Madam, – Your edition of December 12th records the readmission to the serving Catholic ministry of Michael Moloney, who was laicised in 1971 and married the following year. His wife died in 2005.
As this remarkable story unfolds, Cardinal Brady is threatening to take a proposed law permitting civil unions to the Supreme Court, ostensibly to defend the institution of heterosexual marriage.
Could the cardinal please explain how the status of the same institution is advanced by the rules of his own church, which obliged a priest to relinquish his priestly role in order to marry, and then required the death of this man’s wife to allow him to retrieve that role 37 years later? Can he think of a greater insult to heterosexual marriage? – Yours, etc,