That is all.

'tis strange I should be old and neither wise nor valiant. From "The Maid's Tragedy" by Beaumont & Fletcher

I hope Rabbitte was being politic when he said he was surprised by the Bishops' statement. Otherwise he's just not paying attention.

The Bishops, too, rely on the state to enforce their right to practice their religion freely within the state.

This is of course true, although only to an extent, and it is certainly part of the Catholic Bishops' narrative in the US, for example, regarding the new requirement of employers to provide free birth control to employees. But the Catholic Church has only come around to accept the concept of "freedom of religion" since Vatican II, and it was controversial even then.  The mental framework that puts the Church above the state and that makes the state's institutions subservient to the teachings of the Catholic Church, even in states where Catholicism is not the majority religion, remains quite strong among many, even in states, such as Mexico, which formally renounced any institutional connections and went to the trouble of rounding up and killing priests to make the point.

I predict it will be a long time before Ireland gets comfortable with the concept of a true separation of church and state -- in practice as well as just nominally -- based on other Catholic countries' experience.

Dear Archbishop,

No one seeks to deny you your right, as a private citizen, to involve yourself in the debate on abortion. Furthermore, everyone would expect you to exhort your faithful to abide by Catholic teaching, and to impose any internal disciplinary processes you think appropriate for those Catholics who fail to abide by your teaching. However when you seek to enforce Catholic theology by force of secular law on all, including non-Catholics, I have a very big problem indeed. I never voted for you or submitted to your authority and I would urge everyone to resist such theocratic imperialism up to and including civil disobedience towards any such laws you successfully manage to impose.

It matters not a whit that some non-Catholics also take a dim view of abortion: They are also free to abide by and to exhort others to abide by their principles, although the Anglican Communion (Church of Ireland) has long recognised the right of women to have an abortion where their lives are at risk. The issue is the proper scope of secular law, and the intrusion of such law on the human rights of women whose life is imperilled by their pregnancy. The "unborn", particularly those in the first 24 weeks of gestation, are not recognised as persons in either state or church law, and this is for good reason: They are entirely dependent for their lives on their mother. It is for the mother, and the mother alone, to decide what risks she is prepared to take in order to bring her pregnancy to term. No one has the right to impose a pregnancy on her against her will. In cases of rape, the forced imposition of continued pregnancy makes you complicit in that rape.

The gift of life is just that, a gift, to be accepted or refused with free will and good grace, not an act to be criminalised, or a sentence to be imposed and endured.

It is utterly repugnant for the Catholic Bishops to seek to label all those who disagree with them as purveyors of "a culture of death" - just as it is insulting, for the "pro-life" movement, to portray themselves as more "pro-life" than anyone else. The truth is that they are intent on imposing their theology on others by force of secular law when they cannot do so by force of internal discipline, persuasion or evangelisation. The Irish state is not, and should not be, an instrument for enforcing Catholic (or indeed protestant) theology. It is a state which depends on the willing consent of the vast majority of its citizens to the laws which it enacts, and citizens are free, as citizens if not as adherents, to dissent from the teaching of their religious superiors.

We do not need another civil war on moral issues with all the strife and discord that that entails before the basic human rights of women are recognised. The Supreme Court, in a landmark ruling called the "X" case (1992), found that the "equal right to life" provision of the 1983 amendment meant that Irish women had the right to an abortion if a pregnant woman's life was at risk because of pregnancy, and included the risk of suicide as a legitimate risk to the life of the mother.

The Irish people have now voted in four referendums to underscore that right: The Twelfth Amendment Bill (1992) intended to restrict the availability of abortion by stating that an abortion could not be procured to protect the health, rather than the life, of the woman, and specifically excluding the risk to the life of the woman from suicide as a grounds for an abortion was defeated by a resounding 65-35% margin.

However other anomalies remained. My late wife was forced to resign from her job as the administrator of the local VEC Community Education Centre when she refuse to remove leaflets from the community education information centre which gave advice on where further information on "options" for crisis pregnancies could be obtained. The spectre of the Gardai preventing pregnant women from obtaining information on abortion services abroad and from travelling to UK to have an abortion eventually resulted in two more amendments to the constitution being passed which strengthened the rights of women to access to information and abortion services.

The Thirteenth Amendment (23 December 1992) specified that the prohibition of abortion would not limit freedom of travel in and out of the state (to have an abortion in abroad) and the Fourteenth Amendment (23 December 1992) specified that the prohibition of abortion would not limit the right to distribute information about abortion services in foreign countries. What is the moral difference between a woman having an abortion in the UK or in Ireland? A second attempt to exclude the risk of suicide as a grounds for abortion was defeated in 2002 when the Twenty-fifth Amendment to the Constitution was also rejected by the electorate.

