By John Cooney, Religion correspondent
In an arcane spat for the unofficial title of “Defender of the Faith”, Mary Kenny, the conservative Catholic writer has chided Mary McAleese, the darling of liberal Catholics and former President of Ireland, for “lacking in common sense” by calling into question the church’s traditional practice of administering baptism to infants.
Delivering the annual St John Henry Newman address last month in Oxford University, Dr McAleese, who was until recently based in the University of Glasgow, contended that infant baptism was a breach of human rights. Roman canon law claimed to be entitled to limit and control the rights of church members because of personal promises made at baptism, “when most were babies and incapable of making such promises”, she added.
“With the arrival of Newman’s educated laity, literate in secular and ecclesial matters, it is a claim that is increasingly contested and unless faced up to honestly could make the synodal way (of Pope Francis) just a meandering circular journey back to the same old unstable starting point but with fewer and fewer people bothering to turn up.”
Responding in her weekly column in the Irish Catholic newspaper La Kenny, the country’s foremost feminist of the 1960s, was scornful of Mac’s claim that infant baptism meant “people’s freedoms are being suppressed for life” and she accused her of “aligning with Anabaptists and Jehovah’s Witnesses”.
The two Marys – Mary Kenny and Mary McAleese.
Coyly, however, Kenny pleaded that while she was not a doctor of canon law, she “wouldn’t undertake to debate Mrs McAleese on the finer points of Church law: but in terms of ordinary logic, the argument is lacking in common sense.”
Last week Dr Gaven Kerr, lecturer in philosophy at the Pontifical University, St Patrick’s College, Maynooth, intervened, like a Daniel come to deliver judgement, sided with Mary K and pronounced Mary Mac to be wrong. “Only if spiritual communion with God were a bad thing would infant Baptism be a bad thing, intoned Kerr, author of a tome on Thomas Aquinas and the Metaphysics of Creation.
So far, Mary Mac has shown the other cheek, but for how long will the Lady from the Ardoyne countenance Kenny’s impertinence and Kerr’s imprudence? Especially so in the light of Kenny’s provocative taunt: “I have heard it said the trouble with lawyers is that they see everything in a legalistic sense – everything is about “contract law” – rather than seen within a context of personal, social and religious values.
“This may be applicable to Mary McAleese’s analysis,” an emboldened Kenny continued on behalf of Ireland’s simple souls. The Lady “may have come to feel that the Anabaptists, the Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses are preferable company to the traditions of the Catholic Church.”