Ireland’s former president, Mary McAleese, has accused Pope Francis of “misogynistic drivel”. 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 Read more
The report synthesising Ireland’s feedback on the synod on synodality is very clear. “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 Read more
Lay Catholics’ exclusion from the Church’s decision making processes is leading nowhere good, says Ireland’s former president Mary McAleese. 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 Read more
Baptising babies into the Catholic Church suppresses people’s freedoms for life, the former Irish president says. 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 Read more
Ireland’s former president Mary McAleese says blind obedience isn’t enough for people to stay in the Catholic Church. 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 Read more
Ireland’s former president Mary McAleese has written to the Pope saying she’ll leave the the Catholic Church if it is found the Vatican “failed to act to protect members of the L’Arche community” from the community’s founder Jean Vanier. In her letter to the pope (which she published on her personal website on 26 February) Read more
Marking the opening of the new legal year in October, the Vatican’s diplomatic representative in Ireland, Archbishop Jude Okolo, reminded legal practitioners that justice “rests on respect for human rights, assuring that people’s natural and objective rights are not trampled upon”. Indeed, the institution Archbishop Okolo represents displays a breathtaking disrespect for human rights, trampling Read more
Former president Mary McAleese has told the country’s most senior Catholic bishops that she is being wrongly accused of misrepresenting Saint John Paul II’s views on sexual relationships. 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 Read more
Ireland’s former president Mary McAleese has been selected as the winner of the prestigious Alfons Auer Ethics Prize. 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 Read more
The Pope’s views on homosexuality and women should change, says former Irish President Mary McAleese. 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 Read more