Catholic college faces backlash for inviting former Irish president Mary McAleese to speak at graduation

Critics claim she undermines the Church—but most U.S. Catholics agree with her views

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Saint Mary’s College, an all-women’s Catholic school in Indiana, is facing backlash after inviting one of the most famous Catholic women in the world to deliver a commencement address.

Earlier this month, the school’s president Katie Conboy announced that the former president of Ireland Mary McAleese would do that honor on May 17. (McAleese had previously visited the school for a separate event a decade ago.)

Mary McAleese (screenshot via YouTube)

The decision made sense. The 73-year-old McAleese was president of Ireland from 1997 to 2011—the first Irish president to hail from Northern Ireland—and she spent her career trying to bring people with disparate views together. The rest of her bio is no less impressive to the point where her selection would have made sense even if she had never been Ireland’s leader.

… She is currently a member of the Council of Women World Leaders, an international organization of present and former women prime ministers and presidents. She also is the chairperson of the European Union High Level Group on the modernisation of higher education and patron of the Margaret Beaufort Institute of Theology in Cambridge, England.

After serving as president of Ireland, McAleese pursued a doctorate degree in canon law from Gregorian University Rome, adding to her master’s degree in canon law from National University of Ireland. McAleese is also the recipient of numerous awards including the Tipperary Peace Prize.

As far as the Catholic Church goes, she’s been rightly critical of her own faith where it’s warranted. The key word there is “critical.” It’s not that she wants people to turn away from Catholicism, per se, it’s that she wants to Church to live up to its own values, and she feels the decisions made by those in power (even decisions going back centuries) go against the religion as she knows it.

She’s called for the inclusion of women in positions of power within the Church, even saying they ought to be ordained and that the Church refusing to budge on that issue will lead to its downfall: “Sooner or later it’ll fall apart, fall asunder under its own dead weight.” She has even described the Church as an “empire of misogyny.” McAleese has also gone against the Church’s positions on abortion and homosexuality. Post-presidency, she voted to overturn the Irish Constitution’s ban on abortion in 2018. She has also marched in a Pride parade and said the Church’s teachings on homosexuality—including the belief that people who have gay sex are committing “acts of grave depravity”—are “evil.”

And to top it all off, she has said infant baptism, where babies are inducted into the Church before they’re old enough to form opinions, is a form of coercion that unfairly holds these babies to “lifelong obligations of obedience.”

In short, while still Catholic, McAleese has used her platform to criticize the worst elements of the Church, which is no different than what many lay Catholics have said all over the world. But if, despite all that, she still sees value in the religion, that should be reason enough for a Catholic school to honor her as voice worth hearing.

And yet, after the school announced that she would be delivering the commencement, there was all kinds of backlash.

The Loretto Trust, a group of conservative Catholic graduates of the school who flip out whenever the school challenges Catholic orthodoxy, sent a letter to Conboy urging her to rescind the invitation to McAleese:

To bestow an honorary degree upon an individual who has so persistently and publicly attacked Catholic doctrine is an unambiguous betrayal of Saint Mary's College's Catholic identity. It sends a scandalous message to students that one can actively oppose Church teachings while still being celebrated by a Catholic institution.

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By honoring Dr. McAleese, Saint Mary's College is elevating and endorsing someone who is using her influence to weaken the Church's moral authority and undermine the very foundation of Catholic doctrine.

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We respectfully urge Saint Mary's College to rescind this invitation to be commencement speaker and withdraw the honorary degree and thereby uphold its responsibility as a Catholic institution. The role of a Catholic college is not to provide a platform for those who reject and defy the faith, but to uphold, protect, and promote the truths of Catholic teaching.

Got that, everyone? The role of a Catholic college is to teach students to never think for themselves and to always obey their male overlords, no matter how cruel, thoughtless, and criminal those people may be.

That’s not the only group challenging the decision. The anti-abortion Belles for Life group on campus sent their own letter saying the McAleese pick sent “a dangerous message that departing from Church doctrine and denying others the right to life is empowering.” It is indeed empowering to admit that your religious leaders are wrong about basic moral questions.

(Side note: It’s extremely amusing that the president of that group, Jocelyn Porter, openly admits she had no idea who McAleese was until after the commencement announcement was made. McAleese is somehow both a serious threat to the Catholic community and utterly unknown to the leader of the anti-abortion Catholic group on campus. Who knew the former president was also an accomplished ninja?)

The same group launched an online petition calling on supporters to acknowledge that McAleese’s “outspoken opposition to Catholic education and doctrine stand in direct contrast to the principles upon which Saint Mary’s College was founded.” As if there’s only one version of Catholicism practiced by its own followers.

The truth is most American Catholics reject many of the Church’s teachings. 70% of Catholics in the U.S. support marriage equality—a number that’s higher than the national average!

59% of U.S. Catholics also say abortion should be legal in most or all cases, a number that’s gone up over 10% in the past decade, presumably in response to the overturning of Roe.

In many ways, then, McAleese is a more fitting representative for where Catholics stand on these issues than the zealots who claim to represent the Church. If they believe the only True Catholics™ are the ones who accept the Vatican’s positions, then the majority of U.S. Catholics wouldn’t be welcome at Mass.

If anything, the changes McAleese has called for would make the Church a more welcoming place for all the people who are open to the possibility but have repeatedly been told their very identity or their desire for bodily autonomy make them outcasts in the Church.

Even ignoring the Church itself, what’s the point of higher education if not to teach students when and how to effectively challenge bad ideas?

It seems safe to assume that the people calling for McAleese’s invitation to be rescinded would be thrilled if JD Vance took her place instead since he’s arguably the most powerful Catholic in the country. After all, he’s sufficiently anti-abortion and anti-LGBTQ. But that would also mean ignoring his lies and incompetence.

There’s a reason even Notre Dame, the most famous Catholic college in the country, didn’t bother asking him (or Donald Trump) to give the commencement this year.

Saint Mary’s College deserves credit for this decision, but that doesn’t mean they won’t cave under pressure. In 2023, the same school said it would begin accepting trans women to the college… only to back down after bigots whined about it. (That initial decision is what led to the formation of the Loretto Trust, because apparently the school needs to be kept in line by graduates who support faith-based discrimination.)

The Belles for Life group said in its letter that “commencement speakers should be role models” rather than “advocates for abandoning Catholic principles.” But the underlying principle there is that you should obey certain leaders no matter what, even if their beliefs are objectively hurting people and based on their own faulty ideologies.

There’s a reason you never hear inspirational quotations urging you to obey and fall in line. It’s important to stand up for what you believe, and even more important to stand up for those values when it means challenging people who are part of your “tribe.” These students should hear from McAleese. They’d be learning something far more valuable than a traditional Catholic mouthpiece who tells graduating seniors that they can do anything they want to… outside the Catholic Church.

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