Courtney McGrailDear Editor, Fr Andrew McMahon’s September 10 article on confusion and Church communications during the marriage referendum helped shed valuable light on why the referendum was lost.
It seems unfair, however, to blame the Archbishop of Dublin for claiming that he wanted to express his intention to vote ‘no’ through “the reasoned language of social ethics” rather than what he called “dogmatic utterance”.
Dr Martin had in fact said that he expected to be listened to not on the basis of dogmatic utterance but because of his arguments’ reasonable character: he was calling for a reasonable debate, such as any Catholic should support, and recognising that arguments from authority tend nowadays to fall on deaf ears.
It is probably fair to say, though, that by restricting themselves almost wholly to arguments rooted in social ethics and natural law, rather than also emphasising ones rooted in specifically Christian teachings and the words of Our Lord himself, Archbishop Martin and others allowed some ‘yes’ advocates to claim that as Christianity is about love, so Jesus would have supported the public validation of all kinds of love.
Even leaving aside clear New Testament descriptions of marriage, the idea that Jesus, as a 1st-Century rabbi inclined if anything to stricter sexual teachings than those that were the norm in his day, would have backed marital redefinition is, of course, a nonsense.
Those who wonder why substantial numbers of practicing Catholics voted ‘yes’ in May could do worse than to consider whether a well-meant attempt to head off objections that Church and State should be separate may have backfired, leaving the way open for spurious misrepresentations of Gospel values and a rejection of Our Lord’s own understanding of marriage.
Yours, etc.,
Gerald Wheeler,
Kimmage,