The idea that Every Day In Every Way Things Are Getting Better And Better, as applied to the Catholic Church, is dead wrong.

In the UK, and presumably Ireland too, there has been a large influx of Polish Catholics (in Edinburgh, there are probably more people going to Mass in Polish than in English). They have brought much of their ideology with them, which means the rabidly misogynistic crap that has rolled back all the gains women made in Polish society since WW2. And the Catholic Church in Poland has made damn sure that NOTHING of what they've been up to with children has ever been investigated by an independent authority.

As if they weren't bad enough, the British priesthood has been infiltrated by a right-wing fraction (I forget its name, but it was closely aligned with Ratzinger both while he was Wojtyla's enforcer and subsequently) which sees itself as the ideological police. In Edinburgh this meant in one instance that church libraries were purged of all internally dissident literature by people like Hans Küng. I presume these arseholes have been operating in Ireland too.

So. Between a plague of thick-as-pigshit Reagan/Wojtyla fanboys and a Rome-directed elite of ruthless ideologues, the prospects for truth and accountability in these islands don't look that great. And given that despite the admirable statements of intent, Francis looks like ending up about as ineffectual as Obama, I can't see it getting much better in the long run anywhere else.

When Italy became a nation in the 1870s, the whole central part of the "boot" was absorbed into that new nation. That part of Italy had been the Papal States. In the Lateran Concordat of 1929, Italy compensated the Vatican for the loss of the Papal States. That money became the endowment that has supported the Vatican to this day - and yes, there has been corruption in the management of that money at times, but the money is still there. So, the Vatican is in the enviable position of being healthily endowed and largely self-supporting.

Where do you think the money came from? Their wealth meant the poverty of the Italian people. Mussolini bought the Church's allegiance nearly a century ago and it's stayed bought.