A Catholic may take Communion at a Protestant service if in conscience he or she believes in the context that it is the right thing to do, according to Father Gabriel Daly, one of the country's leading liberal theologians. "There is a [church] law against it," he said, "but if [Catholic] people concerned take it into consideration and still regard taking Communion in the circumstances as right, then that overrules the law," he said. This, he felt, was what the President, Mrs McAleese, did in taking Communion at Christ Church Cathedral last Sunday.
He believed that on the overall issue of inter-communion between the churches the focus should be on the occasion of people being together, rather than just on the elements of bread and wine.
Father Sean Fagan, a moral theologian at the Milltown Institute in Dublin, agreed with Father Daly. He wished to remind people that the theologian Karl Rahner said "10 to 15" years ago that the Catholic and Anglican churches had so much in common, with "so little between us, except details and abstractions," that inter-communion was allowable on special occasions.
Such inter-communion, he said, was already a feature of many inter-church services. He regretted the fear of the powers-that-be that this might lead to a trivialisation of Communion or a blurring of church identities. Such fear, in his view, was "groundless".
Father Ray Hannon, a curate in the Finglas area of Dublin, E's Pat Kenny Show yesterday, said that what Mrs McAleese had done was a further indication of "little flaws there in her character."
He had first detected these flaws when Mrs McAleese said she would, as President, sign abortion legislation should it be presented to her. He was also surprised she did not have a Mass at her inauguration, and he objected to her description in the past of the Vatican's views on women priests as "Pope's cant".
He had had "very strong views on Mary Robinson and her liberal agenda". But over the past couple of weeks he had not liked what Mrs McAleese had been doing either.
"I think she'll end up a candyfloss President," he said.
