{"id":1102,"date":"2011-05-05T00:45:44","date_gmt":"2011-05-05T00:45:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.tuppenceworth.ie\/blog\/?p=1102"},"modified":"2011-07-15T08:05:48","modified_gmt":"2011-07-15T08:05:48","slug":"how-i-and-4000ish-other-people-took-on-the-vatican-and-won","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.tuppenceworth.ie\/blog\/2011\/05\/05\/how-i-and-4000ish-other-people-took-on-the-vatican-and-won\/","title":{"rendered":"How I (and 4000ish other people) took on the Vatican’s Papal Nuncio and won"},"content":{"rendered":"

On the 26th November in 2009, the Murphy report<\/a> into the abuse of children by Catholic clergy was released. The country was convulsed and repulsed by the clear description of decades of cover-ups, lies, deceit, and misbehaviour by the Church. In addition, it was clear from the report that the institutions of the state- political, police and judicial- had all participated in the same effort to protect Church institutions at the expense of abused children. <\/p>\n

Like a lot of people, I felt I wanted to strike back at the church and the state for what they had done, and what they had failed to do. I listened to the cant from Ministers and bishops on the radio as I rode the bus home that evening and felt myself getting angry at the obvious lack of sincerity from both sides. Both Fianna F\u00e1il and the Church were engaged in a well-prepared damage limitation exercise- mouth words about learning lessons<\/a> but take no action to change current behaviour. <\/p>\n

I was angry enough that I spent the bus journey thinking what I could do. It seemed to me that there was absolutely no point in attacking the Irish Catholic Church. It is not a democratic structure. It is not accountable to its followers and it has, as we have seen, absolutely no sense of shame. There is no political pressure available and it is immune to moral pressure as it has no morals. It does what it can do.<\/p>\n

This left the State. But, while the state had failed consistently to protect its youngest, most at risk citizens (and still does) it was cheerfully allowing the Church to take the heat. <\/p>\n

The only point of overlap I could see came from the Roman Catholic Church\u2019s political aspect. The Church is also a State and that state\u2019s representative had deliberately stonewalled the Murphy Inquiry, continuing the same pattern of deceit and cover-up. But unlike the local church, the Papal Nuncio, the Vatican state’s diplomatic representative, is answerable to the our state through the Department of Foreign Affairs. And the Minister for Foreign Affairs is answerable to the citizens of the state. <\/p>\n

So that evening, I set up a Facebook page \u201cExpel the Irish Papal Nuncio\u201d<\/a>. Only a few days previously, I had finished Clay Shirky\u2019s Here Comes Everybody<\/a>. It proposed the idea that social networks created a new possibility for reducing the \u2018friction\u2019 involved in organising campaign groups. The author also set out a series of rules of thumb for engagement- people will join something passively with reasonably little resistance. Of those joiners, about 10% will make the shift to doers. You can increase that percentage slightly by making your \u2018doing\u2019 as easy as possible, but you will mostly still be around that mark. <\/p>\n

I knew that if I wanted anything to actually come of this campaign, it would require a mass response. That meant I needed ten times that critical mass of doers to join. I put the word out on Twitter (and it was retweeted). I asked other bloggers to let their readers know. But it was when I bought \u20ac70 worth of Facebook advertising, complete with a photo of the Nuncio looking pleased in his hat, that membership took off. <\/p>\n

It turned out that thousands of people had felt the same way I had- angry at the Church and powerless to do anything about it. The Facebook group gave people a focus, a lens, for those emotions. Not wanting to abuse people\u2019s goodwill, on the 29th November I sent a single message to all the members suggesting they write to the Minister for Foreign Affairs to call on him to express the nation\u2019s disapproval of the Vatican\u2019s behaviour towards an Inquiry. I also suggested writing to their local TDs. To reduce the friction, I gave out the text of my letter to TDs<\/a> and one drafted<\/a> by another member of the Facebook Group, Ruaidhr\u00ed Mulveen, addressing the Minister. I had no way of knowing how many emails were sent, unless people posted confirmations to the Facebook page (which some people did). The only other way of gauging success was watching the impact of the voter\u2019s demands on their representatives\u2019 public statements.<\/p>\n

