IRELAND
Irish Times
Joe Humphreys
Mon, Jun 16, 2014
Former president Mary McAleese has described as “completely bonkers” Pope Francis’s plan to ask a synod of bishops to advise him on whether church teaching on the family should change.
She said there was “just something profoundly wrong and skewed” about asking “150 male celibates” to review the Catholic Church’s teaching on family life.
Commenting on a planned October synod in Rome on the issue, she said: “The very idea of 150 people who have decided they are not going to have any children, not going to have families, not going to be fathers and not going to be spouses – so they have no adult experience of family life as the rest of us know it – but they are going to advise the pope on family life; it is completely bonkers.”
She was speaking in a public interview at UCD to mark her receipt of the university’s highest honour, the Ulysses medal.
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