Sir, Has the Bishop of Clonfert (April 17th) entered into some Mephistophelean arrangement with the President of Ireland - a person who has been campaigning publicly against Catholicism since 1970? (If indeed he has, I, for one, am at a loss to decide which party has got worse value.) Does he naively think to secure the Robinson party for the Church? Is he prepared to clamber onto any bandwagon to keep posteriors on pews and pounds in plates? Are some Catholic leaders so desperate that they must cling to the powers that be at any cost?
And what, incidentally, my Lord, is the "Third World"? This discredited and pejorative term has now been in abeyance for over a decade. Trocaire is rather, I suggest, Most Reverend Chairman, the Catholic Agency for World Development (do read your own literature) - long gone are the days when we labelled other, poorer societies with a yellow rosette or a bronze medal (as too are the days when a young priest - or anyone - could be shut up by the belt of a crozier). So much for being in touch with "the realities of today's world"! The Episcopal Conference might consider someone a little more informed, up to date and - dare I say? - develop as the next chairman of its global development agency. "Third World" indeed! What next? Black babies? The lower classes? Fallen women? I imagine that even Mrs Robinson will be embarrassed by such defence as this!
Indeed Dr Kirby appears to believe that Mrs Robinson's mere presence is of enormous benefit to persons in areas devastated by famine and genocide - although exactly what the pearl clad patronage of a white memsahib on the campaign trail achieves in these situations, apart from diverting scant resources from the problem at hand, can, I conjecture, be best explained by Mrs Robinson's PR people. Is Dr Kirby one of them? Does Dr Kirby, or Trocaire, support too the distribution of contraceptives and the provision of abortion as an appropriate means of helping women in the "Third World"? Does Dr Kirby, or Trocaire, also advocate biological imperialism and the colonialism of "liberal" values as a solution to the difficulties of "Third World" countries?
Maybe, one day, the Bishop of Clonfert can be brought to understand that the best possible contribution President Robinson could make to women in the "Third World" would be to lay aside her own ambition and thus allow the excellent Ms Sonia Picado Sotela of Costa Rica a free run at the High Commissionership. (Ms Picado Sotela is herself a woman, my Lord, and one, perhaps, from your "Third World".) The spectacle, however, of a Catholic bishop leading not even the herd of Robinsonites, but laughably shambling after it, indicates that sadly that day is not near at hand. - Yours, etc.,
Pontificio Collegio Irlandese.