Thank you Ireland for voting Yes in the recent referendums. We are now living in a much more compassionate, egalitarian state. It feels much more like a secular Humanist Ireland.

I never would have thought that I would have lived to see the day when the once theocratic state of Ireland freely acknowledged equal marriage and showed such compassion and recognized the equality of women in the latest two-to-one majority referendum, which recognized women’s autonomy over their bodies and their personal right to choose what happens with their own bodies.

Any crisis pregnancy is precisely that: a crisis. Ireland came of age – we became adults! – in finally acknowledging that the decision is not ours but the woman’s. It is not the state’s, but the woman’s decision. It is not the church’s, but the woman’s decision. It is not a doctor’s, but the woman’s.

If men had babies, it would never have been a debate.

How barbaric was the Constitution until the Irish people, finally grown to adulthood,  saw that they had no right to decide for a woman what is only a woman’s choice to make for herself.

When I left my priestly path after nine years in a religious order, I realized that it was my first adult decision. With the two recent referendums in Ireland, we have grown up. We have heard bishops tell us that we should go to confession for voting Yes. It might be a better idea if bishops confessed to woman, wearing sackcloth and ashes as is the biblical garb of contrition, for their oppression of women which continues to this day. A church that declares that it has no authority to ordain woman simply has no authority!

I get annoyed when I hear church folk say to believers that they can’t ‘pick and choose’. In fact, the authorities of the church have for 2,000 years picked and chosen. They adopt positions that are outright contradictions of earlier positions that they held dogmatically. For instance, the church once held that ‘outside the church there is no salvation’ and an American priest got into trouble with his own church for maintaining the church’s original unambiguous stance. To say nothing of their condemnation of Copernicus, the church maintaining its insistence that the universe revolved around the earth! It remains the church which needs a Copernican revolution, and a humble and contrite one at that.

And the church held dogmatically that Anglican orders were ‘absolutely null and utterly void’. The church no longer holds that position either. And the celebrated saint and doctor of the church Thomas Aquinas did not regard a fetus as having a human soul until 40 days after conception for a boy and 80 for a girl. Nope, I don’t think I heard anyone on the No side in the termination of pregnancy referendum mention that one. And when you study the history of the church it is clear that there was not one clear position on the status of the fetus nor on abortion through the ages, even though believers either don’t know this or are economical with the truth.

I recommend the scholarly work ‘Eunuchs for the Kingdom of Heaven‘ by Uta Ranke-Heinemann for anybody interested in discovering the truth about the Roman Catholic Church and sexuality and especially its two-thousand year oppression of women in its warped thinking and practices.