Ireland: Parting ways with the Vatican

It’s “an unholy spat,” said Kevin Doyle and Niall O’Connor in the Dublin Herald. Ireland shocked the world last week by abruptly announcing that it was closing its embassy at the Vatican. The government claimed that it was shuttering the expensive facility “for financial reasons,” but it was obviously a snub of the Holy See. Relations have been growing steadily colder ever since July, when the Cloyne judicial report showed that as recently as 2009, the Vatican had cruelly and deliberately covered up priests’ sexual abuse of Irish children. In the wake of that report, our own columnist Fergus Finlay urged the government to pull its embassy out of the Vatican, saying, “Diplomacy that is based on obsequiousness in one direction, and lofty disdain in the other, is more than meaningless, it’s damaging and corrosive.” Now the government has heeded his advice.

But at what cost? asked Mary Kenny in the Irish Independent. The pope is one of the most powerful men in the world, and his reach is only growing. In the past decade, many countries “once cut off from Rome for reasons of political ideology” established full relations with the Holy See. Russia is among them, and China may soon follow. “Does it serve Ireland’s best interests to distance itself from a diplomatic network whose universal reach is matchless?” The anger over the clerical abuse scandal is entirely justifiable. But “you don’t have diplomatic relations with another state because you like it or approve of it—diplomatic relations exist to serve the best interests of your country.”

And while Ireland may be undergoing a crisis of faith, it is still a Catholic country, said Deaglán de Bréadún in The Irish Times. The mission to the Holy See was one of the first embassies that Ireland opened upon gaining independence from Britain. Mainstream opinion here is upset at the church’s “arrogance and negligence and failure to protect the innocence of children.” Yet even in the wake of all the scandals, less than half of Irish Catholics say they hold an unfavorable view of the church. “Catholicism has very deep roots in Ireland, which politicians ignore at their peril.”

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Why interpret the embassy closure as a snub? asked Douglas Kmiec in the U.S. National Catholic Reporter. Why not take the Irish government at its word, that it needed to save money in an era of economic austerity? It’s not as if all diplomatic connections are being severed—Ireland will still have an ambassador to the Holy See, just one who is no longer expensively based in Rome. In fact, if anyone overreacted to the Cloyne report, it wasn’t Ireland but the Holy See, which pointedly recalled its own ambassador in protest over what it called Ireland’s “excessive reactions” to the findings. Perhaps now is “the appropriate moment for the diplomatic tit-for-tat to slow down.