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.
Addressing hundreds of well-wishers, including many who had travelled from Northern Ireland for the event at the Redemptorists’ centre in Marianella in Dublin, 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.
“But we don’t know anything about canon law because in the main, canon law has always been mediated through the expertise of priests or more latterly, religious,” she said. “For the first time ever in the 2,000 year history of the Catholic Church we have the phenomenon that Newman invested in, wanted, desired, had a vision for, this thing called an educated laity,” she told the assembled guests.
“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. They dealt with an elite that was an educated clergy and a very tiny tiny elite of an educated laity. Now they are dealing with a mass educated laity,” she commented.
"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.
“Just think about it, when the doors closed on Vatican II in 1965, Ireland did not then have free secondary education; that was still another five years away.” These changes had happened with, “an extraordinary and sometimes savage speed,” she said.
She paid tribute to the role of Sr Elizabeth Cotter, IBVM, in giving her the opportunity to study canon law, who, “at the end of a very distinguished career as head mistress of my daughter’s school in Loreto, went off to Canada to become a canon lawyer. When she came back she did something most unusual, she decided that she would open up the opportunity to lay people and anybody who was interested in studying canon law. She did that through Milltown,” Mary McAleese recalled.
“I am very grateful that it was at Milltown I was able to get tools to help me to analyse what was happening in this Church,” and through analysing this, she saw that the logjam in the Church is at the level of governance.
“So that is what this book is about, it is about governance in the Church and about the Church.”
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.
Earlier in his speech she paid tribute to Fr Alec Reid who is credited with helping to bring about peace talk in Northern Ireland, starting with the Hume-Adams dialogue.
Describing the renowned Redemptorist as, “my great mentor and friend, a man from whom I’ve drawn the greatest inspiration over my life,” she added that he is, “the true author of the peace process.”
She praised him for his role in helping her see that, “every single human being is God’s creation. They all have some part of them that can be reached through love, through tolerance and respect. That was the great gift that he helped me to understand in my life and that I was able to bring I hope to those years of the presidency.”
She was critical of the official Church’s lack of progress on ecumenism, calling the recent attendance of Anglican Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, and the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople at the opening of the Year of Faith in St Peter's as, “a photocall.”
The Second Vatican Council placed a new emphasis on better relations between the churches, but Mary McAleese decried the fact that, “nothing of substance,” had really translated into, “lived communion.”
She added, “Rowan Williams still cannot take communion in my Church,” and for that reason she intended to look at the, “ways in which I, with whatever brainpower I have, and however much energy I have, can I contribute to creating the unity that Christ has promised us.”
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.”