Society will make the final decision on Catholic Care discrimination, says Daniel Phelan.

Responses to my article entitled Once a Catholic? certainly revealed the strong feelings often seen whenever there is the suggestion of secular society impinging on religious freedom.

The article focused on Catholic Care’s success in the High Court in forcing the Charity Commission to review a decision to refuse to allow the charity to change its objects in order to qualify for an exemption from equalities legislation. This exemption would allow the adoption agency to discriminate against gay couples without fear of prosecution.

However, the wider context is that of the Catholic Church’s refusal to deal properly with the child abuse crimes of its clergy and the manner in which its reputation and resources have been placed above the emotional well-being and compensation of its victims.

I do not think that I am alone in having very little patience for one part of the Catholic Church’s argument that children will suffer if it is not exempted from the law while other parts are failing disastrously to deal with the suffering its clergy has been inflicting on children.

Even the Vatican is beginning to understand this. The BBC recently reported Vatican spokesman Fr Federico Lombardi as acknowledging that the Church had lost public trust and Church law could no longer be placed above civil laws if that trust were to be recovered.

Who cares whether it is possible to pay enough lawyers to thread a way through the equalities legislation as drafted? The Catholic Church should simply accept that the law intends prejudice of that kind to be outlawed and behave accordingly.

Catholics may believe and are free to express the view that this will disadvantage children. If this is occasionally the case, then it is clearly a price society’s legislators consider worth paying. That is a judgement society is entitled to take with its eye on what it considers a greater good. After all, gay people start out as children too!