The former president said the event is nothing more than a “right-wing rally” which was designed to incite people to resist rights for women and the LGBT+ community.

She said that the purpose of the WMoF in Ireland was a response by the Church to fight back against the growing acceptance of LGBT+ rights in Ireland.

Dr McAlesse who is pursuing a post-doctorate in Canon Law said: “It’s always been essentially a right-wing rally… and it was designed for that purpose to rally people to get them motivated to fight against the rise of same-sex marriage, rights for gays, abortion rights, contraceptive rights.”

The originator of WMoF, Cardinal Trujillo, has made his opinion on LGBT+ rights well known.

In an interview with catholicculture.org, he said that allowing same-sex couples to adopt children, “would destroy the child’s future, it would be an act of moral violence against the child.”

In response to these comments by Cardinal Trujillo, Justin McAleese backed up his mother’s comments on the right-wing origins of WMoF:

“This is the kind of ill-informed and outrageous rhetoric that one would expect to hear at a right-wing rally. Cardinal Alfonso Lopez Trujillo’s, well known for his anti-gay views, set-up WMOF in the nineties as a vehicle to promote his ultra-conservative and anti-gay agenda.  This was his vision.  All the actions from the organisers of WMOF 2018 so far suggest that they are happy and proudly implementing his vision. The WMOF has consistently and systematically removed all things LGBT+ from the WMOF over the last 8 months.

“The only thing that has changed in the month of August is that spokespeople for the WMOF have stopped trotting out the party line that “everyone is welcome”.  It is as if they’ve given up pretending that this is anything but an event designed to isolate and brand LGBT people as second-class citizens who must be unseen and unheard.

“Perhaps when the Pope comes to Dublin next week he could announce that Dublin is the final World Meeting of Families and that in the future it will invest funds into a much more worthy and Christian cause.  Maybe he could also tell us what steps the RCC in Ireland  will take in its role as the patron of the majority of Irish schools to addressing the devastating statistics presented in the 2016 LGBTI Ireland report on the mental health of young LGBTI people in Irish schools.”

Papal Silence On Complaint

During the show, Mary McAleese also spoke of how she made a canonical complaint to Pope Francis after she was banned from speaking at an event to be held in the Vatican for International Women’s Day earlier this year.

Dublin-born cardinal Kevin Farrell forced the organisers of the ‘Why Women Matter’ conference to move the event outside of the Vatican.

Cardinal Farrell had objections to three speakers, including Dr McAleese, who have pro-LGBT+ rights views.

Despite efforts to find a resolution, which included getting Archbishop Diarmuid Martin of Dublin to mediate, the organisers were unable to make the cardinal change his mind.

She said that she has yet to hear back about this complaint, which was about Cardinal Farrel’s actions, leading her to believe that the Pope had approved the decision to banish her due to her supoort for LGBT+ rights.

She said: “Having received neither an acknowledgement or a reply to date, I can only presume that since the Pope is his immediate superior that this was done with his approval.”