Ancient ideal still radical

■ Hugh Duffy (‘Landlords still hold power’, Irish Independent, August 2) touches on the subject of Pope Leo XIII issuing a Papal Rescript (April 20, 1888) in which the Pope condemned the agrarian nationalists’ plan to introduce a tenant relief bill (hatched against British absentee and rack-rent landlords).

Mr Duffy writes “the Pope was hoping to have a British ambassador appointed” and adds “the decree was firmly rejected by the Irish bishops”.

This wasn’t the only time Irish conservative nationalism and Irish Catholicism would disregard the Pope’s orders.

This first occurred when St Columban reprimanded Pope Boniface IV for co-operating with invaders of the Byzantine Empire led by Heraclius, Exarch of Africa.

The independence of Irish Catholicism was first eroded when Paul Cullen was appointed Archbishop of Armagh in 1850 and the entire Irish Church, with its rich philosophical traditions was reshaped along the Roman lines.

Such freedom of thought wasn’t limited to Irish Catholicism: at the 1414 Council of Constance, Rome supported the Teutonic Order in its bloody conquest of native nonChristian peoples in – at the time – non-Germanic Prussia and Lithuania, Pawel Wlodkowic delivered a thesis about the power of the Pope, in which he proposed a new, radical idea of religious tolerance.

He argued pagan and Christian nations could coexist in peace (influenced by Wlodkowic, Poland was the first country in Europe to implement a religious tolerance act – the 1573 Warsaw Confederation).

This idea of peaceful coexistence still sounds radical today. Grzegorz Kolodziej