And yet, for 20 years, under pressure from yourself and your colleagues, the Government has done nothing to vindicate these rights or to safeguard health care workers caught up in unenviable life and death situations in a legal vacuum created by the failure to legislate as the people and the Supreme Court decided. In December 2011 the European Court of Human Rights (ABC v Ireland) also ruled unanimously that Ireland's failure to implement the existing constitutional right to a lawful abortion in Ireland when a woman's life is at risk violates Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights and so finally, now, out of shame and embarrassment, the Government has been forced to act.

As an Archbishop, you will never have to face the risks of a crisis pregnancy, but you too rely on the state to enforce your right to practice your religion freely within the state. For you to interfere in the basic human rights of a pregnant women as decided by the people and the Courts is tantamount to my campaigning to make Catholic teaching and practice illegal within the state. How righteously outraged would you be then? In past centuries Catholicism was persecuted in Ireland. Must you now persecute those do not recognise your authority or obey your teaching? Has it really come to the point where people of principle and regard for human rights must oppose the very continued existence of the Catholic Church in Ireland in order to preserve their most basic freedom and human rights?

Kind regards...

Index of Frank's Diaries

Hysteria is historically seen as a peculiarly female failing: mad talk caused by our wandering wombs. Like many ancient beliefs, it still lurks in the back of people's brains: women are much more likely than men to be labelled shrill, or strident, or sexually frustrated, or emotionally unstable.

"Calm down, dear": the classic put-down to a little lady who's got herself in a tizzy. But men - especially those with an avid interest in shoring up their dwindling political or religious authority - are just as prone to indulging themselves with wild, emotive, irresponsible language. The only difference is that we don't tend to call it hysteria. We should.

The importunate intervention of the Catholic archbishops, following the Government's announcement of its intention to introduce legislation for abortion - in extremely limited circumstances - is a case in point.

The words were barely out of Minister for Health James Reilly's mouth when the robed quartet popped up, invoking the prospect of "the direct and intentional killing of the innocent baby in the womb". Later, Leo O'Reilly, the Bishop of Kilmore, weighed in. He described the proposals as "the first step on the road to a culture of death", adding that "once you say one human life can be directly destroyed, no human life is safe".

Nobody was surprised by the sentiments, of course. Bears behave in the usual way when they go into the woods. But the urgency and the extremity of the rhetoric, even by customary standards, was striking.

Anti-abortion campaigners, in general, are known for their gruesome, accusatory language, yet this was positively operatic: state-sponsored killing of the innocents, widespread forcible euthanasia, the grim advent of the ill-defined but all-consuming "culture of death".

Let us remind ourselves, we are speaking about protecting a woman's right to continued existence when a crisis pregnancy puts her life in danger. Only that. It is the absolute minimum she deserves, and is entitled to expect; hardly the gateway to inexorable evil.

No need for histrionics. Calm down, dears.

Meanwhile, Rónán Mullen was ramping up the emotional pressure in the Seanad. He warned his colleagues not to fall into "double-think" by condemning the school shootings in Connecticut while supporting the introduction of a new legal framework for abortion here. He urged Senators not to "forget a whole category of children in our own country".

Drawing a moral equivalence between the murder of a class of six-year-olds and the termination of a pregnancy which is threatening the mother's life is repugnant on so many levels: the absolutist logic; the casual rhetorical opportunism; the blatant disrespect for grieving families.

Curiously, there is a coldness, a heartlessness, that often accompanies such emotive arguments. We also saw it when John Larkin - in remarks made before he became the North's Attorney General -- said that destroying a highly disabled foetus in the womb was akin to "putting a bullet in the back of the head of the child two days after it's born".

When it comes to arguing the anti-abortion case, the frequent assumption is that the end justifies the means, no matter how aggressive, inflammatory and distasteful those means appear to be.

Whatever their beliefs, there is an onus on political and religious leaders to use temperate, considered language, in accordance with the dignity of their public role. They have a greater responsibility than the rest of us to rise above the heat of the immediate situation.

---snip---

The bishops and their like are not simply giving vent to heartfelt emotion. In that sense, this is not wild talk at all. Their statements are intentionally, and strategically, freighted with fear and hostility, aimed at evoking an emotional, rather than an intellectual, political reaction.

They also serve to perpetuate still further the deep sense of guilt around this issue, so that many people feel they are invoking something evil simply by uttering the word "abortion". In short, they are continuing their attempt to frighten and shame us, in a visceral manner, rather than rationally persuade us.

But the intensification of their rhetoric in recent days may be telling. The use of excessively emotive language is often the hallmark of a group that knows it is losing the battle, resorting instead to increasingly hysterical claims. The position they cling to is archaic, abstruse and culpably inhumane. No amount of disingenuous emotional incontinence can disguise that.