A WORTHY dirge was penned by the writer Aubrey de Vere to Owen Roe O'Donnell about the failure of the earls in Kilkenny's Council Hall before their vanquished flight to the continent.It can be paraphrased in verse about the reining in of Archbishop Diarmuid Martin by Pope Benedict, the curial cardinals and his 23 fellow bishops at last week's Rome summit:
"Pope, Cardinals and bishops, ye talked and talked/In the Vatican's Salla Bologna, such a grand hall;/But this man whose game ya balked/Was the one man 'mong you all!'
The lamentable end to the two-day Rome talks was crystallised on Friday by Maeve Lewis, director of the One in Four abuse victims' support group.
She expressed acute disappointment that Archbishop Martin could not say why their concerns, conveyed in an open letter to Pope Benedict, had not been addressed.
Archbishop Martin could not give a straight answer as to why the pope had not accepted unequivocal responsibility for the clerical abuse and cover-up by church authorities detailed in the Murphy report - nor sought the resignation of Martin Drennan as Bishop of Galway .
It suggests he has been muzzled by the former head of the Vatican's inquisition. The one united voice - in which the former Joseph Ratzinger ordered the Irish bishops to intone after the Roman summit - is his own.
It was not by chance that one of the curial cardinals present at the meetings was a legal expert.
It was his job to ensure that the Good Shepherd's published text did not contain anything that would subject the Holy See as a sovereign state to legal challenge from abuse victims.
Any admission of the Vatican's culpability in its directives to bishops of reporting abuse complaints would intensify pressure for accountability from the elderly German pope.
Little wonder that victims' groups said Archbishop Martin returned from Rome not as strong in the Irish hierarchy as he was before and that abuse victim Andrew Madden described him as a changed man.
A stoic archbishop of Dublin told the abuse survivors that he would be "more optimistic" about the eventual outcome of the "process" of the Irish church's response to the abuse scandals.
The next step will see publication in a few weeks' time of Pope Benedict's Lenten letter to the Catholics of Ireland.
But the prominent victims of clerical abuse in the Dublin archdiocese have no expectation whatsoever from this letter.
Except for the additional acceptance by the Irish church of mandatory reporting to the gardai and HSE of complaints, the pope will mainly rehash the press release issued last Tuesday.
Archbishop Martin was not underestimating when he warned, before the publication of the Murphy Report, that its findings "would shock us all".
Three months on we have Bishop Drennan openly blaming Archbishop Martin for propelling the resignations of Bishop Donal Murray and Dublin auxiliary, Eamonn Walsh.
Now there is talk of the pope declining the resignations of Bishops Walsh and Ray Field.
But Bishop Jim Moriarty will step down at Easter.
Over the weekend the Irish bishops proclaimed the coming of the papal letter to the faithful.
Yet only Archbishop Martin has offered the wise counsel that the letter may not be exactly what people are expecting.
Archbishop Martin is isolated, but remains the only bishop in real dialogue with victims.
However, that dialogue is now firmly within the parameters prescribed by the Pope and "the Episcopal Gang of 24".
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