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McAleese, “Quo Vadis? Collegiality in the Code of Canon Law”

This January, Columba Press will publish Quo Vadis? Collegiality in the Code of Canon Law by Mary McAleese (former President of Ireland). The publisher’s description follows.

 In her first book since leaving Aras An Uachtarain, Mary McAleese has produced a masterful and highly accessible study of how Vatican II’s teachings on collegiality, or how power and responsibility were to be shared between the Pope and the college of bishops within the Catholic Church, have either been sidetracked or not yet come to fruition, depending on how you interpret the events which followed the Council up to the present day.

Vatican II embraced a fresh new vision of the Church as the People of God, turning away from the rigidly hierarchic structure of the past. It left a clear picture of the Church as communio or community but no clear road-map of how to get there. While it sowed seeds of confusion it also infused into the Church an expectation of broader ecclesial participation and co-responsibility which has impacted in many different ways. Read more

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Enright on Ireland and the Hijab

Máiréad Enright (University of Kent, Canterbury) has posted Girl Interrupted: Citizenship and the Irish Hijab Debate. The abstract follows.

This article discusses the case of Shekinah Egan, an Irish Muslim girl who asked to be allowed to wear the hijab to school. It traces the media and government response to her demand, and frames that demand as a citizenship claim. It focuses in particular on a peculiarity of the Irish response; that the government was disinclined to legislate for the headscarf in the classroom. It argues that – perhaps counter-intuitively – the refusal to make law around the hijab operated to silence the citizenship claims at the heart of the Egan case. To this extent, it was a very particular instance of a broader and ongoing pattern of exclusion of the children of migrants from the Irish public sphere.