Mary Kenny
Pope Francis spoke recently about supporting civil unions for homosexual people, and it’s not the first time he has made that point. He did so as Archbishop of Buenos Aires. He has always been keen to emphasise that gay Catholics are part of the family and that is a point that would, I think, be echoed and welcomed by most people. When President Mary Robinson held a party at Aras an Uachtaráin for a gay group in Ireland in 1993, it was applauded by most of the populace.
An Irish grandmother I spoke to at the time – she’d have been born around 1910 and fairly traditional in her ways – remarked: “Sure, why shouldn’t they have a party? Aren’t they as God made them?”
The same-sex marriage referendum was, I believe, an endeavour to emphasise that sense of inclusiveness. People wanted to be kind, although marriage is not necessarily always about kindness – ask anyone who’s been married! (The arguments! The sarcastic exchanges! The throwing of household china! Don’t get me started!)
But seriously, the historical basis of marriage is a dynastic practice subsequently sacramentalised by the Christian churches (though not by all of them: some Protestants, such as Presbyterians, don’t regard it as a sacrament.)
And now a prominent British lesbian says that she thinks that “the legalisation of gay marriage has done more damage than good. It hasn’t done lesbians any favours.” Natalie Drew, the founder of Britain’s first same-sex fertility clinic, says that she doesn’t think the law should have changed from civil partnerships to marriage.
British government figures published this month showed a considerable increase in same-sex divorces, doubling from 428 in 2018 to 822 in 2019. According to the Office of National Statistics in Britain, there has been an increase in gay couples divorce year on year. Natalie Drew’s own same-sex marriage ended in divorce.
As in heterosexual unions, problems can arise with custody of the children. She has two children with her former partner Ashling Philips, enabled by a sperm donor. But there’s a special problem for lesbian couples who have children: one of the women will be the biological mother, which can leave the other partner in a more distant parental relationship.
Ms Drew said that for gay couples, getting married puts pressure on them to fit into expected roles. “You’ve done the norm…and got married. But we are not the norm.” Civil unions, she concluded, speaking to Sanchez Manning of The Mail on Sunday, were much better than marriage for gay couples.
In her memoir, Here’s The Story, Mary McAleese writes honestly about her support for same-sex marriage, and her support, too, for her gay son and his partner, whom she calls his husband. She regrets that the Church does not offer sacramental marriage to same-sex couples. But perhaps the statistics will rather support Natalie Drew’s viewpoint: that civil unions are the better option, because the template of marriage is based on heterosexual differences: and same-sex marriage forces gay couples into roles that are not necessarily comfortable.
We must stand up for ‘the Mass’
I’ve only recently noticed that some of the mainstream media now uses lower-case initials for a Catholic Mass. That is, they print it as ‘mass’, as in “she was on her way to mass”. Is this to diminish the significance of a service of the Eucharist (probably also lower-case), or is it just a lexical fashion?
Changing nouns to lower-case is certainly a fashion in the academic field, where ‘mass’ has been the practice for some time. British academic publications lower-case Taoiseach as ‘the taoiseach’ and, actually, Irish publications often lower-case ‘queen’, although, so far, not ‘pope’ – it’s still “she spoke to the Pope”.
There are fads and fashions in writing style, and the move to lower-case is partly to ‘democratise’ texts – to make everyone more equal, as it were. (This is the fashion behind the trend to use surnames only: even when I’ve begged someone not to call me ‘Kenny’ in print, they have done so, because it’s the fashion, though I think it makes me sound like an Australian footballer – ‘Kenny’ being a popular first name in Oz.)
But I think we should object to ‘Mass’ being printed as ‘mass’, not on religious grounds, necessarily, but for reasons of clarity. Lower-case ‘mass’ has a different meaning from ‘Mass’ with an initial capital – ‘mass’ simply means any large collection of people, animals or objects. Whereas ‘Mass’ has a specific meaning. In writing, clarity should always be a priority, and giving Mass its proper, capital letter makes it entirely clear what we are speaking about.
