Politicians urged to put Catholicism first

Roman Catholic political leaders owe their responsibilities "first and foremost" to the teachings of their church, a conference organised by Human Life International heard at the weekend.

The conference was also told that non-Catholics should not be offended at being excluded from Catholic schools, as Catholics should not be offended by exclusion from, for example, a Baptist school.

The conference also heard from counsellor Fr John Harvey that in 50 years of encouraging homosexuals to be chaste, he had "never met one" who could say they were a happy to be attracted to the same sex.

Some 200 people, most of them members of Human Life International or affiliated pro-life groups, gathered in Dublin's RDS for the one-day conference on Saturday, which also included talks on abortion, contraception and "embracing chastity as a lifestyle choice" by couple Pat and Paula Reynolds.

In his address on the responsibilities of Roman Catholic political leaders, the head of Human Life's Rome office, Msg Ignacio Barreiro Carambula, said a principal difficulty with socialist/liberal thinking was that it had the potential to subvert traditional moral values.

A Catholic leader would have to have regard to his faith principally and secondly the tradition and history of his country, which in a country like Ireland was a Catholic tradition, he said.

While socialists and liberals claimed to protect the rights of man, the consequence of socialist and liberal thinking was to exclude Roman Catholic values "from the public square".

Msg Carambula said it was plain this was unacceptable. "It's not possible to suppress the anguish, the thirst for God which resides in the soul of every human being," he said.

He said political leaders should recognise the importance of education and in this regard, while he did not know enough about recent reports about children being excluded from schools in Ireland, he said non-Catholics should not be offended when excluded from Catholic schools. Instancing the exclusion of those who could not sing from choirs, he said liberals had "given discrimination a bad name". Other faiths should develop their own schools and send their children to them, he said, adding that State-funded schools were a socialist notion and that schools should be "funded by society".

Fr John Harvey, an American priest who counsels homosexuals to live a chaste life, said homosexuality was an "objective disorder" and he cited several biblical references which suggested that "man should cling to woman" and vice versa. Homosexuality could never be right because it wasn't love the way the Bible intended it, and could not result in a baby. Fr Harvey, who began counselling priests 50 years ago, insisted that no homosexual ever chose to be homosexual and that in all his time he had never met anyone "who was happy to be attracted to the same sex".