From the Irish Times former president Mary McAleese claims that the Catholic priesthood is based around a 'fundamental lie'. 

By Sarah McDonald

Former president of Ireland and the new Chancellor of Trinity College Dublin, Professor Mary McAleese has said she believes the Catholic priesthood is based around “a fundamental lie”. 

She told a conference in TCD on Saturday attended by up to 400 people, including the Provost, Dr Patrick Prendergast, that a clericalised priesthood was not attracting vocations today and that many of those who are attracted to priesthood have a “deeply problematic” sexuality because the Church demands that those priests and seminarians who are not heterosexual pretend to be.

Recalling the six years she spent studying for a doctorate in canon law in Rome, living in the environs of a seminary and monastery, she said she had encountered many young seminarians and priests.

“I became very much aware of the dysfunction at the heart of seminary life and the dysfunction at the heart of much of the priesthood.” 


The number of fake-hetero misogynistic homophobic gays I met frightened me. The homophobia of people who are gay is a lie - it is a vicious lie. But they live it and in living it, apart from making themselves miserable, they also make a lot of other people miserable.”

She said that as pastors, “their capacity for dispersing misery is really immense. That worries me greatly.”

Continue reading @ the Irish Times

Catholic Priesthood Based Around 'Fundamental Lie'

From the Irish Times former president Mary McAleese claims that the Catholic priesthood is based around a 'fundamental lie'. 

By Sarah McDonald

Former president of Ireland and the new Chancellor of Trinity College Dublin, Professor Mary McAleese has said she believes the Catholic priesthood is based around “a fundamental lie”. 

She told a conference in TCD on Saturday attended by up to 400 people, including the Provost, Dr Patrick Prendergast, that a clericalised priesthood was not attracting vocations today and that many of those who are attracted to priesthood have a “deeply problematic” sexuality because the Church demands that those priests and seminarians who are not heterosexual pretend to be.

Recalling the six years she spent studying for a doctorate in canon law in Rome, living in the environs of a seminary and monastery, she said she had encountered many young seminarians and priests.

“I became very much aware of the dysfunction at the heart of seminary life and the dysfunction at the heart of much of the priesthood.” 


The number of fake-hetero misogynistic homophobic gays I met frightened me. The homophobia of people who are gay is a lie - it is a vicious lie. But they live it and in living it, apart from making themselves miserable, they also make a lot of other people miserable.”

She said that as pastors, “their capacity for dispersing misery is really immense. That worries me greatly.”

Continue reading @ the Irish Times

5 comments:

  1. All this because a priest isn't allowed to marry. My brother-in-law was an altar boy, was even taken with his twin brother to meet the Pope (John) back in the 80's. Fast forward 30 years that priest is dead but with multiple accusations of abuse leveled at him during the Australian Royal Commission. My BIL says nothing happened but by chance he is now a very well respected psychiatrist who has worked extensively for both the state and federal governments down here. He was asked, in an official capacity to send recommendations to the Royal Commission which he obliged.

    Number one was absolutely NOTHING would change in the RC Church until they allowed priests to marry. He made the sobering assessment that gay men brought up in the stifling culture that Catholicism represented globally when it came to family life left little alternative for many young gay males as well, and as a vocation the priesthood was attractive as it provided an excuse not to seek a spouse or have a family. Tragically this cover was also available to pedophiles who as we all now know have exploited this path with horrendous results.

    And all this because a priest isnt allowed to marry.

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    1. Really ? You surely cannot be unfamiliar with the term, "Beard" as applied to the (often, but not always) unsuspecting wife of a dishonest homosexual man. English upper-middle class society was rife with such "arrangements" until more recent times and the House of Commons held quite a few of such individuals. Do we really believe that allowing Catholic priests to marry would solve the problem of sexual predators among the priesthood ? Would not unmarried priests be allowed? And would it not be reasonable to assume that a higher number of such unmarried priests would be repressed or conscious but closeted homosexuals? We must realise that openly gay priests would not be tolerated and certainly no homosexual married couples. Has it been understood that there might be a number of homosexual men who would take a wife in order to aid progress to the priesthood and helps disguise any intent to find victims more readily? Oh, and are there some so naïve as to believe that married heterosexual men are immune to thoughts of sexual predatory and subsequently then acting upon such thoughts? There is no evidence that John Christie of Rillington Place and Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper were both married as have been countless lay molesters of hapless children, indeed many such molestors have been the fathers of their victims. I can understand that some (erroneously) see the marriage of priests as a solution to clerical sexual abuse of children by the sexual release it is assumed will be provided in the marital state. The naivitee of such an assumption is quite astounding; so naïve, in fact, that we might be forgiven for thinking that it arose from the mindset of those priests we have encountered in the confessional whose ignorance of sexual mores and practice was enough to cause alarm to well balanced teenagers.

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  2. Back in the 1960s young Irish people were being told that they could channel their sex urge into a religious vocation. Fr Lucius McClean actually used that line in his Sunday Independent column. The result was that a disproportionate number of those who entered the church were struggling with their sexuality and some of them went on to become abusers. As Conrad Baars explained in his 1971 report to the Vatican, many of them came from dysfunctional homes and were psycho-sexually immature. And as Marie Keenan found, some of those who became clerical child sexual abusers traced their offending back through their seminary experiences of religious formation and down into their own childhood experiences. As I argue in my book "Love's Betrayal:.." developmental psychologist John Bowlby's theory of 'attachment' helps explain that pattern:
    It helps explain how growing up in ‘fine Catholic homes’ that were lacking in love (Baars) and those that Scheper-Hughes called ‘novitiate for violence’ could produce pathological narcissists and avoidant types who craved affection but feared intimacy and who felt or believed it when told that they could channel their sex urges into a religious vocation only to find themselves relying on the morally absolute doctrine of celibacy and such masochistic means as self-flaggelation to suppress any inherent or acquired ‘weakness in the will and unbridled desires in the heart’ [original sin]. https://www.peterlang.com/view/title/61592

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  3. Thanks for that comment - it would have made for a fine article as well. Having googled it, the book seems to be well worth the read.

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  4. Read the post, read the comments. Steve and Peter in their comments only touched on the subject. Put these two men together with library facilities and assistants and I think they could find out what is the "origin" of what we despise. Much research required in this area, at least before 5000 BC., or their about. Hard call for Mary McAleese, that took guts and determination. Sometimes it's hard to NOT like what you don't like. I find this useful.

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