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- Christina Finn reports from Washington DC:
TAOISEACH LEO VARADKAR has said that he does not agree with the Catholic Church’s policy towards women.
Speaking in Washington DC on Tuesday, the Taoiseach also said he didn’t think it was the role of the State to tell any religion what rules it should make.
Last week, the former Irish President Mary McAleese described the Catholic Church as an “empire of misogyny”.
She made the comments in Rome, calling for the bar on women becoming priests to be lifted. She also called on Pope Francis to address gender inequality in the Church.
McAleese said in a speech at a conference about women’s roles in the Church:
“Failure to include women as equals has deprived the Church of fresh and innovative discernment; it has consigned it to recycled thinking among a hermetically sealed cosy male clerical elite flattered and rarely challenged by those tapped for jobs in secret and closed processes.
“It has kept Christ out and bigotry in.”
TheJournal.ie asked the Taoiseach about his thoughts on McAleese’s comments during his visit to Washington DC yesterday.
He said:
I believe in two things – I believe in equality between men and women. Whether you are a man or a woman you should be able to aspire to any office or do any job that you want to do.
At the same time I also believe in the separation of Church and State and in the same way it wasn’t right in times gone by for the Church to try and make the State’s rules, I don’t think it is right for the State to try and make the Church’s rules either.
I do believe in that separation, it can’t be à la carte – you can’t believe it when it suits you and not when you don’t so while I don’t agree with the Catholic Church’s policy towards women, the exclusion of women from the priesthood, for example, I don’t think it is the role of the State to tell any religion what rules it should make.
TheJournal.ie’s political reporter Christina Finn will be bringing you all the latest updates from Leo Varadkar’s visit to Washington this week, including his meeting with US President Donald Trump on Thursday.
Stay up-to-date by following @ChristinaFinn8, @TJ_Politics and TheJournal.ie’s Facebook page.
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Is ‘droch ula’ not a viable option (meaning ‘bad apple’)?- Just sayin’
Vlad the Impaler is widely agreed to be the figure stroker based his Dracula character on . Vlad the inmpalers father was Vlad of dracul. More likely to be derived from this I would think .
On the Dracula issue, you would not be likely to use ‘blood’ (fuil) in its genitive form (fola) in a phrase like this. ‘Drochfhuil’ is a long way away from sounding like ‘Dracula.’
In my humble opinion, Dracula is one of the best 19th century gothic novel ever to come out of Ireland. The Hollywood versions of the book go nowhere near instilling the intrigue, fear and horror characters suffer in the book. Anyone who has not read the book themselves should do so. You’re in for a great read.
There is always the vague but unprovable possibility that Irish phonetics leached into Stoker’s linguistic vocab. But I suspect he just thought it sounded ‘Transylvanian’.
Is it notable that the Roman name for York was “Eboracum”? Is the Irish name derived from the Latin, or could it be that the Roman name was a Latinized version of the original Celtic/Briton name?
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