Mary McAleese on baptism, women’s ordination, and a ‘savage’ GAA experience

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Mary McAleese is in good form as we meet in the Dublin 2 apartment she and husband Martin use as a city base when they are not at home in Cootehall, Co Roscommon. She turned 75…

Mary McAleese is in good form as we meet in the Dublin 2 apartment she and husband Martin use as a city base when they are not at home in Cootehall, Co Roscommon.

She turned 75 last June and remains as engrossed as ever by the Catholic Church, as a woman of faith but now also as a canon lawyer. She studied for a doctorate in canon law, the inner legal system of the church, on retiring as president in 2011.

Her latest book, The Baptism Bluff: Human Rights and the Canon Law of Baptism, has already upset some people, although she says: “I don’t know how it could, because it hasn’t been published yet.” That will happen next Thursday.

“I think infant Baptism is a beautiful sacrament,” she says, and missing out on baptism when the parents want it for their child “is particularly awful for parents of children who die in the womb”. She was one such parent.

She feels “very strongly” on the issue “as a mother of two children who were miscarried at 10 weeks and 12 weeks”. Both times she did not know she was pregnant until she miscarried, she adds.

She has “real difficulty” with the concept of original sin. As to where the souls of her two miscarried pregnancies might now be, she says: “I have no idea.” Did they have souls? “Again, I don’t know.”

Baptism, she says, consists of two very distinctive elements. “One is what I call ‘the divine’, the beautiful sacrament, the grace of God that is conferred as a gift on the child and expects nothing back. It removes original sin. It welcomes the child into the Christian community, and it names the child within that community. That’s all beautiful.”

The second element, however, “is absolutely not divine. It is man-made. Unlike the divine – I’m not going to argue with God – but I can argue with canon law, as it’s man-made”.

This canon law element “says that the minute you are baptised you are now a member of the Catholic Church and a member for life.

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