On the first day of the National Novena, Thursday 13 August 2026, broadcaster Mary Kennedy delivered an address at Knock Shrine titled Faith in Full View. In her speech, (see the whole video here) she advocated for expanding women’s leadership in the Catholic Church, expressed her hope for female ordination, and spoke warmly about other faith traditions.
The main things she said were:
“I also love the sound of the Muslim call to prayer. And if there’s one thing I would have liked when I was in a Catholic school and being taught by very committed Presentation Sisters — I really would have loved if part of our religious education would have been to learn about other religions.” “I would like if it wasn’t such a male-dominated ministry. I think that really the value of having women in important positions in the Church… but I really do feel that women would have a huge contribution to make to the Church, and I would love to see women priests. I really would.”
This article is not intended as a criticism of Mary Kennedy personally. She is, however, a well-known public figure, and she chose to express these views publicly at Knock, one of the most important Catholic pilgrimage sites in Ireland. It is therefore entirely reasonable to examine and challenge some of the ideas she presented there.
More importantly, her remarks matter because they reflect attitudes that are widely shared in contemporary Ireland, particularly among people who come from a Catholic background but no longer accept all aspects of Catholic teaching or practice. In that sense, Kennedy is less the subject of the argument than an example of a broader cultural tendency.
These are familiar progressive themes. Taken together, however, they reveal what I see as a deeper tension within modern Western Christianity: a willingness to question, reform or discard elements of its own religious tradition, combined with a far more cautious and deferential approach towards other faiths and cultures.
The problem we are facing these days is that any criticism of Islam is seen as Islamophobia whereas criticizing the Catholic church is just exercising our freedom of speech. It is this broader tendency, rather than Kennedy herself, that this article examines through the concept that evolutionary behavioural scientist Gad Saad describes as “suicidal empathy.”
Dying to be Kind
In his book Suicidal Empathy: Dying to Be Kind, Saad describes a phenomenon in which empathy, normally a valuable human instinct, can become detached from considerations of reciprocity, self-preservation and long-term consequences. In his account, compassion becomes counterproductive when the desire to appear tolerant overrides a society’s willingness to defend its own institutions and values. As Saad warns: “A society dies when it cares more about exhibiting infinite tolerance and empathy than invoking its survival instinct.”
The Two-Nurses Analogy: To understand the mechanics of this pathology, one can look to a famous illustration offered by Margaret Thatcher in a November 1980 radio interview for Independent Radio News (IRN). Thatcher illustrated the danger of excessive sympathy through the image of two nurses caring for a recovering patient. Inspired by her analogy, imagine a slightly different version.
The first nurse is soothing, gentle and reassuring, but offers only comfort while the underlying illness continues to worsen. The second prescribes an unpleasant and difficult treatment that causes short-term discomfort but addresses the disease itself. Much of the modern Western establishment—including parts of its religious leadership—has increasingly preferred the first approach: the comfort of polite accommodation over the more difficult task of confronting uncomfortable realities and defending the institutions, values and traditions on which its society depends.
The Progressive Double Standard
In her recent address, Mary Kennedy praised Islamic practice, expressing a desire for Catholic religious education to incorporate teaching about other global faiths. Yet in a previous interview, Kennedy acknowledged her selective, reformist posture toward Catholicism, referring to herself as a la carte catholic who selects the aspects of the faith that suit her personal preferences.
This creates a glaring asymmetry. Demanding radical institutional reform within Catholicism while treating non-Western practices with romanticized deference is not tolerance—it is biased criticism driven by misguided compassion.
Imagine, for a second, Mary Kennedy standing inside a mosque telling Muslim scholars how they ought to govern their faith. Saad notes that this dynamic manifests when elites display boundless accommodation toward non-Western beliefs while systematically dismantling their own heritage.
This dynamic is no longer just an abstract debate; it plays out daily across European institutions. Consider the recent outrage surrounding the Archbishop Canterbury, the senior Bishop of the Church of England, Sarah Mullally.
Archbishop Mullally faced widespread calls to resign after she was pictured presenting an award to a radical Islamist activist whose fundamentalist principles included that his own wife had covered everything but her eyes in public and praising Osama Bin Laden, who was behind the attacks of 9/11 of the twin towers in New York. It is fair to say that Lambeth Palace subsequently withdrew the award after his 2007 remarks about Osama bin Laden resurfaced.
But here is “suicidal empathy” in its purest manifestation: an Anglican bishop, occupying an office built on egalitarian ideals, bestowing institutional prestige upon an ideology that denies women basic visual presence in public space.
