Mary Kenny
A friendly English Catholic I know whizzed by me on her bike, and then drew up. We exchanged greetings and pleasantries, and then she said: “By the way, one of my sisters is going to Dublin to throw eggs at the Pope at the weekend!”
Oh, why?
She shrugged. “It’s a bit vague. It’s to do with the Pope not meeting with women who were in these abusive homes.”
I said I thought the Pope probably would be addressing the issue of the Magdalene Homes. But I ventured to suggest that this historical situation was complex: blaming the Catholic church alone wasn’t really the full picture. “Women – usually unwed mothers – were consigned to these homes, sometimes by their own families. The State should also have been responsible for the care and maintenance of welfare homes. It’s hardly the fault of an Argentine priest who happens to have become the Holy Father.”
“I suppose not,” she conceded. “It does seem a little, well, mean. But I think she’s resolved to do it, probably with pals – off to Dublin and chuck eggs at the Pope.”
I guess the security people are prepared for all kinds of protests from all kinds of individuals, including egg-throwers. And while I rather hope people won’t hurl ovine missiles – there are more rational ways to make a point – if it does occur, I suspect it might engender sympathy for Francis, personally, rather than hostility.
When the arrangements were being made for the state visit of Queen Elizabeth, in 2011, which I reported, the Department of Foreign Affairs were highly conscious that Ireland’s reputation for extending the ceád míle fáilte to the stranger should be maintained.
I saw groups of vociferous and bitter anti-British demonstrators being corralled away by very determined Gardai, evidently on the orders of the State that nothing amiss should happen to the visitor.
I regretted that a free State felt obliged to have such draconian security, but the country’s good could have been in jeopardy.
And of course, she, too, had to apologise for past wrongs.
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No one who has seen Wim Wenders’ movie Pope Francis, A Man of His Word could reasonably suggest that the Pontiff provides a rallying-cry for “right-wing rallies”.
What’s transparently evident, again and again, is that Francis is a Pope for the poor: it is the poor of so many countries who rally around him, over and over. It is the poor who feel that he is on their side. And prisoners. And refugees.
He speaks as much about environmental degradation as about traditional Christian theology – or, perhaps, he sees the destruction of ‘Mother Earth’ as being an offence against our bounden stewardship of nature. In this, he is truly a Franciscan. Francis of Assisi – though it is seldom mentioned now – was within an ace of being excommunicated from the Christian Church of his time for tendencies towards “pantheism” (seeing the divine in all of nature).
Pope Francis’s lack of “right-wing” credentials is what makes him a focus of criticism among some traditionalists, indeed.
Among his other homilies in Ireland, I’d lay a bet that Francis will mention the need for Ireland to accept more refugees. Right-wing? I don’t think so.
We can’t be both different and equal
A British woman, Kay Longstaff, was rescued from the Adriatic last weekend, having spent ten hours in the water. She had fallen off a Norwegian cruise vessel.
Experts said that her survival overnight, swimming and floating alone in the sea, was explained by two factors: the Adriatic’s temperatures being reasonably warm and because she is a woman. Females nearly always survive longer in water than males because they have different structures of subcutaneous fat.
Scientific fact repeated: men and women are different.
So Josepha Madigan’s assertion that women bring a “different perspective” to politics is perfectly logical – an argument she deploys in a plea for more “gender quotas”.
But there’s the other side of this coin. Men and women are different, and therefore, rigid or over-literal interpretations of “equality” are awkward. It is difficult to be both different and equal. It’s like comparing apples and oranges. Both are edible fruit, but different fruit and not always amenable to exactly equal treatment.