Ireland shut down their Vatican embassy; everyone says it was a cost-saving measure, but you know there had to have been some notion that this was a rebuke to the Catholic church for screwing over Ireland for so long. Now some groups want to reopen it…and so far the response is rather emphatic. I suspect you’ll make it even more emphatic.
Should Ireland reopen its Vatican embassy?
Yes 14%
No 84%
I don’t know 0%
All countries should close the vatican embassies in their country, and not appoint any ambassador to the vactican. Time to put the vatican as state nonsense into the trash heap where it belongs.
Time to put the vatican
as state nonsenseinto the trash heap where it belongs.FIFY.
Hard to believe that only 20 years ago the Catholics and the Protestants were blowing up each other’s school busses in Ireland. I think once that conflict ended, everyone was sick-as-fuck of religion
A thousand times yes.
It says a lot about the church’s behavior when a country as catholic as Eire starts to mumble excuses and back away slowly.
Well, this would also mean getting rid of the Concordat which provides for the exchange of ambassadors.
Also, the Vatican is in a twilight zone between state and non-state. When the German Basic Law was being drafted after WWII, the right to negotiate treaties with the Vatican was granted to the states, on the grounds that the Vatican “was not a foreign country”.
Short of nullifying an internationally recognised treaty, I reiterate my wish that at least the ambassadors from non-Catholic nations would lodge a protest every time the papal nuncio is elected the doyen of the diplomatic corps “by convention”.
Wow. Comparing that to religious polls in America, usually it’s half and half, or skewed toward the religious side. This poll doesn’t need Pharyngulation; it seems a lot of people on the side of reason have already cast their vote. I’m impressed, and happy.
… still, 84% could be closer to 100%…
Next it would be great if the Irish start to preach what they practice.
(Explanation: an end-run around the anti-contraception policy is that a doctor can write a prescription for hormonal birth control if the woman as an irregular period. There are more women with “irregular periods” in Ireland than anywhere else in the world. Genetic? I think not.)
This is a great first step. One pretense down, how many more to go?
That poll is so skewed I almost felt guilty. You know, that guilty feeling you get right before eating that huge chocolate bar.
Just 9 comments and it´s already at 89 %. Should we aim for 120%? Could we then call that an atheist miracle? Please?
The embassy bloody cost a fortune and we’ve one in Rome anyway. Also yes it was two fingers to the vatican as well, we saved money and pissed off a few popeheads what more could you want.
Considering you can get the morning after pill over the counter, I’ve a funny feeling that the old irregular periods hasn’t been an issue since family planning act of 1992, but since I’m a guy I maybe wrong.
I dunno, I’ve never been convinced on the factual level – it has territory and citizens, it was established by treaty with an existing state, and is recognised as a state by most other states, so I find the claim that it isn’t one hard to sustain.
Moreover, I think it may be more useful to agree that yes, it is one – and oblige the RCC in each country to conform to whatever local laws apply to individuals and institutions representing foreign powers. Moreover, the RCC should be continually reminded that Vatican City is a state only because of a concordat between the Pope and Mussolini: it’s the only existing state that is a direct legacy of fascism.
The case would be stronger if there were hereditary citizenship, and not just appointed citizenship as at present. In reality, there isn’t a real state with a sustaining citizenship through birth. That makes the citizenship claim totally artificial. Every “citizen” of the vatican had a previous citizenship at one time.
Nerd of Redhead is onto something.
There are children born in the Vatican to the relatively few families who live there. When they reach the age of majority, they become Italian citizens.
There is no such thing as a natural-born citizen of the Vatican.
Some “state”.
Moreover: the US constitution forbids American citizens from accepting titles of nobility from other countries. Yet Cardinals of the RCC are considered “Princes of the Church”. Sounds to me like the Vatican is playing the same game Scientology does, claims to be one thing today, another tomorrow, to the point that nobody knows just what they are for sure. (They are both criminal conspiracies, however.)
KG,
to be fair, the Papal States (first known as Patrimonium Petri) have existed since the 8th century, and were disestablished twice, once in 1798, and the second time in 1870.
So they merely owe their reestablishment to Mussolini.
I think legally speaking the treaties have been signed by the Holy See, not the Vatican, so the legal picture gets even muddier. They only seem to sometimes be one entity, or sometimes consider each diocese autonomous, like during the abuse scandals (though I don’t know how those plaintiffs who wanted to sue the Vatican fared)
I also read that Vatican City passports are diplomatic passports only. You also lose its “citizenship” once you leave your post. Some countries, like Japan, are very strict about their citizens taking on other countries’ citizenships. There aren’t any Japanese cardinals alive right now, but I wouldn’t be surprised if Japan would make an exception for the Vatican City citizenship.
It has territory only in the sense that the Church of England has ‘territory – it owns a lot of real estate. It only grants citizenship to its bigwigs, and revokes it at the end of their employment. To call it a state in any real sense is nonsense.
Well, *yeah*, and it’s not even a lie, because without the hormonal birth control every couple years her period is 10 months late —
On the embassy, 800,000 Euros? 800,000 Euros for a couple rooms in some crumbling old dump that’s been around forever? That’s just obscene! They could get rooms in a nice modern building for a tenth of that.
davem,
it’s called Montevideo Convention, it’s got nothing to do with the Church of England:
It qualifies all four criteria, even if (a) is a bit iffy, they do have a permanent population within the confines of their state.
The pill thing reminds me of Japan: they legalised abortion for health and economic reasons after the war, but the pill was banned until 2004. Besides the usual patriarchic argument of AIDS, morality and women’s health, another reason for banning it was the possible pollution of rivers! Word has it though that after viagra was licensed in no time, this got feminist activists in arms that the government finally caved… Probably helped that there was no religious justification behind it..
http://factsanddetails.com/japan.php?itemid=599
Voted – thanks.
Latest figures :
Poll Results:
No – 89%
Yes – 9%
Dunno – 1%
pelamun,
Yes, I’m aware of the history of the Papal State; Vatican City was explicitly a new entity, with no legal connection to the latter.
Davem, you’re simply wrong about its territory; the RCC owns a lot of real estate within other states, but Vatican City itself is sovereign territory under international law.
Yes, I think that’s right. They should be obliged, as I suggested, to behave like other states, and the RCC treated as a foreign power everywhere outside Vatican City; or give up any claim to statehood, so Vatican City becomes Italian territory. It’s their insistence on having it all ways that is problematic.
FIFY
It’s currently 90% no, 8% yes, 1% don’t know/don’t care. Yes, that’s 99%, but that’s due to rounding.