"Mary McAleese Profile" by John Cooney.

Mary McAleese Profile by J The Phoenix, 25 February 2018.

The Vatican’s boycott of former President of Ireland and devout Catholic feminist, Mary McAleese - The Outsider as her unofficial biographer Justine McCarthy christened her - was predictably controversial. But Mary’s victimisation has elevated her from a previous role as bridge-builder between Catholic nationalism and Ulster Unionism, into a more universal role as de facto Leader of the Pope’s Loyal Opposition on the central issue of gender change.

This transformation of Ireland’s most theologically literate politician is the principal tangible result so far of the ill-judged decision of a Dublin-born Prince of the Church, Cardinal Kevin Farrell, to declare her persona non grata within the lofty literary salons of the tiny but sovereign Vatican City State.

The 70-year old Farrell’s banning of Mrs McAleese and two other dissident speakers from expressing their support for gays at a venue inside the Vatican on International Women’s Day has highlighted a dangerous rift between the male-dominated centre of Christendom and educated women like McAleese who value independent intellectual freedom. The men frocks still stereotype the vocation of women to traditional motherhood and baking apple pie for their large families.   

A brief look at McAleese’s curriculum vitae would surely have alerted Farrell to the folly of scorning a leading light of what John Knox ridiculed as ”the monstrous regiment of women “ during the Scottish the Scottish Reformation 500 years ago. Mary Patricia Leneghan was born in June 1951 as the eldest of nine children to parents who ran a pub in the working class district of the Ardoyne, north Belfast. When the Troubles broke out in the late 1960s the Leneghans were forced to leave the area by marauding Loyalists.

In a dazzling career that began in Mercy Convent, Crumlin Road, Belfast, and proceeded to St. Dominic’s High School on the Falls Road and Queens University, Mary’s first incursion into the Republic was in 1975 as the Reid Professor of Criminal Law at Trinity College, Dublin, in succession to Mary Robinson. Along the way she married dentist Martin McAleese and reared a family while also working as a barrister and an RTE presenter between 1979 and 1981. She  also formed part of the Catholic Bishops’ delegation to the New Ireland Forum in 1984 when Taoiseach Charles J. Haughey, who admired her performance at the Forum, saw her as a middle class vote winner in the Dublin South-East Constituency. The calculation that she would win a second seat for Fianna Fail did not materialise in the 1987 election, so she announced her retirement from politics and returned North. A decade later, she was parachuted back into Queens as Pro-Vice Chancellor, only to return south and re-enter politics winning the Fianna Fail nomination for the Presidency against an incredulous Albert Reynolds, going on to win the top job in 1997 and, unchallenged, in 2005.

Theologising was a hallmark of her period as Ulster’s First Citizen of the Irish Republic. She fell foul of then Archbishop Desmond Connell for receiving “sham” Communion in the Church of Ireland Cathedral of Christ Church and clashed with a patronising Cardinal Bernard Law in Boston over women’s role in the church. She joined Basic, an organisation advocating the ordination of women to the priesthood, which irked Connell and in 1997 she addressed priests on her opposition to a Vatican document, Dominus Iesus, which ruled that Protestants did not belong to “proper churches”.

Thus, Cardinal Farrell’s imperial decision to bar Mrs McAleese from speaking on the subject of “Why Women Matter” in the Vatican’s hallowed Pius IV lecture room was unwise, indeed. His decision was trumped by the counter-decision of the organiser, Austrian lawyer,Chantal Götz, to switch the one day Voices of Faith conference on March 8 to the nearby Jesuit aula, which is strategically and suitably situated on Italian soil. The immediate two-fold effect of the plucky Chantal’s refusal to obey Farrell has been to guarantee a sell-out attendance at the feminist colloquium, and an upgrading of Mary Mac to keynote speaker from her original ranking as a panel contributor.

There, the matter might have ended in a spectacular stand-off which would have left Cardinal Farrell with egg all over his scarlet cassock, while McAleese and the two other speakers were free to enjoy high-brow conversations in the trattoria around the Borgo Pio and the Via della Conciliazione. Her two other feminist martyrs are Ssenfuka Joanita Warry, a Catholic gay campaigner for LGBT rights in Uganda, and Zuzanna Radzik, a rare radical Polish theologian, who wants the Catholic Church to espouse gender change to attract more young people to “the Faith”. 

