Authority based on ‘fictitious baptismal promises made by non-sentient babies’, says former president

The Catholic Church is at a critical crossroads in its history “and if it fails to choose the right path it risks an enduring permafrost”, former president Mary McAleese has said.

“Many of us are in growing despair of our Church’s inability to turn a critical spotlight on itself while shining a critical spotlight on the world at large,” she said, and referred to “its controlling clericalism, its cavalier misogyny, its evil homophobia, its institutional and clerical child sexual and physical abuse,its episcopal cover-ups that protected criminals and ignored victims, its lack of financial transparency and accountability”.

There was also “its relentless external advocacy of the right to life of the unborn while hypocritically ignoring the fact that the Church, whose primary mission is salvation, itself teaches that it cannot guarantee a right to eternal life for the…