Reality outpaces the theory

Families and the law

Over the next while, as legislation to recognise how what was once imagined as a traditional family has changed is brought before the Dáil and, as an Extraordinary Synod of Bishops on what the idea of a Catholic family means in 2014 and beyond opens in Rome next Friday, modern Ireland and the Ireland more comfortable with certainties established in a more monochrome age will disagree in their usual disagreeable, almost intractable way.

Former president Mary McAleese, a committed and active Catholic, might have set the tone for the debate when she described the idea of a synod made up exclusively of celibate bishops as “bonkers” and “dangerous”, and suggested that deliberations confined to that group would make an already bad situation even worse.