IRELAND
Irish Times
Patsy Mcgarry
Mon, Jul 27, 2015
The Catholic Archbishop of Dublin Diarmuid Martin has said he regrets saying the church needed a “reality check” following the marriage equality referendum, as the phrase has since been widely misunderstood.
He was speaking at the MacGill Summer School on Beyond 2016 – What are our Aspirations for the Republic.
“The first thing that the Church must do is to carry out continuous – what I have called – ‘reality checks’. In some ways I regret that I ever used that term in a recent RTÉ interview. What I said was taken up in the press – national and international, ecclesiastical and lay – all over the world and no two stories had the same interpretation of what I intended, indeed of what I actually said.
“Perhaps I gave mixed messages. The problem is that it is reality that is mixed and there are no black and white definitions of that reality and no black and white solutions, and media are not always good at accommodating subtleties.
“A reality check is nothing more than discerning the facts in all their complexity and then facing the facts and evaluating how to address the facts in a culture that is ever changing,” he said.
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