Dear Editor,
Bishop Kevin Doran has been roundly criticised for saying that it was a sin to vote for abortion. Many will agree with him, but it’s worth re-stating exactly what the bishop said because it is more nuanced than the headlines suggest.
Dr Doran said that if a practicing Catholic “voted ‘Yes’, knowing and intending that abortion would be the outcome, then you should consider coming to Confession, where you would be received with the same compassion that is shown to any other penitent”.
It’s unfortunate that Bishop Doran allowed himself to be pulled down this rabbit hole by the media. He should’ve known that in a media environment that is often hostile towards the Church, such comments would be seized upon to caricature the Church as being authoritarian and dogmatic.
At a basic level, the sacraments shouldn’t be weaponised against people. Nonetheless, the Church has a long way to go to ensure that Mass-going Catholics understand the responsibilities of their Faith.
Yours etc.,
Mary Harris,
Galway,
Co. Galway.
Are all our schools worth fighting for?
Dear Editor,
After the marriage referendum, Archbishop Diarmuid Martin talked of the vote being a wake-up call for the Irish Church, but if it was a wake-up call it seems the Church just hit ‘snooze’ and rolled over. There can be no such dozing now that the Irish electorate has screamingly rejected the notion that the most vulnerable human beings among us have even a right to live.
According to Friday’s exit polls, barely one in eight young adults voted to retain the Eighth Amendment. As much as anything, this stands as a staggering testament to the failure of Catholic education in today’s Ireland, with the vast majority of these young adults having been taught in Church-owned schools, at least at primary level. Were they listening at all? What were their teachers teaching them?
Those who screech about Church domination of Irish education have a habit of complaining about indoctrination, as though we’re brainwashing our children. I think it has to be said now that if we’re in the business of indoctrination we’re not very good at it.
At the same time, perhaps this rejection shouldn’t surprise us, as we all know that despite most of our citizens spending a dozen or more years in schools learning Irish, most can barely string together more than the proverbial cúpla focail. Is it really that startling that religious education sticks no better?
Still, we at least have to ask ourselves now what our schools are for, and how we can regroup. Are our schools worth fighting for? Are they all worth fighting for? One thing that should be certain is this: this is not a time for panicking, but for a calm and studied pause for breath while we think of what to do now. We shouldn’t pause forever, though.
Yours etc.,
Cormac O’Leary,
Tullamore,
Co. Offaly.
On self-determination
Dear Editor,
The Good Friday Agreement, the 20th anniversary of which we celebrate this year, had the principle of consent at the heart of the accord. The document was key, politicians said, in ensuring that the people of the North decided for themselves about their future.
How odd, then, to see politicians both in Dublin and London now insisting that they will impose abortion on the North regardless of what local people think.
Yours etc.,
Jim Cahill,
Newry,
Co. Down.
Voiceless must be given space to be heard
Dear Editor,
A popular book a few years ago was Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind, that argued that we have a ‘moral palate’ with different taste buds of morality: those of us who are more traditionally and communally minded make our moral judgements based on six factors, with those who see themselves as progressive, liberal, and individualist basing theirs on just three. Our referendum looks like being a case study in this sort of thing.
I write ahead of the formal election count, but just looking at the exit polls it seems that over two thirds of voters have voted to abolish our constitutional protections for the unborn, with less than a third voting to keep them. It seems that in making these decisions, over 60% were driven by believing in the so-called ‘right to choose’, whereas barely 30% were influenced by considerations of the right to life of the unborn human child.
These are different moral universes, speaking different moral languages, and it seems that – to follow Haidt – a radicalised notion of autonomy rules the roost in today’s Ireland, though of course it’s an autonomy only for those capable of exercising it, while they’re capable of exercising it. The weak, the imperfect, the voiceless: there’s to be no autonomy for them, and they’ll only ever be allowed to make any choices if others allow them to.
Yours etc.,
Mark O’Connell,
Rathmines,
Dublin 6.
Referendum result is not a price worth paying
Dear Editor,
Over the past few weeks it has been impossible to walk or travel about this country without being confronted by legions of billboards, with ‘Yes’ ones exhorting people to be compassionate and vote ‘Yes’ as though doing otherwise would be a merciless act, or claiming that private acts sometimes need public support as though there should be anything private about enlisting the help of the State in ending the life of another human being.
The ‘No’ ones, however people may have complained about them, at least attempted to engage in the referendum debate in a factual way. What on earth did ‘Yes’ voters think when faced with them? In England, for every four babies born a fifth is aborted – did people just shrug, and say “so?” Again in England, 90% of children diagnosed with Down Syndrome are aborted – again, did people just shrug it off, or do they think things will be all that different here, as though the 500 or so people who’ve aborted their children after finding in Rhona Mahony’s private clinic that Down Syndrome was on the cards are weird outliers?
And then there’s the fact that 97% of abortions in our nearest neighbour are performed on healthy babies, the children of healthy mothers – even Britain’s Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists say that abortion is not better for mental health than pregnancy is. Did ‘yes’ voters, troubled by how we can help mothers in real difficulty, look at the sky-high abortion rates in a country where abortions are available after some medical rubber-stamping and just shrug, and think this would be a price worth paying, and that there couldn’t possibly be another answer?
Who have we become?
Yours etc.,
Caroline Brady,
Athlone, Co. Westmeath.
Irony missed by young voters
Dear Editor,
One of the great, tragic, and all too predictable ironies of this week’s referendum is that it seems that the overwhelming majority of our young adults voted to remove the Eighth Amendment. According to one exit poll, 87% of those aged 18-24 voted to remove our constitutional protections for the unborn, with 83% of those aged 25-34 doing likewise.
The irony, of course, is that all of these were born after the likes of their parents and grandparents voted for the Eighth Amendment in 1983. It seems, if an actuarial report commissioned by the Pro Life Campaign a couple of years ago can be trusted, that perhaps 100,000 of these – and perhaps far more – are alive today largely because the Eighth Amendment caused Irish mothers to think again and have their children rather than travel to England to end their pregnancy.
How many of our ‘Yes’ voters were alive to vote because of the Amendment? And how many ‘Yes’ voters have friends and family who are alive because of the Amendment? Despite this, however, they still voted to repudiate it. Maybe such ingratitude is built into us, though – Our Lord was never exactly inundated with former lepers rushing to thank him after he’d healed them.
Yours etc.,
Louise Fitzgerald,
Belfast, Co. Antrim.
