Papal nunscience: Calls to expel the Vatican ambassador miss the point

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.