Draw Breath

I joined Simon McGarr’s show the Papal Nuncio the door Facebook campaign last night. No matter how Brian Cowen tries to fudge it, the Vatican has been a disgrace on child abuse from beginning to end. I agree that the primary responsibility for abuse lies within Ireland. The abuse took place in an atmosphere where the state had ceded total power over children to an unaccountable group (which, by the way, places Ireland in the sad and grubby tradition of Eastern Bloc countries when it comes to childcare). But that doesn’t mean that responsibility can’t be identified elsewhere too, especially when the Church, from top to bottom, actively pursued a policy of favouring their reputations and incomes over any consideration of child welfare.

Actually, that’s not fair to people who care about reputations. My sense is that the Church didn’t at all feel that its reputation was threatened. In order to fear for your reputation you must first be cogniscent of the shameful nature of your act. I haven’t seen any evidence that the senior figures in the church felt an ounce of guilt when they moved priests on to pastures new (well, until they were caught). So let’s call the Bishops’ cover-up an attempt to maintain a self-regulatory regime in order to maximise the rents accruing from the running of Ireland’s welfare system and in order to maintain a grip on the polity so they could continue to shape the state towards their own benefit. Strange how their ideological ends tended to coincide with their own profits.

Anyway, back to the Nuncio. I think it’s important to recognise that in booting the Papal Nuncio out, as well as expressing displeasure over his attitude towards the investigation into abuse, we would also be rethinking the character of the Church and of religion in Irish law. The Catholic Church, in deed or in claim, is more like a multinational company than a state and – what’s more – it seems to regard the trappings of statehood as little more than a convenient corporate veil, to be trotted out in response to any threat that local liabilities might drag head office into the fray.

As things stand, the Church is an organisation whose members have a primary duty to a sovereign state and who work for that state. But, for what it’s worth, the Vatican state’s territory is quite a bit smaller, if prettier, than the office space occupied by the Microsoft Campus in Redmond. The organisation is run as a global enterprise. The only trappings of statehood that are applied are those relating to diplomacy: as a state the Vatican is essentially a free-standing Foreign Office that only represents itself. Maintaining the fiction that the Irish Church is an arm of a state or is subject to that state’s rule is like saying that a clump of bog oak is a forest. It’s high time we stopped treating the Vatican like a state and started treating it more like we do McDonalds: if they want to operate here then they should be subject both to whatever level of regulation and taxation we deem appropriate. If people want to pursue their religious predilictions through the church that’s fine. But that doesn’t mean that the Irish state has to pretend that the Catholic Church’s executives are really diplomats, heads of state or what have you. If we Irish state inquiries seek information it should be forthcoming through policing channels. If the Vatican doesn’t like that, it can withdraw its representatives and cease trading in Ireland.

Let’s end the fiction and completely withdraw all diplomatic recognition from the Vatican. Or rather, oh to be from a country where that happened.

Update: Via Pete Baker, I see that Fintan O’Toole hits on a similar point. Far better put of course.