At the same time, the effort had a stroke of good luck. Alone amongst all journalists, Patsy McGarry in the Irish Times focussed on the role of the Papal Nuncio in the Murphy report. The following day Stephen Neill, a Church of Ireland canon, explicitly called for the Papal Nuncio\u2019s expulsion, giving the story legs. This kind of \u2018air support\u2019 was very valuable in pushing our guerilla effort forward. Suddenly, we didn\u2019t have to explain what a Papal Nuncio was before we could ask people to support the proposition that he ought to be expelled. <\/p>\n

There was a second stroke of good luck. The Papal Nuncio turned out to be a gift to his opponents. His reaction to the report\u2019s criticism was offensive, blustering and transparently dishonest. Suddenly, it was difficult to find anyone who was willing to stand up and publicly say the Papal Nuncio shouldn\u2019t be expelled. <\/p>\n

Until, that is, one body decided- in the middle of a storm of criticism of the Church sweeping the entire country and dominating all media discussion- that it would publicly confront and reject calls for the Papal Nuncio\u2019s expulsion. Those calls were now leaking out of the political system. Senators were getting ready to call for it. Everyone knew \u2018some people\u2019 were looking for that expulsion.<\/p>\n

In response, we can only presume, to this pressure it was getting via contacts from voters directly, as well as those relayed on by TDs, the Department of Foreign Affairs took the peculiar step of issuing this statement<\/a> rejecting the Nuncio\u2019s expulsion. This was surely one of the moments to most mystify journalists. At this time, as far as the general press were concerned, this idea had only been canvassed by a single CoI canon. <\/p>\n

On Tuesday the 1st December the Dail and the Seanad met and were all in spontaneous agreement- the Papal Nuncio had been contemptuous of the nation\u2019s duly appointed inquiry into the Church\u2019s abuse of Irish children. The Irish Times finally reported on the Facebook campaign- then with 1,850 members. Presumably alarmed at the turn Ireland\u2019s reaction to the Murphy report had taken the Nuncio contacted the Secretary General of the Department of Foreign Affairs and met him in Iveagh House that evening. We have never been told what the contents of their discussion was, but can guess at it fairly well from subsequent events. <\/p>\n

By Wednesday (2nd December) the Facebook group had hit 4,000 members. I had stopped the Facebook advertising when my \u20ac70 ran out. Allan Cavanagh had then spent some of his money picking up the slack. But over the weekend the membership had started to snowball organically, as people started joining because their friends were joining. <\/p>\n

I was invited on The Last Word on Today FM to debate the Nuncio\u2019s expulsion with Breda O\u2019Brien<\/a>. As her response largely consisted of listing everything else I could be doing and asking why I was doing this, it ended up as mostly another opportunity to push the Facebook campaign\u2019s message into the mainstream discourse. <\/p>\n

What was significant was that, as I was going on air, the Taoiseach was getting to his feet to address the Dail on the Murphy report. This was to have been the government\u2019s keynote response to this massive social and political event. However, Brian Cowen, with his unerring capacity for allowing his bad instincts to lead him to make very bad judgements, decided to abandon the text of his speech as disseminated earlier to the press and instead to lead with a defence of the Papal Nuncio, clearly drafted for him by the Department of Foreign Affairs. It was an act of political insanity. It was also a characteristic misjudgment of the mood of the nation. Instead of voicing the anger of the people, the Taoiseach became the Vatican\u2019s excuser-in-chief. And far from closing down the matter, it fanned the public\u2019s anger. It also revealed the hollowness of the rest of his prewritten speech\u2019s claims of a break with the past. <\/p>\n

The evening of the very next day, the Minister for Foreign Affairs announced in calculatedly bland terms that he was summoning the Papal Nuncio to Iveagh House.<\/p>\n

The membership of the Facebook Group surged- perhaps driven either by my interview or by the Taoiseach\u2019s response. So I took a chance and sent out what was only the second message ever to all members. I asked them to again contact local TDs and the Minister for Foreign Affairs. And to make things easier, Cian Flatherty and Simon at IrishElection.com also set up a contact form<\/a>, with all the email addresses of the country\u2019s TDs available in a drop down menu. <\/p>\n

