A chara, - I would like to make a few comments on the article entitled "Pity the poor petitioners" by Kathryn Holmquist (Weekend, September 18th).
Using a newly-published book on the history of the Galway Regional marriage Tribunal as a backdrop, Ms Holmquist takes a cliched and unthinking swipe at the Catholic Church and its view of marriage and sexual morality.
The rather tedious "how dare they?" line is used many times, for example when mentioning that 56 of 137 petitions received in 1993 remained undecided by 1997. I will leave it to others more qualified to discuss the operations of the tribunals. Rather I would like to take issue with Ms Holmquist's response to the case studies in the book.
The main contention of the author, Fr Albert McDonnell, we are told, is that much marriage breakdown is caused by a lack of emotional intimacy to correspond to the sexual intimacy which develops at an early stage in many relationships. Ms Holmquist, while neither specifically agreeing nor disagreeing with this analysis (although she does sneer somewhat at the idea of a Catholic priest discussing any form of intimacy), heaps blame for the problem on Catholic sexual morality. According to her analysis, Catholic morality creates "a destructive sexual tension".
She wrongly states that the Church tells people that "their natural sexual urges are sinful without a marriage certificate". What we Catholics actually believe is that our natural sexual urges are just that - natural - and as such morally neutral. Questions of morality arise in our response to those urges. Catholic promotion of pre-marital chastity is geared precisely to encourage the rounded emotional/sexual development of a relationship, the lack of which Albert McDonnell identifies as being at the root of many of the problems surveyed in his book.
The blame for cases of women forced into "shotgun weddings" or marriages of economic convenience is also laid at the door of the Church. While there is no doubt that un-Christian application of Catholic doctrine has often been responsible for the former, it eludes me how the Church can be blamed for the latter.
The Church is also blamed for women who arrive at the altar full of dizzy dreams of marital bliss. Surely a more likely culprit is the secular romance industry? Indeed Ms Holmquist heaps odium on the Church for the rather more down-to-earth vision of marriage which stresses "permanence and a modicum of self-sacrifice".
Ms Holmquist feels that civil divorce has taken the sting out of the tribunals' tails. As they are Church bodies, used by Catholics to regularise their situations in the eyes of their Church, unconnected to the civil law, I'm not sure I see the point.
Lastly I would ask Ms Holmquist: as we, as a society, more further away from Catholic teaching on sexual morality, does she think the divorce courts of thefuture will reflect a happier and more fulfilled people than those featured in McDonnell's book? - Yours, etc.,
Paul Tobin, Esker Park, Lucan, Co Dublin.