The retirement of Jim Cantwell as director of the Catholic Press Office after 25 years has not gone unmarked. An unofficial translation of a Latin document, found in a rubbish sack behind the Apostolic Nunciature in Dublin is in circulation, according to a note for editors, and has been quoted at a series of farewell functions. Quidnunc has information that it originated in the offices of the Bishops' Justice Commission and that the scribe Jerome had a hand in it.
The document quotes a statement from the Vatican Office for Social Communication (formerly the Sacred Congregation for Reticence) that the retirement of Cantwell (Jacobus Nonbeneposset) did not signify the end of the world, merely, according to Cardinal Pierre Neditesrien, the end of an era. "Mr Cantwell, whose main achievement may well be judged by posterity to have been to successfully manage the transition from an upright typewriter to the electronic computer (calculator electronicus) is to be honoured by the publication by the Vatican Polyglot Press of a four-volume leather-bound series - Collected Press Releases."
The document says there is to be a Cantwell Award for an Irish journalist who best combines veracity, intelligibility and self-survival in dealing with religion and church government. Cantwell is to get the Galileo Medal, a historical allusion, Neditesrien reminded the Roman press corps, in that Galileo had to "recantwell". In addition, Cantwell will join the board of the International Project for a Media Friendly Vatican, a project denounced by Opus Dei and other quasi-infallible bodies as subversive.
The Latin document confines itself to Cantwell but Quidnunc can reveal that his deputy Des Cryan is also retiring and that the whole operation is moving from Booterstown to Maynooth. Meanwhile, the Church of Ireland, whose press officer, Liz Harries, left early this year, has been unable to fill its two advertised vacancies for a press officer and deputy, in Dublin and Belfast. Recruitment, it appears, is a problem all over.