Government Loses Face over Vatican and We Lose Faith

By Shaun Connolly
Irish Examiner
February 18, 2012

http://www.examiner.ie/news/government-loses-face-over-vatican-and-we-lose-faith-184268.html

GOD-hating, priest-baiting, loony leftie Eamon Gilmore secured a key plank of his evil secular masterplan to make us a nation of pagans by shutting down the Vatican embassy.

Except, of course, he didn’t. He made a perfectly sensible decision, but his big mistake was to lose control of the narrative surrounding it — which is always deadly dangerous in politics.

And so the agenda was driven, not by Gilmore, but by the religious right, who portrayed the move as a direct attack on their faith, and by hardcore liberals who saw it as a totemic victory against an old enemy.

Labour’s amateur-hour media presentation added to the confusion, with muddles over costings and when the Vatican was, or was not, added to the embassy hit list — so the overriding impression was left in many people’s minds that we have broken off diplomatic relations with the Vatican City State and are now at war with them.

Indeed, it was left to Micheal Martin, of all people, to inadvertently let Gilmore off the hook by stating that Martin himself had refused to close down the embassy when he was foreign affairs minister — which proves the idea has been kicking around Government Buildings for some time and was not dreamed up by Evil Eamon after all.

Indeed, Gilmore deserves credit for having the nerve to face down such vocal, vested interests and streamline our representation in Rome.

The notion of the Catholic Church being treated as a nation state is ludicrous in the 21st century — imagine the outcry in the West if Shi’ite Muslims declared 110 acres of Tehran, Basra, Mecca, or Lebanon’s Bekka Valley to be a ‘city state’ and demanded similar status at bodies like the UN, that the Vatican now receives.

But, even putting that to one side, two separate embassies in Rome makes no sense.

However, nobody believes it is just about saving around ˆ500,000 a year; many people assume it is wrapped-up in the post-Cloyne readjustment of Irish society to the Catholic Church — and if the Government admitted that it was, at least, part of the reordering of our diplomatic attitude to Rome, it could gain it more support.

After all, the Taoiseach’s landmark Dail speech in the aftermath of Cloyne Report revelations chimed with the national mood and won widespread applause.

Enda Kenny said the report: "Made it very clear the Holy See deployed an appalling attitude to the rape and torture of Irish children by people it was represented by.

"For the first time in Ireland, a report into child sexual abuse exposes an attempt by the Holy See to frustrate an inquiry in a sovereign, democratic republic — as little as three years ago, not three decades ago.

"And, in doing so, the Cloyne Report excavates the dysfunction, disconnection, elitism, the narcissism, that dominate the culture of the Vatican to this day.

"The rape and torture of children were down-played or ‘managed’, to uphold, instead, the primacy of the institution, its power, standing and ‘reputation’.

"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."

Another reason the Vatican move has garnered such attention and controversy is the depressing fact that shutting down embassies is one of the few powers this Toy Town government of an economically failed State still possesses without having to go cap in hand to our Troika paymaster for approval.

That is also why Jan O’Sullivan grabbing a ˆ17,000 pay rise for a minor promotion to ‘super junior’ minister level irks people so much — because they are two of the few things this government still has control over.

Which is why Pat Rabbitte’s incredibly patronising dismissal of criticism of the wage rise, indicating such matters were beneath him and other ministers, was an outrageous — and uncharacteristic — betrayal of emotional intelligence.

O’Sullivan is a competent minister, but being bumped-up to ˆ147,000 a year? Really?

It, once again, underlines how appallingly our public representatives are overpaid.

David Cameron gets ˆ170,000 a year for running the world’s fourth biggest military power and the globe’s fifth biggest economy — Leo Varadkar gets paid the same amount for, er, being Leo Varadkar.

But back to diplomacy, as we await the arrival today of China’s heir apparent, Xi Jinping.

And just so he can see what a thrusting, free-speaking democracy looks like, the Department of Foreign Affairs has conspired with Beijing to ban any journalists from asking Xi Jinping any awkward questions — like why, in a nation of 1.3bn souls, only a few old men in the politburo get to vote for him as next leader, or why his government is so keen to prop-up the killing-machine regimes in Syria and Burma?

But we are assured our hero Eamon will raise the issue of human rights with him.

Oh, please!

When is he going to get round to daring to do that? In between begging for investment and groveling for Chinese foreign reserves to bail-out the collapsing Eurozone?

Will he mumble "Tibet" and the name of recently imprisoned artist, Ai Weiwei, as he pretends to cough so Mr Xi does not hear it and the Tanaiste can claim he did voice such issues? At least the foreign affairs minister can be assured the decision to modernise our Vatican representation marks a belated coming of age in our relationship with the Holy See.

Just as most Irish Catholics pick and choose what they want from the Church, and what they are prepared to give back — enjoying the solidarity and comfort of its faith, yet, in many cases, also rejecting its teachings against sex outside marriage, divorce, abortion, contraception civil partnerships, etc — the State can adopt a more adult relationship with the Vatican after the agenda of prostrate submission that dominated so many dark decades after independence.