Mary McAleese: Vatican authority over Catholics is ‘legally and morally questionable’

Vatican authority over Catholics “belongs to an old disintegrating empire of generals and conscripts” and was “legally and morally questionable”, former president Dr Mary McAleese has said.

Dr McAleese, who was speaking in Rome at Spirit Unbounded, a lay-led synodal process involving over 40 Catholic reform organisations taking place this week in parallel with the Vatican Synod on Synodality, said that: “Human rights are central to the equality which is God’s inalienable gift to all his children. We believe that the Catholic Church, which should be and could be an exemplar of that equality and respect for human rights, is not.”

Instead, it was “languishing in a deepening credibility crisis” because it had failed “to reform an outdated internal structure of governance, teachings and laws in which inequality is embedded and in which the human rights of members are routinely restricted”. This applied especially where “the fundamental intellectual freedoms of expression, opinion, conscience and religion including freedom to change religion” were concerned, she said.

Spirit Unbounded is described as “a synodal assembly for the uninvited” and speakers also included Cherie Blair and former minister for children and youth affairs Katherine Zappone. Participants have noted that just 14 per cent of voters at the Vatican Synod were women, with no openly gay person.

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The Synod on Synodality, which began on October 4th and continues to October 29th, was announced by Pope Francis in 2021 and follows an unprecedented worldwide consultation with Catholics on the church in the 21st century.

Major changes favoured by Catholics included equality for women up to and including ordination; an end to mandatory celibacy for priests; greater inclusion of gay people, the divorced and remarried, cohabiting couples and single parents; and greater involvement of laity in church governance. The Vatican Synod includes 364 voting delegates, 54 of whom are women.

Dr McAleese felt the inclusion of this “small cohort of women merely highlights the extent of the continuing gender imbalance at the core of church governance. It also highlights the resistance to equality in all its fullness. Equality is a right not a favour. The women attending the Synod on Synodality are there as a favour not as a right.”

Church teaching excluding women from ordination was “unscholarly sexist humbug masquerading as threadbare theology”, she said, while “the laws that regulate life inside the church” were “often oppressive and are not consonant with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child”.

[ Labels like liberal versus conservative do not fit Pope Francis or the Church he leads ]

Catholics worldwide, “beginning in the West” were “now actively dismantling what is widely accepted is a dysfunctional magisterial [Vatican] culture and its long list of unChristian teachings. They are doing it from the bottom up, hollowing out misogynistic, homophobic, judgmental and legalistic hierarchical authority by challenging, ignoring or bypassing it.”

Still “the gravitational pull of resistance to change is strong but we are here because we believe change is possible and essential. We are here to encourage the Synod of Bishops to capture the spiritual zeitgeist and reorient the church towards its Christian mission,” she said.

Reform required “a new legal infrastructure which unequivocally accepts the principle of equality of all church members and accepts their inalienable and indivisible human rights”, she said.

Meanwhile, at the Vatican Synod, participants are bound to silence. Dr McAleese commented that “veiled discussions behind closed doors which are subject to confidentiality and publishing restrictions are disappointingly old-school and smack of reluctance to trust even the Holy Spirit”.