THREE events last week -- the meeting between Minister for Foreign Affairs Micheal Martin and the Papal Nuncio in Iveagh House on Tuesday; the Catholic hierarchy's meeting in Maynooth on Wednesday and Thursday; and what happened in the Vatican on Friday -- demonstrate the historic significance of the Murphy report.Never before has an Irish government minister taken a Papal Nuncio so publicly to task.
Mr Martin's announcement, stressing "the need for a substantive response even now to the questions that have been raised", and his insistence that the Vatican must provide a "comprehensive response" to any questions that might be raised by the Murphy commission's ongoing investigation into the Diocese of Cloyne, were utterly unprecedented.
Also unprecedented was the divide in the ranks of the Irish hierarchy of which the television cameras afforded us some startling glimpses on the fringes of the Maynooth meeting. The language -- and more tellingly, the body language -- of the participants, said it all.
Archbishop Diarmuid Martin and Cardinal Sean Brady appeared gracious, forthcoming and willing to engage with whatever questions were put to them. Other bishops were graceless, evasive, and even in some cases, resentful.
Resentment boiled immediately to the surface, for example, when Patsy McGarry, the Irish Times religious affairs correspondent, asked Bishop Eamonn Walsh, an Auxilary Bishop of Dublin named in the Murphy report,about suggestions that he was under pressure: "Yeah. Well, you and your newspaper have put me under pressure."
But at least Bishop Walsh had the guts to say on the first day of the Maynooth conference that he saw no reason why he should resign; not so Bishops Ray Field and Jim Moriarty, who waited until Archbishop Martin and Cardinal Brady were safely en route to Rome.
What happened in Rome dwarfs the importance of the earlier events.
Never before has a pastoral letter been specifically addressed to Irish Catholics; indeed, it is extraordinarily rare for any pope to address a pastoral letter to any local church.
There are two key passages in the Vatican statement issued after Pope Benedict's meeting with Cardinal Brady and Archbishop Martin.
First, that the pope "will follow this grave matter with the closest attention in order to understand better how . . . best to develop effective and secure strategies to prevent any recurrence [of these shameful events]".
Second, that "the Holy See takes very seriously the central issues raised by the reports, including questions concerning the governance of local church leaders with ultimate responsibility for the pastoral care of children".
Note the absence of any specific reference to Dublin. With a further report from the Murphy commission (into the Diocese of Cloyne) already pending and the prospect of further investigations into Raphoe and other dioceses, there may be worse to come. 
Archbishop Martin spelt it out to the media in St Peter's Square immediately after he met the pope. The pastoral letter, he suggested, may demand "a very significant reorganisation of the church in Ireland".
We seem on the brink of the most historic change in the structure of the Catholic Church in Ireland possibly for centuries, and certainly since the aftermath of the Great Famine.
But structural change will count for no more than shuffling around the deck-chairs on the Titanic unless it is accompanied by a fundamental change in mentality, a rooting out of the endemic culture of cover-up and collusion.
Archbishop Martin seems the only bishop who could plausibly be cast to act as an agent of change and who might play a role in what he has described as the process of renewal.
Indeed, he has already won international acclaim -- most notably in a remarkable editorial in the New York Times on December 7 which compared Archbishop Martin's behaviour with that of Bishop Edward Egan of Bridgeport, Connecticut.
Bishop Egan's then diocese (he has since been elevated to the position of Cardinal and Archbishop of New York) fought a lawsuit for seven years resisting the release of 12,000 pages of documents alleging decades of sexual abuse of children.
Bishop Egan, wrote the New York Times, in stark contrast with Archbishop Martin whose initial response to the Murphy report they quote at some length, "responds to accounts of abuse not with shame, but scepticism, and exhibits the keen instinct for fraternal self-protection that reliably put shepherds ahead of the traumatised flock".
Bishop Egan, "with institutional pride, looks at the relatively low rate of proven abuse cases as a sort of perverse accomplishment. 'It's marvellous,' he said, 'when you think of the hundreds and hundreds of priests and . . . how very few have even come close to having anyone prove anything'."
Cardinal Egan could have been the star turn in that sickening concert of episcopal complacency we glimpsed in Maynooth, crooning the traditional Irish ditty: "It's all right, as long as you're not caught!"
The spotlight of international attention exemplified by the New York Times editorial points to the Vatican's larger dilemma. Clerical sexual abuse of children is an international, not just an Irish, issue.
The pastoral letter to Irish Catholics will receive much wider scrutiny, especially throughout the English-speaking world where such abuse has been particularly prevalent. Pope Benedict confronts a stark choice.
He can take refuge in pious platitudes and endorse the institutional solidarity with which Cardinal Egan and those delinquent Irish bishops who refuse to resign are identified. Or he can identify with the victims, sanction the transparency personified by Archbishop Martin and treat Ireland as an exemplar of a new policy of zero tolerance to any bishop who has ever turned a blind eye to sexual abuse.
In the unlikely event of his taking that second course the Murphy report will stand as an historic landmark not merely in Ireland but throughout the Catholic world.
* Ronan Fanning is Professor Emeritus of Modern History at University College Dublin *
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