McAleese reveals she is often mistaken for a nun in Rome

Sarah MacDonald
Catholic Ireland news
Oct. 23, 2012

Former president of Ireland, Mary McAleese, has said she is often mistaken for a nun at the university where she is studying canon law in Rome.

At the official launch of her new book, Quo Vadis? Collegiality in the Code of Canon Law, the former head of state recounted how clerics at the Gregorian University regularly take her for a nun or a consecrated virgin.

....... Mrs McAleese said no amount of flashing her engagement and wedding rings seemed to make any difference because lay people at the university are so few.

The presence of the laity would be one of the great changes for the future of the Church she said.

The total population of the Church globally was 1.6 billion of whom 99.9 per cent are lay people, Mrs McAleese noted.

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“The Church isn’t quite sure how to handle us yet because, of course, for most of the 2,000 years they haven’t had to deal with an educated laity. ....

"This is one of the major difficulties of adjustment for this Church today, an educated laity living in democracies where they have freedom of speech, freedom of conscience and in the public space, access to every kind of science, every kind of analysis in order to bring all of that to bear on the opinions that they form.” She said this is, “a big challenge” for the institutional Church and it is a challenge that post-dates Vatican II because even at Vatican II there was not a mass-educated laity.

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Expressing her gratitude once again to Sr Elizabeth Cotter, IBVM, who was unable to attend the launch and was represented by Sr Jane Carey, IBVM, from Portglenone, Co Antrim, “a good Northern woman”, Mrs McAleese said, the former head of state then added that having obtained a Masters in Canon Law under Sr Cotter’s supervision, she was able to undertake a licentiate in Canon Law in the Gregorian in Rome and having obtained that, she was now undertaking a doctorate.

Elsewhere in her address, Mary McAleese paid tribute to the Irish Church’s five silenced priests, of whom Frs Sean Fagan, Brian D’Arcy, Tony Flannery and Gerry Moloney were present for the launch.

In a strongly worded rebuke to the institutional Church for its treatment of the five, Mrs McAleese said they are, “living with such grief.”

She described Marist Sean Fagan and Redemptorist Tony Flannery as, “good men who have loved this Church with a passion,” and who are living through a time when they are being asked were they “real Catholics.”

“Are we living with Christ if we are obliged to live in silence, in a silence which consumes the truth,” she asked, and she accused the Vatican of succumbing to fear in its handling of these priests.

“There is a fear at the centre of how they can cope with these voices. One of the ways in which it was dealt with is to iterate the demand for obedience,” she said, and added that this demand for obedience has contributed to the clerical abuse scandals.

“It was translated into a really really dangerous silence where children suffered abominably. It may also have contributed to the terminal decline of the Church. It, certainly made the Church very very ill,” she acknowledged.

Referring to the title of her book, which asks the Church where it is headed, she said the faithful are now being asked today whether they want to stand and make a fight against this or to disappear out the door and no longer appear in the pews.

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One of the, “most wonderful moments in the wake of Vatican II,” she recalled was when Pope Paul VI took off his episcopal ring and handed it to the then Archbishop of Canterbury, Michael Ramsey. The gesture said the Pope accepted not just his priesthood but accepted him as a bishop.

“I remember thinking that in the country that I lived in and in the city that I lived in where religious division was so brutal and so violent and contemptuous, that here was our hope; here was our future.”

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