I wonder what tomorrow will bring? It is comforting in a way, to see that the FCO is challenging the Vatican Press Office in incompetence at news management. To be fair, it should be said that the Sala Stampa is improving rapidly: this would probably be called a "learning curve" over at King Charles Street.
For details on today's development, see the following articles:
Daily Telegraph: Diplomat disciplined over Pope memo is named
Daily Mail: Revealed, the papal visit chief who wrote memo mocking Pope
Noorani's role is "Head of the Papal Visit Team" which puts the FCO in a quandry. They said that a junior worker was responsible for the offensive memo. Have they put a junior worker in charge of the Papal Visit Team? Is Mr Noorani just a step up from Mr Mulvain in the chain of scapegoating?
The Telegraph says:
The Foreign Office declined to comment on the religious beliefs of the members of the Papal Visit Team.According to the Mail,
Mr Noorani is understood to be British Pakistani - but colleagues say he is not a Muslim.Both, of course, could be entirely true; the FCO staidly refusing to comment while colleagues, trying to be helpful, desperately deny something that would blow the story up further.
According to these reports, there were four people in the team. It would be interesting to know who the other two were. The Mail reports that
None of the Foreign Office's Pope memo team is understood to be Catholic, according to senior sources within the Church. (my emphasis)There seems to be an ambiguity here as well, since the Telegraph version says:
Senior members of the church have described Mr Noorani and his team as having “not the slightest understanding of Catholicism”. None of the four-strong group is thought to be a practising Catholic. (my emphasis)So there is plenty more to come out and I think we can probably expect further news over the next few days.
Apparently a "senior source" in the Catholic Church in England and Wales has said that this whole affair shows that the government is not taking the visit seriously. I'm not sure about that. The FCO website has a chain of pages as follows: Home › About us › What we do › Working in partnership › Working with stakeholder groups › Working with faith groups (>>> predictably, the chain continues with Working with Muslim communities.) On the Working with faith groups page, we read:
UK faith groups and religious leaders have a strong interest in international affairs and can play an important part in delivering our objectives of preventing and resolving conflict, respect for human rights and promotion of a low carbon high growth global economy. They have particular expertise and networks, which can supplement and complement our own information and contacts base.So I think it is probably right to say that this team are clueless about Catholicism and insensitive to our religious beliefs. Nevertheless, they probably see the Papal visit as an opportunity for the Catholic Church to "play an important part" in delivering their objectives.
7 comments:
Leaving aside the nastiness and absurdity of the whole thing, I think one aspect is comment-worthy. It's a safe bet that when John Paul II visited in 1982, when both of the identified perpetrators of this incident were respectively about 2 years old and not even thought about much less conceived, and at a time of huge political sensitivity because of the Falklands war, the FCO or any of the other agencies involved did not have to resort to this "management-speak" drivel of stakeholder positioning charts and brainstorming sessions (in which the principal missing ingredient would appear to have been brains). And yet that visit was a triumph.
Think of it: there was no IT to speak of and faxes and mobiles were still on the horizon. The telex was a pretty neat thing. No video conferencing. Everything was done on the basis of old-fashioned post and dial-up phones and face-to-face meetings. And, it was a triumph.
Now, in super-modern 2010, with all our gadgets and doo-dahs, and graduates who in terms of their school-leaving results appear to be in the Einstein league, this sort of thing happens. I would venture to suggest it's partly because of the confusion engendered by all this management speak - people are so wrapped up in all the babble that they completely miss the main point. It's committees about committees and meetings about meetings.
Whatever happened to the days when every Civil Servant needed only things like the Gowers/ Fowler "Modern English Usage"? Of course back in '82 the show was still being run by those who hadn't been drowned in all the current idiocy, the more senior of whom would have been of the WW2 generation. 'nuff said.
Finally, I would think our two young friends will not be putting themselves forward for any "competency-based" promotion interviews for quite some time. They really need to start thinking outside the box (proactively of course and in a blue-sky mode) and engaging in win-win situations while pushing the envelope to take it to the next level, perhaps having moved the goalposts.
And they'll really have to improve their knowledge base... not least of a certain Rome-based multi-national organisation.
This whole affair shews how far the Civil Service, including the once proud Foreign Office, have been politicised and rendered "correct". All the keywords are there: stakeholders, delivery of objectives and, of course. worship at the low carbon shrine.
Of course the FCO is only focused on delivering their own objectives for this visit: the government only issued the invitation to shore up its crumbling support amongst Catholics who are sick and tired of having the teachings of the Church comprehensively disregarded.
In a rightly ordered world, British Catholics should be able to rely on the professionalism of FCO civil servants to ensure first-rate organisation of this visit. Lacking a practising Catholic in the team, they might reasonably have been expected to have sought advice about anything of particular sensitivity about which they should be aware.
But perhaps I'm just giving my age away....
It would appear that the memorandum was five pages in length.
So far all we have seen published are two small extracts.
I wonder what the rest of the memorandum said ?
Or what the other working papers of the group said ?
Read Sir Humphrey : the FCO always, and only, has its own objectives; no-one else's (not even the rest of the Government's) are of any interest to it at all !
I believe that it is a good thing that this 'gaff' has been revealed, because it shows up people's true colours. It represents a much clearer position than one of a pretence of being open to God and the Church, which England is not, and it would be better for all those others who have the same attitude to recognise that this is their position.
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