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Showing posts with label Mary McAleese. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Mary McAleese. Show all posts
Irish Times ➨ Mary McAleese says church hierarchy is a ‘small, self-serving hermetically-sealed group of men’
 
By Shauna Bowers

The Catholic church ‘is 1.2 billion people which is why I stay’, former president Mary McAleese told BBC 4 Woman’s Hour programme.  

Former President of Ireland Mary McAleese has said people are leaving the Catholic church “in droves” because they are tired of “little old men, trying to beat the drum of obedience”.

In an interview with BBC Radio 4’s Women’s Hour on Thursday, Ms McAleese, who is a licensed canon lawyer as well as a civil lawyer, said she is a person of faith but is also “a person with a thinking brain”.

McAleese said she studied canon law to have “credibility” when criticising the church. She has openly spoken about misogyny in the Catholic church, but admitted that nothing she had ever said had changed anything.

She attributed this lack of progress to the church’s hierarchy, which she described as a “ small, self-serving hermetically-sealed group of men”.

Continue reading @ Irish Times.

People Leaving Catholic Church Because They Are Tired Of ‘Little Old Men’ – Mcaleese

In the Irish Times Former Irish President Mary McAleese urges Ireland to show kindness to strangers and speaks of ‘cowardly’ bishops.

By Patsy McGarry

Former president Mary McAleese has said it bothers her greatly to see people who are strangers to Ireland treated in ways that are contrary “to the ethic of our country and our people”.

Without specific reference to protests against accommodating asylum seekers in Achill, Ballinamore, and Oughterard, she spoke on Saturday of people who had to leave their homes and:

suddenly they have nowhere, and nothing. And now they rely on the kindness of strangers …  My God tells me I have to be the stranger who is kind. That simple . . . it bothers me greatly finding that [in] a country that I’m so proud of, that sometimes people are not experiencing the kindness that I know is the ethic of our country and our people.
She pointed out: “We relied on it [kindness] ourselves so often when we went as emigrants to other countries, poor, our two hands the one length, looking for opportunity.”

Continue reading @ the Irish Times.

Strangers & Cowardly Bishops

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'

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