There’s something about Mary

Dear Editor, I found Martin O’Brien’s article, ‘There something about Mary’ (IC 12/11/2015) most intriguing.

Mary McAleese describes herself as being “more comfortable with the chaos of debate than in the festering suffocation of silence”. These are two extremes. Pope Benedict XVI described reason as one of the two wings – the other being faith – on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth. I found the reasoning in this article to be more focused on trying to prove points of opinion than on uncovering truths. Allow me to cite just three examples. 

1. Why is it not enough to say we love the sinner but not the sin? It is precisely because we love the sinner that we hate the sin. Isn’t this what Jesus meant in his response to the woman caught in adultery? “Neither do I condemn you. Go, from now on do not sin anymore.” (John 8:11)

2. In believing a teaching of the Church to be wrong, Mrs McAleese says: “I am as entitled to stand up and state it to be wrong just as someone else is entitled to stand up and say that I am wrong.” Of course Mrs McAleese is entitled to state it to be wrong – that’s what freedom of speech grants – but one’s opinion doesn’t make a Church teaching wrong, at least not in any reasoned debate.

3. Mrs McAleese interprets the Virgin Mary’s questioning of the Angel Gabriel in Luke 1:34, as evidence that “the Virgin Mary, child and all that she was, was far from silent” and that “there is a process here and we tend to have that process edited out”. If there is a process, surely key to it is the Virgin Mary’s receptivity to follow Divine Will as we observe later in Luke 1:38 when she proclaims: “Behold, I am the handmaid of the Lord. May it be done to me according to your word.”? 

Yours etc.,

Paul Casey,

Glasnevin, 

Dublin 9.