HISTORIC events crowd on top of each other in Ireland.
After the
queen's visit only a few weeks ago, we now have a confrontation between
Ireland and the Vatican which, from the British side of the Irish Sea,
seems scarcely conceivable.
It is momentous enough to register not just
in the press here in Britain but in the International Herald Tribune and
a full-page spread in the leading Swiss paper the Neue Zurcher Zeitung.
The
images of a clerical society in Ireland where, to use Enda Kenny's
colourful phrase, "the swish of the soutane" counts for more than the
injunctions of civil society are hard-wired into British consciousness.
Many years ago, my tutor at Oxford told me he had left his teaching post
at TCD with the greatest reluctance because he couldn't put up with
living in a theocracy ruled by the then Archbishop of Dublin, John
Charles McQuaid.
I thought he was exaggerating.
But no doubt
McQuaid would have excommunicated the current Taoiseach if he were alive
today.
It is a measure of how far Ireland has come, both socially and
culturally, that the Taoiseach was greeted by a standing ovation when
delivering the MacGill lecture in honour of John Hume a week ago.
The
diplomatic kerfuffle prompted by the Vatican's decision to recall the
papal nuncio for consultations may seem arcane, even trifling.
Yet it is
virtually unprecedented for states which are not in a state of at least
cold war to resort to such actions.
The Vatican's claim that the
withdrawal is the better to inform its response to the Cloyne Report
should fool no one.
If Rome wanted Archbishop Leanza back for his
diplomatic and intellectual input, there are discreet ways of doing it
without publicly announcing it and linking it directly to what the
Vatican terms "certain excessive reactions" to Cloyne.
No,
withdrawal for consultations was a calculated move to express serious
displeasure at the Irish Government's dramatically robust response to
the report, with its withering attack not on the church in Ireland but
on the Vatican itself.
In a sense, it was also a pre-emptive move
by the Vatican, given the various calls for the papal nuncio to be
expelled.
For the Government to reply in kind by failing to replace its
recently departed ambassador to the Vatican, Noel Fahey, or by
indicating that the nuncio's return in the future would not be welcome
(effectively demanding his permanent withdrawal) would seem petty and
unnecessarily confrontational.
After all, the Taoiseach made his
point as unambiguously and brutally as even Rome's bitterest critics in
Ireland could have wished.
And he has clearly been rewarded with an
avalanche of domestic and international support (including, by his own
account, from many members of the Irish clergy).
So it would now seem prudent to turn the other cheek.
What more Christian response could there be to a Roman Pontiff?
Meanwhile,
the Vatican is on notice that prevarication of the type illuminated in
the Cloyne Report will not be tolerated.
Justice Minister Shatter told
the Sunday Independent last week: "We must get a rapid response from the
Vatican" and warned that failure to produce one would lead to
Government action.
While he waits for the response in the next few
weeks, the minister need not remain sitting on his hands.
He should
examine Irish legislation to ensure that it has no weaknesses which
might allow clerics to claim that they are not bound by the supremacy of
civil over canon law to report to the civil authorities any wrongdoing
that comes to their notice.
It can never again be acceptable for the church to undermine the Republic's laws.
The
Vatican -- not for the first time in this protracted and intensely
painful and humiliating affair -- appears to have misjudged the public
mood in Ireland and looks to be in urgent need once again of PR
counselling to get it right.
Going on the diplomatic warpath in response
to the Taoiseach's home truths, admittedly not couched in diplomatic
speak, was the wrong call.
Instead of complaining at "excessive
reactions", it might have been better to adopt a position of some
humility in the face of the coruscating condemnation in Judge Yvonne
Murphy's trenchant report.
But the Vatican has a long track record
of being a slow learner in this area.
"We think in centuries," its
officials say dismissively. In the internet age this is a lofty but
inadequate response, though not a surprising one from a male
gerontocracy.
We may have to await a change of personalities,
perhaps a generational change, before we see a more sensitive response
to the general outrage prompted by the Cloyne and the three earlier
reports on paedophilia in the church over the last seven years.
Meanwhile,
perhaps both Dublin and the Vatican will conclude that a papal visit
might best await a change of cast at the top -- in Rome.
Sir Ivor
Roberts, President of Trinity College, Oxford, is a former British
ambassador to Ireland, Italy and Yugoslavia, and editor of the new
edition of 'Satow's Diplomatic Practice'