In a desperate bid for performative inclusion, the leader of a historic Western church actively legitimized a hyper-patriarchal, illiberal structure directly opposed to the values she purports to champion.
The Catholic prohibition on female ordination is routinely condemned as proof of institutional patriarchy. Yet mainstream Islam reserves congregational Friday prayer leadership exclusively for men, while many Muslim-majority societies enforce rigid, state-backed norms around dress, marriage, and female autonomy under Sharia law.
If Catholic traditions deserve ruthless modern scrutiny, why do non-Western traditions get a free pass under the banner of inclusion? True respect requires critical engagement across the board, not patronizing immunity for other faiths.
This therapeutic subversion of duty is not confined to the church; it increasingly governs the Western courtroom. Consider the case of Lindsay Clancy, the Massachusetts mother who strangled her three young children—Cora, Dawson, and Callan—before attempting suicide. Rather than an unyielding demand for justice for three slaughtered infants, public discourse and courtroom deliberations became consumed by overwhelming empathy for the perpetrator, driven by narratives of postpartum psychosis and mental health struggles.
When emotional mitigation and pathological sympathy eclipse the objective reality of the crime, the criminal justice system is turned upside down. If infinite empathy excuses the most fundamental violation—the duty of a mother to protect her offspring—then standard moral culpability dissolves entirely, laying the groundwork for a system where institutional accountability yields to universal absolution. The same thing happens when we start using the preferred pronouns by any individual, we prioritize empathy and compassion over biological reality.
Polite Delusion in Interfaith Dialogue
Calling for broader religious exposure, Mary Kennedy claimed that learning about other faiths in school would have enhanced her experience of spirituality. Coexistence, however, does not require theological amnesia. True dialogue requires confronting fundamental structural differences, not smoothing them over with lazy platitudes.
Christianity is built on a foundational divide between temporal and spiritual authority: “Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s”. Islam emerged through a prophet who was simultaneously a spiritual leader, political ruler, and military commander. Classical Islamic jurisprudence governs everything from prayer to statecraft, marriage, and criminal law.
To pretend all faiths view society, law, and individual liberty through the same lens isn’t interfaith harmony—it is intellectual dishonesty. When a society becomes so eager to avoid offense that it tolerates foundational legal systems entirely incompatible with secular rights and reciprocal freedom, it risks its own survival.
Consider the practical realities of reciprocal tolerance across religious landscapes:
Ignoring these disparities out of a desire to project universal goodwill is precisely how tolerance becomes self-defeating.
Demanding the Impossible from an Unapologetic Hierarchy
Addressing the role of women in governance and liturgy, Kennedy expressed her frustration with Catholicism’s male-dominated structure, arguing that female leadership would offer vital contributions and stating her strong personal desire to see women ordained as priests.
Hoping for women priests in the Catholic Church fundamentally misunderstands what the Catholic Church is. Catholicism is not a secular democracy; it does not rewrite its core doctrines based on changing opinion polls or contemporary sentiment.
In 1994, Pope John Paul II declared in Ordinatio Sacerdotalis that the Church has “no authority whatsoever” to ordain women. Pope Francis reaffirmed this definitive teaching with characteristic brevity: “That door is closed.”
Anglican and Protestant denominations already ordain women—and as the case of Sarah Mullally demonstrates, adopting modern social consensus does not save an institution from moral and intellectual confusion. Anyone who prefers that ecclesiology is free to join them.
But remaining inside a sacramental, hierarchical Church while demanding it abandon its foundational understanding of divine revelation is an exercise in willful denial.
The Real Asymmetry
The issue at Knock goes deeper than women priests or interfaith optics. Kennedy’s remarks reveal a crippling asymmetry in modern Western Christianity: an eager willingness to dismantle its own heritage, paired with a timid refusal to critique anyone else’s.
It is time to decide which “nurse” Western society wants to trust. The soothing nurse of suicidal empathy will comfort us with sweet platitudes about diversity and inclusion right up to the point of cultural collapse. The second nurse—the one that insists on harsh truths, objective scrutiny, and mandatory reciprocity—offers a bitter medicine, but it is the only one capable of curing the disease.
A culture or church that subjects its own sacred traditions to relentless modern revisionism—while extending blanket deference to illiberal systems that offer no reciprocity in return—is not being progressive. As Saad concludes: “There is nothing more existentially empathetic than the dogged defense of the truth.”
Scrutinize Catholicism. Scrutinize Islam. Demand intellectual honesty and reciprocal rights from both. Anything less isn’t dialogue—it’s just polite surrender.