This was an effort to further reduce the friction to action- to try to convert a few more of those thousands of members into doers. <\/p>\n

The response was astonishing. 500 people used the form to contact their representatives and the Minister in the space of a few days. Those representatives suddenly felt their own voters\u2019 anger and demands on the topic and forwarded those representations on to Iveagh House, as a second wave. In the Minister\u2019s Office, it must have felt as though the nation was spontaneously rising up against the Vatican\u2019s representatives. Which, of course, it was.<\/p>\n

Fianna Fail TDs started to distance themselves<\/a> from the Taoiseach\u2019s already discredited defence. Their mouthpieces in the press<\/a> likewise attempted to shield themselves from his toxic association. If the Nuncio had done nothing wrong, according to the Taoiseach on Wednesday, why was he being summoned to Iveagh House by Thursday? Journalists reported on these twists and turns, but the engine powering the entire machinery was invisible to them- hundreds of letters pouring in every day from angry, articulate voters demanding their government act. A campaign which couldn\u2019t be fixed by a word in a journalist\u2019s ear, or by a promise of a quid pro quo, because it effectively had no centre. The Hierarchy was being consumed by the Network. <\/p>\n

There isn\u2019t much more to say. By the time the Nuncio did finally appear at Iveagh House, the efforts to shield him had been abandoned. Now, instead of the \u2018discussion\u2019 it was described as on the 3rd December, the Minister was reported to have issued \u2018ultimatums\u2019 and to have told the Nuncio \u2018of the Irish public’s deep anger and outrage at the cover-ups by the Vatican and Irish bishops\u2019. Reading that, I imagined the thick sheaf of papers, letters from voters, and their TDs the Minister might have waved to make his point. <\/p>\n

The Papal Nuncio was not expelled. But he was publicly held to account for his failings and the failings of the state he is the representative of. This was unprecedented, anywhere in the world and was reported all over the world. Furthermore, as a diplomat who proved unable to conduct diplomacy, the Nuncio was humiliated. He was forced to break his silence and face the press immediately after leaving the meeting with the Minister and issue an apology (or something that sounded like an apology if you didn\u2019t read it carefully). The Vatican suddenly found that the Irish Church\u2019s problems were leaking into the Holy See\u2019s front garden. Bishops and the Papal Nuncio were all urgently summoned to Rome, their self defined timetable of \u2018reflections\u2019 taking months (until the heat died down) thrown into chaos. <\/p>\n

I do not believe that any of those things would have happened without the efforts of the 4000ish people who put their name to the Facebook proposition and, more importantly, the hundreds of those people who took the time to have their voices heard, and turned the empty mouthing of platitudes long planned by the clerical and civil powers into high-stakes gambles with their reputations. A gamble which they mostly lost, rescuing a shred of Ireland’s honour.<\/p>\n

Final Note:<\/strong> This will eventually be a very link heavy post. But just right now, I\u2019m putting it up as bare text. Links will creep in as time allows. Also, the text is still a little loose. I\u2019ll be amending things for a while, to make sure my timeline is correct, and also to take into account anyone else\u2019s good points sent by comments or otherwise. Do not be alarmed if my typos are decreasing every time you visit, is what I\u2019m saying.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The story of the campaign to expel the Papal Nuncio over the Vatican’s refusal to cooperate with Ireland’s inquiry into clerical child sex abuse.","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[582,672,613,612],"class_list":["post-1102","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general","tag-nuncio","tag-irish-politics","tag-poitics","tag-vatican"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tuppenceworth.ie\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1102","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tuppenceworth.ie\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tuppenceworth.ie\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tuppenceworth.ie\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tuppenceworth.ie\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1102"}],"version-history":[{"count":16,"href":"https:\/\/www.tuppenceworth.ie\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1102\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1173,"href":"https:\/\/www.tuppenceworth.ie\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1102\/revisions\/1173"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tuppenceworth.ie\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1102"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tuppenceworth.ie\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1102"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tuppenceworth.ie\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1102"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}