One of the crosses Catholic intellectuals bear is having an occasionally infallible leader with whom you sometimes agree and sometimes, well, not so much. So John Gehring of Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good today gladly uses the pope’s recent encyclical embrace of environmental concerns as a club with which to beat anti-environmentalist conservatives. And then there’s Austin Invereigh, British Isles blogger for In All Things, who’s got a heavy load to tote on the recent summit meeting His Holiness held with the Irish episcopacy on the gigantic priest pedophile cover-up scandal in the Emerald Isle.

“The Irish bishops just don’t get it” is the title of post–but the real point that Invereigh can’t bring himself to utter except obliquely and in the passive voice–is that it’s the pope who doesn’t get it. Here are the key graphs:

But Dr Martin’s approach was defeated in Rome, and the other
bishops returned home happy. Only one has had his offer to resign
accepted. And from what they said yesterday, it doesn’t look as if
anything happened in Rome to shake them out of their denial. 

That leaves the Pope’s pastoral letter to the Irish people,
expected mid-March. But if that doesn’t confront the core sin
identified by Murphy, the chances of trust being restored in the Church
look slim indeed.

Dr. Martin is of course Archbishop Diarmuid Martin of Dublin, who assuredly does get it, and who signaled his unhappiness with Rome by not showing up at the post-confab dog-and-pony show. Invereigh’s meaning is, to be sure, clear enough for those with eyes to read. But you figure he’d have preferred to grab a beam and club the pope upside the head with it.