Francis, Pope Francis," she said.

Mrs McAleese described as a "wonderful thing" Pope Francis's establishment of a working group on the Church's teaching on homosexuality that will report to the synod on the family in October.

"I'd like to think that maybe down the line it would change, but believe me, a ‘Yes' outcome in the referendum will not change Church teaching," she said.

Sources

• Irish Times
• Image: Catholic Ireland

Shame, because I'd been a fan until I read her letter to the Irish Times on Saturday criticising the pope for his remarks, on the basis that they're at odds with the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child which, apparently, has zero tolerance when it comes to corporal punishment.

Actually, make that two benefits to flow from the row.

I hadn't even heard about the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child until she brought it up and if I hadn't realised it was so preposterous, I'd probably have been instinctively in favour of it - well, who's against the Rights of the Child?

Anyway, McAleese feels that the Vatican's commitment to this particular UN Convention is now in doubt.

Another critic is Peter Saunders, a former victim of clerical sexual abuse - I'm a bit tired of the term ‘survivor' in this context - who is a member of the Vatican's commission on stopping the molestation of minors.

Saunders, also head of the National Association for People Abused in Childhood, says he was hit and ‘it did me a lot of harm'.

Well maybe, but there's a spectrum here, isn't there, between smacking a toddler for playing with matches to the modus operandi favoured by so many Irish fathers a generation ago, viz, whacking children with a belt.

Personally, I'm rubbish at corporal punishment. Continue reading

• Melanie McDonagh in The Spectator

Melanie McDonagh is a leaderwriter for the Evening Standard and Spectator contributor. Irish, living in London.