I lost a bet about who would be the new archbishop of Dublin. This is galling, and no doubt will seriously damage my current usefulness as a token Catholic on programme panels, writes Breda O'Brien
Worse still is the fact that the person who relieved me of my €5 is a priest, who in his part-time career as bookmaker claims he has made €100 in fivers from the appointment, something which surely disqualifies him from any further advancement in the church.
At this point perhaps I should point out that I am not being entirely serious, because a response to a recent article has made me somewhat nervous.
Many people contacted me about my column on the papal encyclical on the Eucharist. The vast majority enjoyed the irony-laden response to the critics who had concentrated on inter-communion to the exclusion of everything else in the encyclical. A minority, however, thought that I was in earnest about being embarrassed by the Pope. So let me put this on the record; far from finding the Pope an embarrassment, I admire his courage greatly, and wanted to highlight aspects of the encyclical which few others would. Ah well, just shows you how careful you have to be about irony.
Anyway, where was I? Oh yes, being robbed by a priest. Despite my chagrin, I am quite happy to lose the price of two cappuccinos.
I believe that Diarmuid Martin will be an excellent archbishop of Dublin. I know that an endorsement from me would be considered in some quarters akin to the usefulness of Gerry Adams warmly endorsing David Trimble. Nonetheless, I shall press ahead with my assessment, which in a time-honoured tradition of opinion columnists is based upon one meeting with Archbishop Martin.
Funnily enough, the aforementioned bookmaking priest was also responsible for that meeting. Before our first child was born, he asked my husband and me to be part of a group accompanying him to Rome some 10 weeks after the birth. He wanted us to help him check out a lay religious community in which he was very interested. With the airy confidence of people sublimely ignorant of what life is like 2½ months after a birth, we agreed. The poor baby had a tough start in life, as he was slow to grow and slower to sleep.
In spite of feeling corpse-like, my husband and I felt we should honour the agreement to go to Rome. The trip was highly memorable, but perhaps not for the reasons which the priest had hoped. We stayed in a pensione overlooking a street where when the prostitutes stopped work at four, the street cleaners arrived and started conducting conversations at a volume more appropriate for communication between peaks in the Alps. Given that I was already exhausted, each morning I emerged from the pensione more and more pale and haggard.
The worst was yet to come. I was feeding the baby myself, and at the time I had a firmly embedded stereotype of large, warm Italian families where bambinos were cherished. I had not realised that in modern and affluent Rome, the middle classes had one or no children, and were very sniffy about breast-feeding, which they considered the province of poorly educated peasants. My baby started to howl at Mass in Trastevere, and being miles from the pensione from hell, I felt the best thing to do was feed him discreetly. When my female neighbour, who had been rigid with tension when the baby was squalling, discovered the reason why he was now so quiet, she peremptorily ordered me to leave the church. When I staggered outside, I happened to glance up at the fresco on the front of the church, which depicts Jesus being breast-fed by Mary, in the approving company of a large number of saints.
Perhaps in an attempt to make up for some of our tribulations, our priest friend told us that we had been invited to dinner along with him in the Vatican apartments of Diarmuid Martin, at that time not yet an archbishop of anywhere. The evening was balm to the soul of one very new and very frazzled Irish mammy.
Fr Martin cooked the meal himself, and was a funny, kind and considerate host, full of knowledge about what was happening at home. One intriguing thing which he told us has stayed with me since. He said that the Pope's vision of the church was not of a centralised, uniform institution, contrary to a common misperception.
Instead, he saw the church as thousands of fragile flames of faith kept alive in small communities, and that it was his job as Pontiff to nurture those flames, because without them the church would not exist. The Pope's tireless travelling and the time given to small groups suddenly made sense.
This model of church will serve Diarmuid Martin well. There is no doubt that he inherits a diocese with a significant crisis in morale. Yet very small gestures of appreciation, and setting out a vision in a low-key way at local level would make an enormous difference. One of his first actions should be to continue the dialogue slowly and painfully begun by Cardinal Connell with victims of clerical sex abuse.
No doubt the media will give him a short period of grace - perhaps a week. Then the relentless focus on every vaguely controversial move he makes will begin. He will need every ounce of his considerable skill to avoid the many minefields of the Dublin archdiocese. Perhaps the greatest disadvantage Diarmuid Martin has is the high expectations placed upon him because of his excellent record as a diplomat.
Yet my favourite story about him, told to me by a friend, does not portray a polished diplomat at all. The redoubtable Madeleine Albright, the former US Secretary of State, approached him at a high-level conference with a "Good to see you again, Father." He looked her in the eye, and said, "Madam, I have never met you before in my life." She roared with laughter, clapped him on the shoulder, and from then on took him under her wing, introducing him to Hillary Clinton and other luminaries. Such ability to be straight and honest, and his own man, will serve him well in the days ahead.