The controversial anti-abortion campaigner Father Paul Marx has described Archbishop Connell's remarks on children who are born to couples who plan their families as "strange".
The American Father Marx, who is best known in Ireland for having displayed a 14-week foetus in a bottle to teenage schoolgirls on a visit here in the 1970s, said Archbishop Connell "invited the criticism he got".
"I'm not convinced that planned children are less fortunate than those who are not planned. I think it was quite a strange remark," Father Marx told this newspaper.
He was speaking after delivering two talks at the Human Life International Conference on "Love, Life and the Family", which took place at the weekend in Dublin.
Father Marx, who is founder and chairman of Human Rights International, said he wished Archbishop Connell "had said more about contraception" which, Father Marx argues, inevitably leads to abortion, and ultimately euthanasia.
Father Marx said the Catholic "faith is increasingly weak" in Ireland and the Irish "may have lost the battle already" against abortion becoming available in this State. Ireland had "a very anti-life government" and "a very bad form of sex education", he said.
"I don't believe in ignorance on such matters; I think we have to educate in human sexuality, but with prudence and always with morality". Instead, a lot of "confused youths" were teaching in "so-called Catholic schools".
He criticised priests for "never saying anything about contraception" and not reminding their flocks that the "pill is an abortifacient". The programme of the Catholic marriage agency, ACCORD, was "very disappointing" in that they "do not oppose contraception . . . I'm surprised the bishops allow it".
Mr Patrick McCrystal, the Executive Director of Human Life International (Ireland), said he "fully stands behind Archbishop Connell's words in terms of the disruption that contraception has caused to society". Couples who used contraception were "separating the sexual function from the creative dimension . . . Sex for its own purpose gets you into areas such as rape, prostitution and paedophilia, fornication and ultimately abortion".
Archbishop Connell "was right when he said that children conceived as a technological product are definitely viewed differently than children conceived in the natural context".
Mr McCrystal said that when couples attempted to have children by in vitro fertilisation, "the embryos that are deemed deformed or inferior are discarded". Even the embryos that were preserved were conceived in a "clinical, cold, hostile environment with no rights of protection against being washed down the sink or whatever. A child has the right to be conceived in a proper manner in its mother's body," he argued.
Couples who could not have children should use means that are "acceptable in a moral sense" such as those which involved "hormonal manipulation of the oestrogens in the woman's cycles . . . "
