Madam, - I have rarely felt so angry and distressed as I did on reading the remarks of the Roman Catholic Coadjutor Archbishop of Dublin, Dr Diarmuid Martin, in St Patrick's Cathedral (The Irish Times, March 15th).
Archbishop Martin calls for "clarity and respect" on the issue of homosexuality. I would welcome this from him and other senior members of the Roman Catholic Hierarchy here and worldwide. It would make a refreshing change.
The Vatican has attempted to arrest the progress of human and civil rights in this area wherever it can - even presuming to tell democratically elected politicians in Ireland and throughout the world how to vote. While this is preferable to the record of murder and torture of gay people by the Inquisition which stains the pages of late medieval history in Europe it is still quite intolerable in the 21st century.
Dr Martin says that "the Roman Catholic tradition is not that different from the Protestant tradition of 'searching'". The Roman Catholic tradition also "struggles and suffers as it wrestles with the joys and hopes, the sorrows and the anguish of the people of each generation".
Is this really so? Virtually every distinguished Roman Catholic theologian priest, bishop or archbishop who has attempted to tell the truth about homosexuality, and I mean people like Archbishop Hunthausen, Prof Charles Curran, Dr John McNeill, SJ, have been removed from their posts, silenced, persecuted and hunted, while simultaneously the Roman Catholic Church throughout the world operated covertly to protect and facilitate known serial child-abusers within the clergy.
It is, I suppose, possible that Archdeacon Gordon Linney's words did in fact sting the archbishop in some abstract, impersonal, theological way; but then the truth frequently does. If Archbishop Martin wants to know what hurt really is he should wait until he has been on the receiving end of the vicious campaign of hatred against gay people orchestrated from the Vatican, as I myself and hundreds of thousands of other gay people have been. If he would like to see its result in Irish lives he might like to acquire for himself a book entitled Coming Out: Irish Gay Experiences. This tells of the very painful and damaging effect of the Church's prejudices on the lives of Irish Roman Catholic men and women, some of them former priests and almost all of them driven out of the arms of Mother Church by this persecution.
He might like to review and repent of the consistent and systematic use of abusive words such as "deviant", "objectively disordered" and "evil" by Vatican spokespersons to describe gay people.
I worship in St Patrick's every Sunday, a fact well known to Archbishop Martin, which makes his discourtesy even the more grave. The reason I was not there last Sunday is that I was speaking as part of a series of Lenten sermons in two suburban Dublin churches. Had I been present in the Cathedral, Archbishop Martin's insensitive remarks would most certainly not have gone unchallenged.
Dr Martin's sojourn in Rome appears to have blunted his sense of the appropriate behaviour of a guest in a sister church. In the Anglican Church honesty and energetic inquiry is welcome in its correct setting, but hurtful theological disputes are not regarded as appropriate at Evensong.
I have heard many sermons in my time in St Patrick's but I have never witnessed the pulpit abused in this manner. Nor have I ever previously heard anything other than words of comfort, compassion and reflection. Dr Martin's intervention has been a lamentable and un-Christlike exception to this rule.
Interestingly and tellingly, in one of the several newspapers which reprinted Archbishop Martin's supplied script the text appears directly above yet another account of the resignation of a Roman Catholic priest after allegations of child sex abuse. - Yours, etc.,
Senator DAVID NORRIS, Seanad Éireann, Dublin 2.