IRELAND
Irish Times
Patsy McGarry
Fri, Jun 20, 2014
Some people have taken offence on behalf of Pope Francis because Mary McAleese, the former president, threw the word “bonkers” in his direction. One figure in the Catholic Church said it was unbecoming of a former head of state to speak this way. A letter writer to this paper described her remarks as terribly unfair.
Speaking at University College Dublin last Monday, to mark her receipt of the university’s Ulysses medal, McAleese criticised the pope’s plan to ask a synod of bishops next October to advise him about church teaching on the family.
There was “something profoundly wrong and skewed” about asking “male celibates” to review the church’s teaching on family life, she said. “The very idea of 150 people who have decided they are not going to have any children, not going to have families, not going to be fathers and not going to be spouses – 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.”
Last year the Vatican circulated a questionnaire to Catholics worldwide seeking feedback on pastoral issues of marriage and family. In her interview last Monday McAleese said: “I wrote back and said I’ve got a much simpler questionnaire, and it’s only got one question, and here it is: ‘How many of the men who will gather to advise you as pope on the family have ever changed a baby’s nappy?’ I regard that as a very, very serious question.”
It’s doubtful whether the plain-speaking Pope Francis would take offence at any of this. He may disagree with the substance of what McAleese said, but its manner of expression would hardly faze him. After all, this is the pope who advised his clergy to get down and dirty among the people so they smell of them and who has spoken about the narcissism of popes and theologians.
As for McAleese, she is just being consistent.
Note: This is an Abuse Tracker excerpt. Click the title to view the full text of the original article. If the original article is no longer available, see our News Archive.