Catholic Church needs candid friend like Mary McAleese

By John-Paul Mccarthy
Sunday Independent
June 22, 2014

http://www.independent.ie/tablet/comment/catholic-church-needs-candid-friend-like-mary-mcaleese-30374064.html

Mary McAleese

FORMER President Mary McAleese made a welcome return to the national stage this week as she accepted UCD's handsome Ulysses medal.

In deference perhaps to James Joyce's own aversion to theocracy, our eighth president used the occasion to reflect on some recent rumblings from the Holy See.

By all accounts the current Pope is hoping to get some advice on family life from the next Catholic synod.
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Mary McAleese responded by insisting: "The very idea of 150 people who have decided they are not going to have any children ... so they have no adult experience of family life as the rest of us know it – but they are going to advise the Pope on family life; it is completely bonkers."

These vigorous insights dovetail with her contribution to an important profile of Pope Francis in last December's New Yorker magazine.

James Carroll sat down with her during her time as a visiting scholar at Boston College to discuss Catholic doctrine on the ordination of women and the themes of her book on the internal power structures of the Catholic Church.

Carroll captured a certain catch in McAleese's voice. She personally favoured the ordination of women, she said, yet also understood why Pope Francis "has to act with some degree of political nuance".

Why? Because previous popes "came very close", she explained, to making their veto of female priests a matter of infallible papal dogma.

McAleese remained hopeful though, emphasising how "this is a great opportunity for Francis".

Reminding her interviewer that Francis remained Christ's vicar on earth after all, she asked rhetorically, "Can he do it?", before answering her own query: "He's the Pope!"

There is something characteristically Irish about this perspective, which at the risk of mangling Prof Diarmaid MacCulloch's Anglican formulation, we might call the perspective of the "candid friend".

For all her exasperation in Boston and in UCD last week, Mrs McAleese speaks as a student of Catholic canon law, and a former resident of the Gregorian, no less.

Echoing O'Connell's polemics against the Vatican's soft spot for shady deals with the British, or Cardinal Newman's assault on the papal "chain on my arm", or De Valera's public critique of the operation of the Ne Temere doctrine, she seeks to purify Catholicism of its various ailments, rather than destroy it.

Her tone closely matches the one adopted in the Taoiseach's startling meditation on the delinquent behaviour of the Vatican in 2011, a powerful meditation that struck only one dud note, that is to say, the Taoiseach's decision to include the phrase "as a practising Catholic".

Ought we here not aspire though to a more muscular form of critique in our dealings with the Vatican and their devotees at home? Or are the prospects for genuine reform and amelioration sabotaged by a critique that places itself self-consciously outside the zone of the practising Catholic, and thereby disputes the core assumptions of that particular faith?

To absorb Mary McAleese's poised and polished critique of contemporary church doctrine on collegiality in her book Quo Vadis is to wonder if such a scholarly stance can ever really hope to resonate at the highest levels.

The scale of the Vatican's defiance of civil powers all over the world suggests that the only kind of critique they will listen to is the one that smarts, like a pole brought down between a mule's eyes.

The Taoiseach seemed to partially grasp this in 2011 when he explained how "the rape and the torture of children were downplayed or 'managed' to uphold instead, the primacy of the institution, its power, its standing and its 'reputation'. Far from listening to evidence of humiliation and betrayal with St Benedict's 'ear of the heart'... the Vatican's reaction was to parse and analyse it with the gimlet eye of a canon lawyer".

This was the kind of language we associate with the likes of the late, lamented Christopher Hitchens, who once dismissed Catholicism as a "wicked cult".

The urgent advice of the candid friend also looks tired when placed next to some of Conor Cruise O'Brien's best writings on theocracy.

In his powerful open-letter to the Catholic hierarchy in the aftermath of the Supreme Court's voiding of the travel ban in the X Case in 1992, O'Brien wrote simply: "I accuse you of abusing your power by causing to be inserted into the fundamental law of the State, binding on all citizens, a simplified version of the teaching of your Church, and yours only. This is manifestly unjust to those of us who conscientiously reject your teaching in that matter ... Your Lordships have just had a bad couple of weeks, as a result of your own gratuitous Constitution-making venture. I suggest you now take a rest."

How we miss candour of that quality today.