Concordat diplomacy: Tricks of the trade

Here are 15 tricks to help get a concordat signed and ratified, with examples showing how these dodges work. Essential reading if you want to become “foreign minister” at the Vatican.. Above all, don't forget the “mousetrap clause”: this frees the concordat from democratic control forever and lets you move on to the next one. Fortuna!

Both sides try to keep these hidden from the taxpayers. Neither the Vatican nor the politicians, (who are wooing the “Catholic vote”), want the bill to be made public. In Australia it was even declared a state secret. But when the hidden figures were revealed, it was found that the papal visit had scared off tourists and cost far more than estimated.

• Security hysteria on the Pope's trip to Bavaria

• Gay Catholic youth not wanted

• Vatican's “World Youth Day 2005” funded by European Union
 

This was the papal visit of 1979 which boosted Irish fertility. John Paul II's exhortations to the women of Ireland to be fruitful like the Virgin Mother, managed for a time, to recall them to their reproductive duty to the Church — until a tragedy led many to reconsider what they had been taught.

Vatican diplomats have the dual role of representing the Holy See to the nation where they are posted and also of keeping an eye on the local Catholic Church. The Vatican City is a hub for diplomats around the world with accreditation limited, where this is possible, to conservative Catholics who may have a double allegiance: to their own country and to the Church.

The war in Afghanistan which threatens to destabilise Pakistan is claimed to have begun “a secret initiative” by the US and the Vatican to use religion to weaken the Soviet Union. It is depicted as a pincer movement of Catholic dissidents on the Soviet empire's western flank and Islamic fundamentalists on its southern one. Today the Vatican is happy to take credit for the first, but doesn't mention the second.
 

In the words of political analyst Avro Manhattan, “The Papal representative has at his disposal, not only the diplomatic machinery that any ordinary diplomatic representative of a lay State would have, but also the vast religious machinery of the Catholic Church inside the country to which he is accredited, as well as outside it.”

Concordats take the form of treaties between the Church government and a national government. This allows them, in most cases, to claim precedence over national legislation, and sometimes even over a country's constitution.

In (monist) countries where international treaties are at the top of a single hierarchy of laws, concordats have automatic precedence even over constitutions. In dualist countries, on the other hand, concordats must be incorporated into national law and their priority varies, though, even here concordats generally outweigh national laws.

Papal trips are as ambiguous as the Vatican itself, which claims the benefits of being both a state and a religion. As "state visits" they are paid for by the host country, unlike the trips of any other religious leader. And as "apostolic visits" they lend themselves to the dispensation of politically-charged "moral guidance" which would be a breach of protocol if it came from any other head of state. Included is a list of the 104 trips of John Paul II.

On 15 December 2004 the European Parliament rejected in its first reading the earmarking of 1,5 million Euros for the funding of “World Youth Day 2005” in Cologne — but the next year the grant got through.

Ostpolitik (German for “eastern politics”) was the Cold War policy of accomodation to Communism. But the Church had a problem: when the West’s acceptance of the Berlin Wall showed that Communism was going to last, the Church had to find a way to begin negotiating with its sworn enemies -- without this looking like standard political manoeuvring. The solution was ingenious.

This legendary cardinal-diplomat served under five Popes. Appointed roving ambassador in Eastern Europe in 1961, he took part in the 1975 Helsinki Conference, urging that religious freedom be monitored in Communist countries. After the election of the "Polish pope" he worked secretly with the US to use religious zeal to weaken the USSR. (See this story here.)