                                              Fall-out stakes

However, the fall-out stakes for Il Papa and the Vatican were raised considerably when a defiant McAleese wrote to Pope Francis about her treatment by Cardinal Farrell. She has declined to comment further while awaiting the Pope’s response to her letter and in effect has put it up to the Pontiff to disown Cardinal Farrell, a former member of the secretive, ultra-right-wing and recently disgraced Legionaries of Christ organisation, founded by Fr. Marcial Maciel Degollado. A Mexican whose lavish and corrupt lifestyle was shielded by Pope John Paul II, Maciel was disciplined by Pope Benedict XVI for sexually abusing seminarians and she 

Educated in Franco’s Spain and American Universities, Farrell rose to leadership rank as an auxiliary bishop in Washington D.C. and, subsequently, as Bishop of Dallas, Texas, before moving in 2016 to Rome, at Francis’s request, to head the Vatican’s Congregation for Laity, Family and Life. In that powerful capacity the normally bluff Farrell assumed responsibility for overseeing the forthcoming International Conference of World Families, which is to be held in Dublin, from August 21-26, hosted by Archbishop Diarmuid Martin – and which is due to be attended by none other than Pope Francis himself.                                     

This is not the first time Mary McAleese has found herself at loggerheads with the Vatican on the issue of gender and she was most adversarial in May 2015 when Ireland became the first country in the world to approve same sex marriage in law by popular acclaim. It was around this time that she revealed that her son Justin was a homosexual and she spoke eloquently of how he was bullied by his contemporaries and went through mental torture when he discovered that his beloved Catholic Church taught that homosexuality was “an intrinsic psychological disorder”.

                                                 Old Boys’ Club

This was followed, in autumn 2015, when world bishops spent three weeks in Rome with Pope Francis deliberating on family matters, including the thorny question of allowing divorcees who remarried in civil law admission to the sacrament of Holy Communion. For their troubles, these earnest male celibate bishops were derided by the increasingly hawkish McAleese as “the old boys’ club.”   

Yet, in hindsight, the origins of McAleese’s divergence from Vatican teaching are detectable in the publication in autumn 2012 of her book, Quo Vadis? Collegiality in the Code of Canon Law. This was the product of her canon law and theological studies during her two-term presidential years at Dublin’s Milltown Institute, followed by a three year doctorate post-graduate course in canon law at Rome’s Gregorian University. It was at a lavish launch of Quo Vadis? in south Dublin’s leafy Rathgar – and in the presence of priests silenced by the Vatican including Fr Brian D’Arcy, the late Sean Fagan and Redemptorists, Raymond Maloney and Tony Flannery - that she declared: “I’m here for the long haul… Why and where in the Roman system has  Christian love been blocked by harsh ecclesiastical structures?” she pointedly asked. 

Her strictures sound less valid in the light of the renewed reformism under Pope Francis, who succeeded Benedict five years ago in March 2013 after the latter’s unexpected retirement. Perhaps McAleese’s continuing studies and professorial work at the Catholic University in London have caused her to underestimate Francis’s teaching on love, propounded in his post Synodal encyclical, Amoris Laetitiae – the Joy of Love.  Using the image of a mother who cannot renounce her child, Pope Francis urged the Church to “accompany with attention and care the weakest of her children, who show signs of a wounded and troubled love, by restoring in them hope and confidence.” (Amoris Laetitia, Section 291).

Clearly, this marks a subtle shift in Catholic teaching which regarded the traditional marriage as composed solely of a husband, a wife and children. According to Francis, however, there are no perfect marriages or families, and all human loving is in some way “troubled”.  Not surprisingly, this encyclical is regarded as heretical by the old guard in the Roman Curia who fear that Francis, the first ever Jesuit pontiff, is undermining by stealth Pope Paul VI’s condemnation of artificial forms of birth control, in his 1968 encyclical, Humanae Vitae. Indeed, Francis’s emphasis on the theological virtue of mercy rather than censure is on McAleese’s wavelength.

The demonising of Cardinal Farrell overlooks the support for him among “the simple faithful”, not least in Drimnagh, where he and his older brother, Bishop Brian Farrell, a strong figure in the Roman Curia, were born in the 1940s Ireland of Archbishop John Charles McQuaid. According to parish priest, Canon John Flaherty, the two Farrell brothers were born into “a faith-tilled family”. So proud is Canon Flaherty of the parish’s two former altar boys that he is tempted to place an early bet on Cardinal Farrell “rising to become Ireland’s first native Pope”.  

