An influential US Catholic group is trying to stop President Mary McAleese from making a speech at a Catholic university in Pennsylvania later this month.
The Cardinal Newman Society, which lists 10 US archbishops and bishops as advisers, says the President is not in line with Catholic teaching and had directly contradicted statements by the new pope, Benedict XVI.
It has started a phone- and letter-writing campaign at Villanova University, where Mrs McAleese is due to accept an honorary law degree and make a graduation speech.
The group, which claims 16,000 members, has said the President had "angered the Irish bishops by her advocacy for homosexual rights and women priests". The group issued a statement listing her alleged transgressions, including a 1997 article in the Tablet, in which she compared defenders of the male priesthood to "Communist Party apparatchiks hawking redundant clichés".
It also lists a 1995 Dublin seminar on women in the church, in which the future president "responded with scorn" to statements by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (now Pope Benedict XVI) that women should never be accepted into the priesthood.
"They say the debate is closed. I think they had better turn up their hearing aids," the Cardinal Newman Society quotes President McAleese as saying. It also quotes her as saying that arguments against women priests appear to be "dressed-up misogyny".
The society claims that 16 of the 220 Catholic Colleges in the US are in violation of a June 1994 statement by the US bishops which said that Catholic colleges should not honour people "who act in defiance of our fundamental moral principles".
The group has also put pressure on Catholic colleges not to invite speeches by Senator Hillary Clinton because of her pro-abortion stance.
President McAleese's private secretary, Helen Carney, said the President had no comment to make on the Cardinal Newman Society campaign.
Stephen Merritt, assistant to the president of Villanova University, said the Cardinal Newman Society was entitled to its beliefs but the university's board of trustees had approved President McAleese as a graduation day speaker. He said she had been re-elected unopposed because of her popularity in Ireland and said she made an excellent ambassador for her country.
The president of the Cardinal Newman Society, Patrick J Reilly, said that some of President McAleese's statements were "clearly rude" to the Irish bishops and to the Vatican. He said that dissenters like President McAleese are often very involved in the church but that did not excuse their statements.
"Her statements are available on the internet and I think they should be widely known to the Irish public," he said.
Mr Reilly, who was educated at a Jesuit college in New York, founded the Cardinal Newman Society in 1993 and has appeared on Fox News and other TV channels to discuss his views. Speakers and guests deemed unacceptable by the Cardinal Newman Society include California secretary for education Richard Riordan at the Dominican University, California; former New York City mayor Rudolph Giuliani at Loyola College in Maryland; and dissident theologian Sr Margaret Farley at Saint Xavier University, Illinois.