ROME
irish Times
Paddy Agnew
When Ireland’s new Ambassador to the Holy See, Emma Madigan, was chatting to Pope Francis in the pontifical library the day she presented her diplomatic credentials last month, the pope at one point told her: “You know, before the conclave last year the bookmakers were quoting me at 25/1, and then look what happened.”
If Francis’s election in 2013 saw the triumph of a 25/1 shot, what price do we put on the rapid turnaround – even U-turnaround – in Irish-Vatican relations now as compared with three years ago? Those were the days when Taoiseach Enda Kenny, rightly in the opinion of many, accused the Holy See of being dominated by a culture of “dysfunction, disconnection, elitism and narcissism”.
Rather than listen to evidence of clerical sex abuse with “St Benedict’s ear of the heart”, the Holy See had preferred to “parse and analyse it with the gimlet eye of a canon lawyer”, he said in a celebrated speech to the Dáil in July 2011.
When Madigan met Pope Francis last month there was no mention of those strained relations. A veil has been drawn over that awkward moment. But that is not to say that, from 2015, Irish relations with the Vatican will return to their genuflecting past.
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