Archbishop Antonio Mennini, the Apostolic Nuncio to Great Britain, is returning to take up a post at the Vatican. Archbishop Mennini was ordained by Cardinal Poletti in 1974. His episcopal consecration was undertaken by Cardinal Ruini, and JeanLouis Tauran, ,SecretAry for Relations with State. He was born into a Roman family with strong links to the Roman See. His father was managing Director of the Vatican Bank; one of his brothers is a public prosecutor. He has served the Vatican in Uganda, Turkey, Bulgaria , Russia and Uzbekistan.
He was a St John Paul II appointee as Bishop. While we can, of course, be sure that neither his family connection nor his professional relationship with the Vatican will have affected his judgment in any way, in any given situation, he is certainly a Curia man /to the bone.
There will be idle speculation as to why his experiences in Uganda, Turkey, Bulgaria, Russia and Uzbekistan made him just the man for Great Britain, but this is irrelevant. After all, Bruno Heim picked Cardinal O’Brien as a bishop, after a lot of time in Egypt and Finland. Then Luigi Barbarito picked Bishop Roddy Wright, after a lot of experience in Senegal, Niger and Haiti. There was no speculation about the relevance of all this to choosing bishops for Scotland in the Catholic press , although to be fair, due to holidays we might have missed an edition or two of the ‘Scottish Catholic Observer’.
The omission of comment on what seems a bizarre method of choosing bishops for a country rather than leaving this to the country does suggest, possibly, a tolerance of Curia whim. We are reminded of ‘Cuckoo’, a game played by Czarist/Soviet army officers, when well-oiled in the mess. The lights were put out, and a revolver was fired into the darkness, to cries of ‘Cuckoo!’
On the other hand, this may all have been a prescient venture into the benefits of diversity, not all of which, it must be said, are as yet immediately apparent.
The concept of an ambitious prelate has been for those of us brought up on sermons about humility, a difficult one to grasp, not to mention the lack of transparency about financial matters and the secrecy about clerical sexual adventurism at all levels. It may not have been ambition which has prevented the bishops of Scotland at any point, as far as we know, to ask the Curia if it has even heard of Drumchapel and Drumnadrochit and their different pastoral needs, never mind why poor Archbishop Mennini was asked to transfer his experiences in Bulgaria and Uzbekistan to these very different areas. Who knows? We are sure he did his best.
Anyway, Archbishop Tartaglia has thanked him conventionally and no doubt genuinely. But one phrase he uses may well ring down through the ages. He thanks him for ‘his readiness to convey the specific reality of the Catholic Church to the Holy See’
If Archbishop Mennini does this, he will undoubtedly spoil the morning coffee that day for the Holy See, since we must assume they don’t know this already. Mustn’t we? We wish him more strength to his elbow. The results should be stimulating, and we certainly hope he managed to get a copy of Fr Despard’s silenced book on his Kindle before it was removed. Our only regret is his failure to answer our respectful letter to him in 2014 on the extension of ordination, despite our certificate of recorded delivery.