Mary McAleese

17 March 2021

By: email Archbishop Eamon Martin President, Irish Ard Coeli Cathedral Road Co. Armagh

Re: Responsum of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith to a dubium regarding the blessing of the unions of persons of the same sex

Dear Archbishop Martin,

I attach a copy of a letter I have written to and to The Tablet in response to the recent Responsum ad dubium and explanatory memorandum from the CDF which was validated by .

I wrote to you some weeks ago seeking support from the Conference for the 2020 Global Interfaith Commission’s Declaration of the Sanctity of Life and the Dignity of all which acknowledges the harm done to our gay brothers and sisters by the language employed historically within faith systems. Now I am writing again to ask if there is even one among you willing to acknowledge publicly that the language used in this most recent document from CDF is gratuitously cruel in the extreme.

I did not expect the answer to the dubium to be positive. I am not that naïve. But I did not anticipate the unbearably vicious language which can only have brought more heartache to our gay children and to us their families. Heartache and hurt fired like a missile from the centre of governance of the Church. Foolishly I dared to hope the language might reflect a growing awareness of the damage Church language has already wrought.

That it does not is simply unacceptable and more than that it bodes ill for the Synodal journey the Irish bishops, encouraged by Pope Francis, are inviting the faithful to embark upon. Is it really an open, honest, good faith invitation to a listening dialogue especially to those who have left the Church or who are hanging on by a thread? Or have the die already been cast? Is it little more than a thinly disguised project of the “New Evangelization” at the end of which those who conscientiously disagree with aspects of Church teaching on a litany of well- rehearsed issues will be told in the words of the recent document from the CDF to “recognize the genuine nearness of the Church” and “receive its teachings with openness”. In other words expect no change on the part of the magisterium but expect to be asked to renew obedience to it despite your conscientious opinions.

If that is to be the Synodal journey you can be sure it is already doomed to failure. I hope you plan something better but am not at all reassured by Cardinal Grech’s talk to the Irish bishops or the IEC’s statement where the leitmotif of re-evangelization over and against the Big Bad Wolf of secularism is much more evident than a realistic appraisal of the internal Church reasons for growing levels of disinterest and disengagement. It is still early enough to start this journey well but for as long as the CDF’s words, endorsed by Pope Francis hang in the ether so will a cloud of well-founded skepticism.

I appeal to you, please acknowledge the hurt these words of CDF and Pope Francis have caused and will keep on causing. You represent one of the key influencers of Irish society. The Catholic Church runs ninety percent of our primary schools and fifty percent of our second level schools. School children in faith based schools have rights under the Convention on the Rights of the Child. Our government is a State Party to that Convention (as is the Holy See) and thus a protector of those rights. Among them is the right of our children not to be exposed to cruelly-worded teachings that conduce to homophobia by presenting same sex married couples as ipso facto sinful and incapable of receiving God’s grace. We already know the dysfunction and damage those teachings have caused in the past and the message from the same sex marriage referendum was a resounding “Stop”. Did you not hear it?

It has been heartening over these past few days to see clerics and bishops (though not from Ireland in the case of the latter) take issue with the language of the Responsum’s Explanatory Memorandum. Their courage is commendable. Is there any vestige of such episcopal courage here? Without it there can be no genuine Synodal journey if that journey merely circles back to the starting place, like the CDF’s appallingly ill-worded explanatory memorandum to the Responsum.

My very best wishes

Mary McAleese

Response by Mary McAleese

to

Responsum of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith to a dubium regarding the blessing of the unions of persons of the same sex

15 March 2021

“Who am I to judge?” said Pope Francis in 2013 in answer to a ’s question about gay Catholics. With those five little words Francis was instantly deemed to have rebranded the Catholic Church from judgmental to merciful. He avoided using the cruel words of Church teaching on homosexuality and homosexual acts like “objectively disordered” or “intrinsically evil”. More recently he even seemed to support same-sex civil partnerships. But appearances can be deceptive and words can raise expectations only to disappoint. That is specially true of this Pope whose chummy words to the Press often quite reasonably raise hopes of Church reform which are subsequently almost invariably dashed by firm restatements of unchanged Church teaching. Encouraged by Francis’s spoken words some Cardinals, bishops and priests have been confidently offering blessings to Catholic couples who have entered same-sex civil marriages. It is impossible to imagine the spiritual comfort, the hope and sense of inclusion this has provoked. It has also provoked this week’s withering response from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith on the question whether the Church can offer such blessings. The answer is not simply an emphatic and disappointing “No”. It is a litany of judgmental statements wrapped in syrupy language which asks gay Catholics to

“recognise the genuine nearness of the Church and asks them to receive its teachings with “openness”. How likely one wonders is that when the same document tells them that any blessing which “tends to recognise their union” “is illicit”, for it would “approve and encourage a choice and a way of life that cannot be recognized as objectively ordered to the revealed plans of God”. God “does not and cannot bless sin”. Same sex marriages cannot “be objectively and positively ordered to receive and express grace, according to the designs of God inscribed in creation, and fully revealed by Christ the Lord”. Pope Francis gave his assent to this document, firmly answering his own question “Who am I to judge?”. When he is on a plane shooting the breeze with he is the populist Pope who is trumpeted as the Great Reformer, a label he seems to relish.

Behind his desk he is the Pope who toes the old hard line”.