Church should abandon claims to sovereignty

All this hullabaloo about the closure of the Vatican embassy represents a storm in a tea cup and an irrelevancy in the austerity faced in Ireland.

The Catholic Church unfortunately became embroiled in politics from the time of Constantine onwards and now seems to be more interested in maintaining the Vatican as a sovereign state rather than proclaiming the kingdom of God. The anomaly is that no embassies to the Holy See are situated in Vatican territory. What makes the Pope the leader of the Church is not that he is a head of an artificial sovereign state, but as Bishop of Rome, where his residence is the church of John Lateran in Rome.

We need a reform of the Catholic Church where all claims to sovereignty are abandoned in favour of a return to the Gospel as proclaimed by Jesus.