Demands to boot Archbishop Giuseppe Leanza, the Papal nuncio, out of the country are growing louder and more vociferous by the day. Protests, both real and virtual in the form of a Facebook a group, have forced Dr. Leanza to respond to criticism that the Vatican has washed its hands of the matter and taken no interest in seeing clerical abusers tried.
The affair started when the Murphy Report into Catholic sexual abuse in Ireland revealed that both Dr. Leanza, who was appointed in 2008, and his predecessor Archbishop Giueeppe Lanzzarotto had failed to respond to two separate requests for information from the commission. Outraged parents, mostly drawn from Ireland’s rapidly growing ranks of lapsed and ex-Catholics, see this as evidence that the Vatican is at the very least complicit in the abuse of children.
Taoiseach Brian Cowen stepped-in yesterday to say it was “regrettable” that this gave the impression of non-cooperation.
The anger that has been building has transformed itself into calls to expel the nuncio because, aside from being a cleric, he is also the representative of a foreign state. Dr Leanza is in effect the ambassador plenipotentiary to Ireland of the Holy See, the state that is generally referred to as the Vatican. But booting out a 66-year old priest won’t absolve anyone of the need to address the facts: what happened in Ireland is not the Holy See’s responsibility, it is Ireland’s.
The fact that the Catholic Church had such a reach into Irish life was a result of the failure of Ireland’s bourgeoisie to sufficiently modernise the country after partition in 1921. The decades of grinding poverty that went hand in had with Irish piety reflected the development of a political elite that having secured independence for five sixths of the country was unable to finish its job of transforming the newly independent state into a modern European democracy. Ireland was declared a sovereign republic in 1948 but ardent republicans refused to acknowledge this, insisting on continuing to refer to it as ‘the Freestate’, the name the country took after settling its war with Britain. Neither fish nor fowl, the name ‘Irish Freestate’ came to represent not only unfinished business but backward ignorance and piety that was a disgrace to the name of republicanism.
Where in other countries the state took responsibility for education and health, Ireland handed over the task to the Catholic Church. This failure was no mistake: it was a direct result of the inability of Ireland’s backward-looking elite to make a break with the past and forge a new country in the white heat of the technological revolution that was the twentieth century. Industry was not properly developed and the economy remained tied to the land, resulting in the political dominance of conservative rural clique that deferred to the Catholic Church in just about any area you could care to mention. Homosexuality was outlawed until 1993, condoms until 1985 and divorce until 1997.
In the last two decades Ireland has changed beyond recognition and the country is, more or less, the secularised republic it claims to be. But modernity remains an unfinished project in Ireland – even straightforward measures like roads remain unfinished: Ireland’s first motorway wasn’t built until 1983 and there still remain significant gaps in the country’s road infrastructure. A report released on Monday indicates that industrial output is rising again, but this is from a very low base. Ireland’s skipped from being a poverty-stricken rural economy to developing the kind of fantasy post-material economy that supposedly generates profit without actually making anything. Britain may now be paying the price for no longer being the workshop of the world, but Ireland will pay a price for having never been much more than a cottage industry. This is not to talk Ireland down: things today are not nearly as bad as they were in the 1980s, despite the glee of many a liberal commentator delighted to see the ‘greedy’ working class get its comeuppance. There is a very real need, however, to face our own failings. The solution for Irish society is the same as it is for the economy: we need to develop or, to put it another way, to grow-up.
Some are hoping that Fianna Fáil’s impending destruction at the next general election could pave the way for a new Irish politics, one based on ideas rather than filial loyalty that goes back to which faction of the IRA our grandparents supported during the civil war. But where are these ideas to come from? The collapse in Fianna Fáil’s support comes at the precise moment when politics throughout the Western world has been completely exhausted.
Just as the opposition’s empty rhetoric on the economy has nothing to offer, calls to expel the Papal nuncio are a substitute for the real work that needs to be done.
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