THE LAST vestiges of Catholic Church influence over politicians were well and truly buried in the Dáil yesterday.A once subservient role, fashioned over decades by the threat of a potentially lethal belt of a crozier, was dramatically reversed as the church was held to account by TDs in the wake of the Murphy report.
When the interparty government took over in 1948, its Fine Gael taoiseach, John A Costello, sent a telegram to Pope Pius XII expressing his cabinet’s desire to “repose at the feet of Your Holiness the assurance of our filial loyalty and of devotion to your august person . . .’’
Yesterday, Fine Gael leader Enda Kenny described the papal nuncio’s failure to reply to the Murphy commission as “discourteous’’.
And he challenged the Taoiseach on how the Department of Foreign Affairs reacted to the Vatican’s response that contact with it had not been made by the commission through the correct diplomatic channel.
Reading from a prepared document, Cowen said it was a matter of regret that the Holy See was not in a position to provide substantive response to the commission’s inquiries.
But it was not unreasonable, he added, to assume the Holy See was open to responding to a further approach through diplomatic channels.
Neither was it unreasonable to assume that the present and previous papal nuncios believed the matter was more properly addressed by the diplomatic route, he added.
Labour leader Eamon Gilmore was unimpressed. He spoke of how parents and others who went to priests and bishops about the activities of paedophile priests were blocked and frustrated.
“The tracks in the sand were being covered rather than investigated,” said Gilmore.
“The Taoiseach’s reply, on diplomatic movements at different times, appears to confirm this is the approach taken in the Vatican also.”
Kenny reiterated his demand that senior churchmen, who had moved paedophile priests from parish to parish, should resign from their current positions.
Cowen repeated his view that it was a matter for the individuals concerned.
The Taoiseach was careful, however, to disown the actions of those whose resignations the Fine Gael leader had sought.
The State’s job, said Cowen, was to ensure that everybody was amendable to, and equal before, the law.
“That applies to institutions, or individuals . . .and, obviously, also to ensure that best practice in this whole area will be promoted in the future,” he added.
He went on to refer to “a very horrific deficit of accountability”.
The generational change was reflected in a hard-hitting contribution from Fine Gael’s justice spokesman Charles Flanagan.
Flanagan is the son of the late Oliver J Flanagan, a TD from the 1940s to the 1980s, who staunchly defended the church’s role and who sat with Costello on the Fine Gael benches for some of his career.
Flanagan rounded on the papal nuncio.
“His contemptuous response can only be taken to be a tangible example of the contempt in which the Vatican continues to hold the secular authorities in this State,” he said.
It was the kind of remark that would have been unthinkable from most TDs in his father’s era.
The old order has changed forever.
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