She made the remarks in an interview with Gay Byrne to be broadcast tonight as part of his Meaning of Life series.
Mrs McAleese said she believed that for centuries “gay people have lived in a dark secretive world of indeterminate loneliness, dreadful complexity”.
She said that gay people were “as entitled to live their lives on their own terms, as I do as a heterosexual”.
She added that she was “just thrilled anyone wants to get married”, which was “a great grace”
Asked about her new book Quo Vadis?, she said it dealt with collegiality in the church, as agreed at Vatican II, whereby, she claims, the College of Bishops was to co-govern the Church with the Pope. “It did not happen,” she said. The College of Bishops had not met since Vatican II, which concluded in 1965.
Her book directly asks the pope where were the structures that allowed for legitimate debate and discussion. “I’m not clear anymore where the boundaries are,” she said. To express dissenting opinion was to be disobedient.
Church leadership lacked “a fair degree of credibility now” as a result of the child abuse issue, she said. “If they could be so dreadfully wrong and take so long about accepting how wrong they were . . . ” and yet “we seem to have arrived at a situation of creeping infallibility about everything”, she said.
She said she had been in Rome since “almost immediately” after she left Áras an Uachtaráin last November. She was studying canon law and said “I see my life writing in that field,” the Irish Times reports.
Meanwhile, Lord Carey, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, has said that Christians must continue to resist gay marriage and the debate around it must not be allowed to descend into name-calling.
Speaking yesterday at a fringe event at the Conservative Party conference organised by the campaign group Coalition for Marriage, he said that gay marriage was the first step on the “slippery slope” to polygamous, “Mormon-style” relationships.
He said: “Let’s have a sensible debate about this, not call people names,” he said. “Let’s remember that the Jews in Nazi Germany, what started it all against them was when they started being called names. That was the first stage towards that totalitarian state.”
Lord Carey rejected the suggestion that advocates of gay marriage were “bigots” who would not listen to the concerns of religious groups who disagreed.
