Opinion

Fionnuala O Connor: Catholics facing a testing time over Eighth Amendment and further abuse revelations

Paedophile Fr Malachy Finegan who died in 2002
Paedophile Fr Malachy Finegan who died in 2002 Paedophile Fr Malachy Finegan who died in 2002

The Republic faces into its latest referendum on abortion, with most of the south surely hoping for less poison than before.

Northern Catholics meanwhile have to recognise, yet again, a decades-long silence on priestly abuse. On the two issues, so closely linked by their Church’s history on both, clerics and devout laity alike must be struggling to keep their feet.

For a moment there, it looked as though former campaign warrior and former president Mary McAleese might become part of the campaign to repeal the Eighth. The moment passed in an RTE interview yesterday, where she said that her youngest brother had been ‘seriously sadistically abused by Malachy Finegan’ and called for an independent inquiry.

As to the campaign she said ‘absolutely not, I will not be taking part’. Though it was clear she has changed her mind about the amendment. She had found ‘quite compelling’ the obstetricians who said they were ‘hamstrung’ in how they treated women by the Eighth. ‘As somebody who supported the Eighth Amendment I’m disappointed at how it has rolled out,’ she said. ‘We never intended that...’

Echoes of Fianna Fáil leader Micheál Martin in the Dáil on January 18 though a lot less forthright, which is not the McAleese style. In Rome last week she accused Pope Francis of patronising women, calling for a church where women ‘truly matter’, a church of equals worthy of Christ. Because it would not survive in its current form otherwise, she told a press conference, the hierarchy having ‘reduced Christ to this rather unattractive politician who is just misogynistic and homophobic and anti-abortion.’

Her barnstorming later speech upstaged the ‘anti-abortion’ remark, and she refused to elaborate until yesterday. But linking abortion to her main topic of Church misogyny reflects the debate on social morality - although McAleese this time is well behind the curve. Micheál Martin told the Dáil straightforwardly that he had changed his mind and after listening to women and experts now believed there should be legal abortion without restriction until 12 weeks of pregnancy.

McAleese said yesterday that her thinking process is not complete.

Nobody knows better than she does whose faith has kept the Catholic Church in Ireland afloat. A ‘priest-mother alliance’, she calls it. Women are ‘the primary handers-on of the faith to their children’. Once she fronted up the Church delegation to the New Ireland Forum as super-articulate lawyer and lay-woman. In Rome she was telling the hierarchy, and the pope, that her patience is exhausted. As ‘a Catholic mother and a Catholic woman, the people who let me down are not very far from here’, she said.

Not for the first time she called the refusal to have women priests ‘misogynist codology dressed up as theology’. When Sean O’Rourke asked yesterday if she wondered was she the ‘token woman’ in Cardinal Cahal Daly’s team in the 1984 New Ireland Forum she said ‘I can’t remember, it’s too long ago. No point asking me.’

But in and around bitter past campaigns McAleese has written and spoken as a loyal Catholic woman, academic, journalist, against contraception, divorce, IVF and most passionately, against abortion.

In 1987 in a Catholic Church video opposing IVF she interviewed an Australian Anglican priest - who said 90 per cent of women with damaged fallopian tubes using IVF had caused the damage themselves through abortion, sexually transmitted disease or through using IUDs. McAleese asked him ‘is this apparent compassionate technique actually dangerous and subtle?’

In 1992 the Irish Supreme Court rejected the Attorney General’s plea that a raped pregnant 14 year old (dubbed Miss X) should not be allowed travel to Britain for a termination. The court said terminations should be lawful when a woman's life was in danger or she was at risk of suicide. Miss X miscarried. The government chose a referendum instead of legislating. McAleese co-signed a letter to the Irish Press praising them for recognising ‘that the threat of suicide provides no medical justification whatever for abortion.’

Five years later she became the second Irish female president and as she geared up for the Áras played down some past stances. ‘At the time I didn’t know anything about IVF,’ she said about that video.

It is still intriguing to hear her hit a new note. Decades ago she complained of the old men crouched ‘behind rusty barricades’ who ran the Church. What to make now of Mary McAleese? Yet another question for women still patching up the barricades, and comforting a clergy beset once more by revelations of a prominent priest abuser immune until well past his death.