Background: Damning reports brought relations with the Vatican to an all-time low.Benedict XVI’s papacy came at a time of worsening relations between Ireland and the Vatican as the State deepened its investigations into clerical child abuse in the Catholic church.
The church’s response was found wanting as new light was cast on a legacy of brutal sexual violence against children and systematic cover-ups, sapping its moral authority and blunting its political influence.
A nadir was reached two years ago in the wake of the Cloyne report, when Taoiseach Enda Kenny castigated the Vatican in a Dáil speech for its “brazen disregard” for child protection.
Accusing it of downplaying or “managing” the rape and torture of children in order to uphold its own power and reputation, he said the report excavated the “dysfunction, disconnection, elitism, the narcissism” dominating Vatican culture.
‘Opposite of compassion’
“Far from listening to evidence of humiliation and betrayal with St Benedict’s ‘ear of the heart’, the Vatican’s reaction was to parse and analyse it with the gimlet eye of a canon lawyer,” he said, “this calculated, withering position being the polar opposite of the radicalism, humility and compassion upon which the Roman Church was founded.”
No Irish leader had ever spoken in such terms.
Relations between church and State reached a historic low.
Rome’s decision to recall the papal nuncio and the closure of Ireland’s embassy to the Holy See only emphasised the sense of discord.
There was more.
When Kenny joined other European leaders in an audience with Benedict last September, he was seen fidgeting with his mobile phone.
It was hardly his finest hour, but resonated as an exemplar of changed relations.
All of this is a world away from the deference of old, which continued long after the clause recognising the “special position” of the church was removed from the Constitution in 1972.
It also underlined a perceptible diminution in the church’s power to sway political debate.
When the Catholic hierarchy urged Kenny last month to rethink steps to legislate for limited abortion, his Government insisted it would proceed.
Fine Gael TDs are far from united on the initiative and there are clear divisions with Labour over its scope.
The fact remains, however, that the Coalition remains wedded to the plan. It’s all a far cry from the church’s domination of the abortion debate 30 years ago.
Public revulsion at the abuse scandal was well entrenched by the time Benedict became pope in 2005 after the death of Pope John Paul II. John Paul, who had visited Ireland in 1979, remained a popular figure even as a litany of violence and neglect within church orders emerged from the shadows.
Dublin’s growing frustration with the inadequate response from Rome was evident before Kenny took power.
Responding to the 2009 Murphy report on the Dublin archdiocese, then taoiseach Brian Cowen described as a “crushing verdict” the finding that the standing of the church as an institution was placed above the safety of children.
Cloyne report
Two years later, the Cloyne report accused the Vatican of giving comfort to dissenters within the church to the Irish bishops’ procedures for handling child sexual abuse.
The report also revealed that in a secret letter to the bishops, the Vatican had described the 1996 rules as “merely a study document”.
This was the backdrop to Kenny’s withering speech in the Dáil, which drew a 25-page response from the Vatican several weeks later.
The Vatican described as “unfounded” the Taoiseach’s claim that it attempted to frustrate an inquiry into abuse “as little as three years” previously.
It also maintained the report produced “no evidence” to support the claim that a letter to the bishops undermined the implementation of child protection guidelines.
But the Government would not back down.
In a statement, it said the speech accurately reflected the anger of the overwhelming majority of Irish people “at the failure of the Catholic Church in Ireland and the Holy See to deal adequately with clerical child sexual abuse”.