THE chaotic manner in which the decision of Pope Benedict to refuse the resignations of two Dublin auxiliary bishops named in the Murphy Report trickled into the public domain is a communications calamity on a monumental scale personally for Archbishop Diarmuid Martin.The normally media savvy Martin may have been under orders from his Roman superiors to make known the continuation in office of assistant bishops Eamonn Walsh and Raymond Field via clerical channels.
This manner of public relations is more associated with the Vatican's own dismal public relations record in dealing with such matters.
The way it was done was through an off-the-cuff paragraph towards the end of a private three-page letter from Martin -- dated Tuesday, August 10 -- to his priests, which was mainly devoted to framing new guidelines for administering the sacraments of baptism and confirmation.
Martin was surely aware that such a letter would find its way sooner or later into the hands of journalists.
And sure enough, bishops Walsh and Field were not to be seen or heard when the enterprising editor of the 'Irish Catholic', Gary O'Sullivan, revealed its contents.
But Martin's media office had not seen fit to alert in advance the spokesman of the Irish Bishops' Conference, Martin Long, to the papal decision.
Inevitably, Long, who must have the hardest public relations job in Ireland, initially dismissed O'Sullivan's disclosure as speculative, thus provoking the intrepid editor to release the full text of the letter to the national media.
In the absence of a response from the archbishop -- he is on holidays at the moment -- Pope Benedict's unexplained decision amounts to a vote of no-confidence in his attempts to see off the Drumcondra pitch all present and past auxiliary bishops of Dublin who were associated with the prevailing culture of cover-ups that Judge Yvonne Murphy identified as the hallmarks of the reigns of four successive archbishops of Dublin from 1940 to the mid-or-late 1990s under Cardinal Desmond Connell.
It is a chilling reminder to Martin that, for all his talk about greater involvement of the laity in the life and administration of the church, Rome is determined to conduct its ecclesiastical business in Ireland with an iron hand.
Irish Catholics in all 26 dioceses, but especially in Dublin, are being subject to a new diet of Rome Rule -- a regime that is secretive about its decision-making in the Vatican corridors of power and relayed behind the scenes to cowered Irish bishops via the Pope's Man in Ireland, Archbishop Guiseppe Leanza.
All hopes of a process of renewal signalled by Pope Benedict in his post-Murphy Letter to the Catholics of Ireland now sound hollow, especially when the priests and laity are being kept in dark about how this autumn's nine-member Apostolic Visitation ordered by Papa Ratzinger to probe the Irish church.
While Walsh and Field will have stout defenders who will argue Pope Benedict was right and Martin wrong in his wish to sow a culture of co-responsibility in church decision-making, the reaction of honest-to-God Catholics is one of dismay at the diktat from Rome.
The alienation and sense of hurt by victims of clerical abuse are further aggravated by 'the Good Shepherd' of Rome.
This latest insensitivity from Benedictine Rome that last month outraged women for placing the ordination of women priests on the same scale of grave sin as clerical child abuse may prove to be the last straw for mainstream and liberal Catholics who have lost trust in the Vatican's capacity to get right its response to the papacy's biggest crisis since the Reformation.
Nor does the Vatican yet understand that in the age of the internet, its media machinations and crassness towards the Irish church are being watched -- and commented on -- around the globe.
Barbara Blaine, the founder-president of SNAP, the American Survivors' Network of those Abused by Priests, summed up the mood of despondency in Ireland when she characterised the Pope's decision as "rubbing more salt into the already deep and still fresh wounds of thousands of child sex abuse victims and millions of betrayed Catholics".
Having lost faith in the Pope and his bishops of showing moral leadership, Blaine claimed that "without media scrutiny and public pressure, Catholic officials act recklessly, deceitfully and callously about the safety of children".
In recent months the Vatican instructed Irish bishops to refrain from making public statements in favour of radical reform in the expectation that the post-Murphy fury of lay folk would abate.
Yesterday's news from Rome -- via an internal Drumcondra clerical letter, with the inevitable leak to the media -- smacks of obtuse cynicism on the part of the Vatican and a backing off by Martin from "his open communications" policy.
With Cardinal Sean Brady morally voiceless over his role in the Brendan Smyth paedophile cover-up, and with removed Bishop John Magee facing further censure in the forthcoming Murphy report into the diocese of Cloyne, this latest episode spells doom for a revived people's church in Ireland under his direction.
SIC: II