The Coadjutor Archbishop of Dublin, Dr Diarmuid Martin, said last night he had no comment to make "for the moment" on a challenge by Senator David Norris to publicly debate the Catholic Church's teaching on homosexuality.
The Archbishop said he had been attending confirmation ceremonies yesterday and had yet to get a transcript of what Senator Norris had said about the issue on RTÉ Radio's News at One programme yesterday.
Senator Norris accused the Archbishop of defending "a gospel of hatred" where homosexuality was concerned.
He said the Catholic Church's use of language about homosexuality, such as "evil", "objectively disordered" and "deviant", had provoked a climate in which six people he knew had been murdered.
Archbishop Martin also said last night that he had spoken to Archdeacon Gordon Linney, whose comments on Catholic Church teaching on homosexuality had prompted the Archbishop to express his "hurt" in an address at St Patrick's Cathedral, Dublin, last Sunday. Dr Martin emphasised that his comments had not been a personal attack on the Archdeacon.
Last night also Archdeacon Linney said he appreciated the call from Archbishop Martin, which had been friendly.
Speaking in Monkstown, Co Dublin, on March 9th Archdeacon Linney had said of homosexuality that "the Roman Catholic tradition, along with Protestant fundamentalism, has taken a very strong and definite stand. My own Anglican Communion struggles and suffers.
"But I have to ask how people who are so certain about homosexuality being evil could have been so indifferent and even devious when it came to facing up to the issue of child abuse. Which has done the greater harm?"
Last Sunday Archbishop Martin said: "It would not be honest of me speaking here today in a Church of Ireland cathedral not to refer to a certain hurt that I felt in these days by words attributed in the press to a Church of Ireland figure which somehow gave the impression that those who hold different theological positions to the author on the subject of homosexuality were perhaps less sincere, even fundamentalist, or were associated with having been 'devious' on other serious issues."
"The Roman Catholic tradition is not distant from the Protestant tradition of 'searching'. The Roman Catholic tradition also 'struggles and suffers' as it wrestles with the joys and hopes, the sorrows and the anguish of the people of each generation.
"The answers arrived at in various cases may not always have been fully authentic."