Catholic Church had no special privileges in Tilson case

THE Irish Times religious affairs correspondent, Patsy McGarry, criticised me at length in these pages last Saturday for what I had written about the Tilson case of 1951, but he didn’t manage to find a single inaccuracy in what I said.

My point was that the Supreme Court’s reasoning in the Tilson case was far from being sectarian in nature, and should not be represented as such.

In that case, a father who had promised to raise his children as Catholic removed the children from the family home and placed them in a Church of Ireland-run home.

Before the courts, the father relied on a principle from English law that the father had a superior right over the mother to determine their children’s education.

The Supreme Court rejected this and, preferring the Irish Constitution’s reference to ‘parents’, enforced the father’s original promise.

Patsy McGarry argues that the Supreme Court was ‘influenced’ here by the overt Catholicism of Judge Gavan Duffy’s earlier judgment in the High Court and the ‘changed political climate with a new Government headed by the devout Catholic John A Costello’.

But he ignores the clear words from the Supreme Court to the effect that there were no special privileges on the Catholic Church in such matters.

Both Patsy and the Church of Ireland Archbishop of Dublin, Dr John Neill, were present, as I was, when Dr Gerard Hogan SC explained the true reasoning behind the Tilson decision.

Yet they persist in seeing Tilson as a case in which the ‘dominant Catholic ethos of the Irish Constitution’ was used in a negative way towards other denominations.

Are they entitled to claim this as a matter of ‘opinion’, or do they not, as persons on whom other people depend for guidance and/or information, have a greater responsibility to base their opinions on the facts?

Patsy accuses me of inaccuracy when I say that “any laws or practices with a uniquely Catholic character were gone by the 1970s”, and he cites the various ‘moral civil wars’ over divorce and abortion in the 1980s.

That is a very revealing comment.

The fact that the Catholic Church opposes divorce and abortion does not make laws prohibiting these things “uniquely Catholic”.

Those who oppose abortion or divorce on exclusively social or human rights grounds will wonder at such prejudice.

Rónán Mullen.