The announcement that the Archbishop of Armagh and Primate of All-Ireland, Dr Seán Brady, is to become a cardinal on November 24th was "sign of the interest of Benedict XVI to come to Northern Ireland, if not in the immediate future," the Archbishop of Dublin, Dr Diarmuid Martin, has said.
Speaking in New York yesterday, the archbishop said: "such a visit, alongside one of Queen Elizabeth to Dublin, would have the symbolic meaning of ending an era of our history and opening to something new, North and South."
As reported in The Irish Timeslast October, during the Irish Catholic bishops' ad limina(obligatory) visit to Rome, British government representatives there were investigating the possibility of a simultaneous visit to the North by the pope and the queen.
Sources had confirmed in Rome that it was understood preliminary enquiries had been taking place there about the feasibility of such a visit, which was being presented as a culmination to the Northern peace process.
Yesterday, in a wide-ranging inaugural lecture at the Irish Institute in New York University on the theme New Ireland, New Church, the archbishop said that economic progress in the South had played a significant part in shaping the framework that permitted developments in Northern Ireland to take place.
"Unionists would hardly have been tempted to talk to representatives of a nationalism which had not been able to achieve economic success," he said.
The success of the peace process would depend to a great degree on the way in which the two economies can be integrated for the benefit of all, he added. "The challenge of establishing a new economic model for all of Ireland is a challenge for our own country but also for the friends of Ireland around the world, especially in the United States," he said.
All-Ireland economic co-operation was expanding and an "all-Ireland cultural zone" was emerging, he said. This would mean that "the numerical balance among religious denominations will change. Inevitably, the strong adherence to a denomination which was necessary to survive in troubled times will loosen."
He asked "what will take its place? Is the New Ireland going to be increasingly more secular?" As to the future of the Catholic Church in Ireland he said he did not have a plan, "a fixed agenda . . . I am not sure you can have one". He added: "it must be a journey made together with many, a journey involving the Catholic community but also people of different religious backgrounds and people of none - if that absolute category really exists".
In a general observation, he said: "the Irish will never give any institution 100 per cent marks. There will probably be a special corner of heaven for those Irish who will have found something to be negative about in their eternal reward."
The full text of Archbishop Martin's talk is available on www.dublindiocese.ie