Former Irish President McAleese criticizes Pope Francis

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Former Irish President Mary McAleese addresses the Root and Branch Synod on September 10. (Courtesy of the Root and Branch / Brek Taylor Synod)

A former president of Ireland has expressed reservations about Pope Francis’ leadership over the world Catholic Church, telling a British Church reform movement that the pontiff is “a conservative leader” who is fortunate to have enemies who make him seem more liberal than him.

Mary McAleese, a Catholic who ruled the Republic of Ireland from 1997 to 2011, cited the Vatican Doctrinal Office March document prohibiting priests from blessing same-sex unions on the grounds that God “cannot bless sin ”.

“It was a document that never had to be written, but it was, and he authorized it. It tells me how ultra-conservative he is,” McAleese told attendees of the Root and Branch, a gathering of laymen held from September 5-12.

McAleese, who after leaving public office earned a doctorate in canon law from the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome, said she did not view Francis as a great liberal reformer, nor as a brave one.

“The real space that opens up is not Pope Francis, but the great educated laity who now wonder all these years after Vatican II why the promises, hopes and expectations of Vatican II have all disappeared in a late death . ” Mary McAleese, Former President of Ireland

She called Francis a “very disorganized pope”. But she also told the synod that “in his chaotic way” the Pope had opened spaces for dialogue and debate.

“The real space that opens up is not Pope Francis, but the great educated laity who now wonder all these years after Vatican II why the promises, hopes and expectations of Vatican II have all disappeared in a late death McAleese said. “And how did we come to this clericalized and masterful bishopric that betrayed our trust in so many ways? Francois is really just reacting to this. “

McAleese has criticized Francis on several occasions in recent years, particularly on the role of women and LGBT people in the world church. In March, the former president told The Irish Times that the Pope was a populist and said that “his friendly words to the press often raise reasonably enough hopes for church reform which are subsequently almost invariably disappointed “.

She spoke to Racine and Branche, meeting in person and online, on the theme: “No synodality without freedom of expression Canon law must not recognize the human rights of members of the Church.

Former Irish President Mary McAleese addresses the Root and Branch Synod on September 10. (Courtesy of the Root and Branch / Brek Taylor Synod)

It was part of a series of lectures given by leading Catholic scholars and leaders of Church reform groups during the week-long synod.

Catholic synods are usually meetings of bishops, held in the Vatican, where lay people are invited to attend as experts without the right to vote. In January 2020, journalist Joanna Moorhead summoned in British Catholic magazine The Tablet for a synod that begins with the participation of lay people, especially women.

This call resulted in the year-long journey of the Root and Branch event, which was centered in Bristol, England, and heard calls for a radical overhaul of the way the church walks together and the need for reform. in the fields of inclusion, diversity, moral theology. and governance.

In her speech, for which she received a standing ovation, McAleese argued that while there is real value in developing a new culture of synodality in the church, “Synodality will only work, in fact the future. church will only function if it is firmly situated in a context where there is an unequivocal acceptance that church members are entitled to within the church and [by] all its laws and processes, including synods, to the inalienable human rights set forth in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948. ”

These rights, she stressed, include the equality of men and women, and their intellectual rights to freedom of expression, speech, thought, opinion, belief, conscience and religion, including the right to change religion.

McAleese said the church’s canon law places limits and restrictions on all of these rights. She said it was clear that in Francis’ notion of synodality, these issues were not open to discussion.

“Yet they urgently need to be,” McAleese said. “Without a change of course, there is little chance that the next synod on synodality will produce a measurable ecclesial thaw.”

Former Irish President Mary McAleese addresses the Root and Branch Synod on September 10. (Courtesy of the Root and Branch / Brek Taylor Synod)

McAleese was referring to the next official synod of the Catholic Church, which will be held in three phases from October 2021 to 2023. The first phase is to involve the local diocesan synods comprising lay people, the second to the larger continental synods and the third. the usual meeting of bishops at the Vatican in October 2023.

McAleese said she sees greater hope in the Root and Branch process and the German synodal path, a national process undertaken by the German Bishops’ Conference.

“We must hope and pray that a sufficient number of the faithful in each diocese, including laity, religious, priests and bishops, find the courage to insist that recognition in the law of the church of the equality and intellectual freedom of all members of the church be a priority in the national episcopal reports that will go to Rome for the 2023 synod, ”said McAleese.

If that happens, said the former Irish president, “it will be the most important reset button the church has ever touched.”

But McAleese expressed concern that there would be a “disinfection of commentaries” at the synod’s office in Rome, and she said the preparatory document, released on September 7, had shown signs that it had. was “meticulously designed to prevent comments from worshipers on contested masterly teaching, or on overlooked issues such as recognition of the equality and intellectual human rights of church members.”

Later stages of synod preparation will leave complete editorial control to national episcopal conferences, McAleese said. She said she feared that the laity would “disappear from the path” at the end of the first phase of the three-part synodal process and that a process of “secret disinfection” would take over and only the bishops actually walk together. . .

“It’s hard to see how this honors the principle of ‘nothing about us without us’. It is also difficult to see how this model of gagged synodality will produce an ecclesial spring. More likely, it will just prolong the ecclesial winter and ice on the green shoots of hope, ”said McAleese.

“Pope Francis’ notion of synodality, which once seemed to have captured the zeitgeist in favor of an inclusive church debate structure, now appears determined to prevent it and, at worst, to micromanage it until which is no longer relevant, “she said.

In the question-and-answer session that followed his speech, McAleese said that while the synodality process looked like bottom-up news, it was likely that by the time it reached the top, it would be “So filtered and so sanitized and so homogenized that all those adorable, rebellious, dissenting and insightful voices with new ideas will have long been filtered out.”

She suggested that as a precaution, to bypass this filtering, local synod groups like Root and Branch which she called “fringe synods” should collect their views, put them in a report and send it straight to the office. Vatican synod.

Scottish lawyer Helena Kennedy, baroness and member of the House of Lords, is one of the UK’s most respected jurists.

Speaking at a panel on “Insist on Sharing of Authority,” Kennedy said a radical overhaul of canon law should be a “key call” from the synod.

Kennedy also suggested that the church should establish a commission to oversee this review of canon law and that it should include lay people. The commission should “systematically review the structures of canon law and adapt them to the 21st century” and should sit in public when it hears testimony.

Describing herself as “a strong supporter of reform,” she said: “I really think we need to persuade the current leaders [in the church] that they must cede power to survive.

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