Catholics, keep away, lest you hear what you ought not

[rug]

Critical: Mary McAleese. Photo: Louie Douvis

August 31, 2014 - 12:00AM
Damien Murphy

The former president of Ireland Mary McAleese will deliver the Rosemary Goldie Lecture at Sydney Town Hall on Sunday week but local Catholics, it seems, are being discouraged from attending.

The Catholic Weekly newspaper refused to take advertisements for the lecture which honours an Australian Catholic theologian who became the first woman to serve in an executive role in the Roman Curia.

Professor McAleese had criticised the former Catholic Archbishop of Sydney Cardinal George Pell for his "boy's club" appointment of a Sydney colleague to a key position in the Vatican.

She had also openly attacked Rome over its refusal to ordain women and said it should rethink it stance on homosexuality, saying the issue was "not so much the elephant in the room but a herd of elephants" for the church.

http://www.smh.com.au/nsw/catholics-keep-away-lest-you-hear-what-you-ought-not-20140829-109ziu.html#ixzz3BtOVSbV3

This is DU. Here's more info:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_McAleese

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosemary_Goldie

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Pell

[Fortinbras Armstrong]

1. The same attitude that created the Index of Prohibited Books

Thinking for oneself is an activity not encouraged among many in positions of authority in the Catholic Church.

I suspect that one reason for this is that many of the arguments given by the Vatican for its positions are crap -- I have written on DU about the problems with documents such as Pope Paul VI's encyclical on contraception, Humanae Vitae, his encyclical on priestly celibacy, Sacerdotalis Caelibatus, and the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith's document on the ordination of women, Inter Insigniores.