RITE & REASON:The WikiLeaks Vatican disclosures confirm what we knew about the Holy See

THE AMERICAN author Stephen L Carter remarked some years ago that if churches are to be a moral bulwark in society they must avoid being “seduced by the lure of temporal power”. The fact that the Vatican had blocked moves to permit the Murphy commission to investigate senior Vatican officials regarding the rape of children by priests here, confirmed by cables from the US ambassador to the Holy See, come as no surprise to seasoned and critical observers.

What the leaks confirm is that the Holy See/Vatican views itself simultaneously as two distinct entities: the centre of a “global community” and as the head office of an international legal entity with sovereign status. Its deliberately selective embodiment of one or the other of these is something invariably contingent upon particular circumstances.

This shape shifting allows the Vatican to capitalise on the advantages afforded by both international status and transnational community. While bargaining for privileges with national governments, the Vatican utilises a benign language of religious “community”, protected by the freedom of thought, conscience and belief clauses of the main human rights instruments. Demands for separate schools, tax privileges as a charitable organisation and access to mechanisms of policymaking relative to its perceived interests are predicated on the notion of benign religious fraternity.

Yet, when the Machiavellian nature of the institutional church’s corporate behaviour is scrutinised, the drawbridges are raised. “Sovereignty” – not “community” – becomes the dominant language of the church. Hence the invocation of the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act in the face of US legal action into abuse allegations by Catholic priests there. Here the commission of inquiry and the Joint Oireachtas Committee on Foreign Affairs were both given short shrift by the princes of the church when asked to explain their role in the most serious and systematic breach of human rights in any peacetime European state. Inquiries were rerouted via “diplomatic channels” or ignored.

Institutional Catholicism’s ambiguous international legal status, which most nation-states recognise unilaterally, affords it a special position at the United Nations. The Vatican’s privileged “observer status”, which was upgraded significantly in 2004, permits the Holy See’s diplomatic representatives to use its influence over member states to ensure that UN objectives are not antithetical to its ideological position on a range of issues.

This is why the goals of the International Conferences on Population Development have not been fully realised, and why targets to improve the empowerment of women have been significantly diluted in the UN’s millennium development goals programme.

The Vatican, in alliance with some of the most odious regimes on the planet, has conspired to subvert and obstruct the provision of greater access to reproductive health for women. What is disappointing, but still not surprising, is the continued craven “deference” to the church displayed by our own political representatives. What should have happened following the Vatican’s failure to co-operate fully with the inquiry, indeed what was argued for by some commentators, was the expulsion of the Papal Nuncio pending an adjustment in the church’s attitude.

The Vatican has played the international system with masterful adroitness; morphing from “sovereign” city state to moral guardian of national identity to beleaguered minority to global community as and when it is appropriate or advantageous to their institutional and ideological interests.

There are two possible ways to respond: either call time on the Holy See’s strategising and demand it face up to its moral responsibilities; or, very quietly, start sending our own political class for courses at the Vatican school of law and diplomacy.

Kenneth Houston is a researcher at the University of Ulster’s Incore institute. This article draws on analysis published in the recent issue of the Journal of Critical Globalisation Studies (Issue 3)