I WONDER if the Pope and the President, Mrs Robinson, exchanged a word or two at all about the weather? Did His Holiness recall the not so gentle Irish rain that swept across Connacht bogs towards Knock some 18 years ago. And the mischievous interfering Irish wind that blew his robes in all directions at the Phoenix Park? And did Her Excellency pronounce the current balmy Roman spring a trifle sultry for the presidential taste?
The Vatican, as it happens, has a long and honourable tradition of support for meteorology. Gregory XIII, for example, who inherited St Peter's Chair in 1572, is probably best remembered for his reform of the old Julian Calendar.
His initiative resulted in what ought to have been October 5th, 1582, becoming October 15th, a jump which removed an error that had accumulated over 1,500 years. But meteorologists remember Gregory as the founder in 1578 of the Tower of the Winds in the Vatican - the region's first weather observing station.
Papal meteorology flowered most, however, during the long reign of Pope Pius IX from 1846 to 1878. Pius had a far sighted view of the value of international scientific cooperating. With the help of a Jesuit Father Angelo Secchi, director of the Pontifical Observatory at the Roman College, Pius established a wide network of weather stations throughout the papal states.
Father Secchi is credited with developing the meteorograph - an instrument for the automatic recording of upper level winds, temperatures and other weather elements which was used extensively with kites and unmanned balloons. This instrument, technologically very advanced for its time, was exhibited by the papal states at the Paris Universal Exhibition of 1867, and was received with wide acclaim by the scientific world.
Pius's successor Leo XIII is best remembered as the author of the social encyclical De Rerum Novarum. But Leo, too, furthered Vatican meteorology by means of a motu proprio - a term signifying "of one's own volition", and which describes a promulgation drawn up by the Pope himself on his own initiative without advice from others. The motu proprio "U Mysticam" was issued on March 14th, 1891, and established a new pontifical Astronomical and Meteorological Observatory in Rome, to be called the Specola Vaticana.
The Specola, as it is called, moved to Castel Gandolfo in the early 1930s, and that is where the papal weather people carry out their duties to this very day.