Admiration for old style religious certitude was also in abundance earlier this month at a Festival of Faith in Galway, where Fr. Eugene Barrett, OFM, spiritual director, told the Galway Advertiser that a unique attraction for the 250 attendees were the purchase of Benedictine Crucifixes, blessed in the discredited Marian Shrine of Medjugorje. The keynote speaker was Breda O’Brien, a well-known conservative Catholic propagandist.  The newsmaker, however, was Papal Nuncio, Archbishop Jude Thaddeus Okolo, a Nigerian  who took over last year  from the more showy Archbishop Charles J. Brown, a New Yorker and  ex-member of the Vatican Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. Okolo apologised on behalf of Pope Francis for a mood of “discouragement and disappointment” for Catholics in an increasingly secularist society. He did so without citing the scathing findings of the Ryan-Murphy reports into clerical sexual abuse and church cover-ups, and rounded on the media for reporting only negative stories about the Church. Next day Okolo presided at the installation as bishop of Galway of the liberal-sounding Brendan O’Kelly, who is on record as saying the Dublin conference should welcome not only orthodox Catholics but also embrace "people from the peripheries".

                                     

Okolo’s outlook is worth examination, because in the critical six month run into the Dublin Conference, he will be an important link between Cardinal Farrell and Archbishop Diarmuid Martin. Undoubtedly, Farrell exceeded his authority by not consulting Archbishop Martin. Without mentioning Cardinal Farrell by name, Martin, himself a former Vatican diplomat, astutely said that he first heard of the decision from Mrs McAleese herself. His office added that the archbishop has “consistently” noted that the World Meeting of Families will be an inclusive event, open to all families and family members”. Farrell’s intemperate unilateral action threatens this noble aim.

                                                  Papal visit

Cardinal Farrell may have been demonised by the media’s “monstrous regiment” by Sarah MacDonald, Mary Kenny, Justine McCarthy, Mary McAuliffe, Derbhail McDonald and from across the Atlantic pond by Bishop Bridget Mary Meehan of the Association of Catholic Women Priests. But crucial detective work has been done by two mere men: Brendan Butler and Colum Holmes of the liberal-minded Catholic reform organisation, We Are Church, which has just recruited retired TV journalist, Ursula Halligan, who declared she was gay during the equality referendum.

 They were amazed to discover that the World Meeting of Families had reprinted their main booklet, deleting all photos which showed two members of the same gender together, and that the main objections to these photos came from extreme right-wing groups in the USA. “The booklet makes no reference whatsoever to LGBT, single parent families, divorced and remarried or cohabiting couples - all of which are important parts of society in Ireland”, they stated.
    

Attempts to mend fences are going in cloistered rooms. Although Pope Francis has been invited to attend the McAleese lecture on March 8, he will not do so. Nor will he fire Farrell. But His Holiness will have to make a placatory gesture towards McAleese. Much will depend on the McAleese-Martin relationship, perhaps discreetly aided by Cardinal Sean Brady, whose elevation to the College of Cardinals in 2007 was attended by McAleese. Already there are disquieting vibes for the organisers, Fr Tim Bartlett and Anne Griffin, that Francis will not attract anything like the throng that flocked to see Pope John Paul II in 1979 in the Phoenix Park. Even volunteer numbers have not reached the expected 3,500 target, with many of these being retired civil servants on State pensions.

It is expected that Pope Francis will announce within weeks his coming to Dublin. Plans are well advanced for his itinerary which may satisfy Archbishop Michael Neary of Tuam with a second papal visit to Knock’s Marian Shrine. Archbishop Eamon Martin of Armagh wants him to visit the See of St Patrick – but if the North has returned to direct rule from Westminster will Il Papa be met there by British Prime Minister Theresa May?

As for Dublin, will Archbishop Diarmuid come up with a diplomatic master plan that produces a platform of liberals and conservatives, graced by abuse survivor Marie Collins, Breda O’Brien, Ursula Halligan and, of course, Mary McAleese?  Mary Patricia McAleese may be close to joining such outspoken women as St Joan of Arc and St Catherine of Siena who spoke their minds to popes and won. Such a line-up would surely see a grateful Pope Francis conferring a Red Hat on Diarmuid Martin.