IT'S just another paedophile scandal, no less and no more important than one in Kansas or Sydney, Australia," says Sean Lovett, head of Vatican Radio's English-language section, about the Brendan Smyth and other clerical child sex abuse cases which have rocked the Irish church in the past two years.
One tends to forget from the viewpoint of Dublin or Cork or Belfast that in the great big world of the international Catholic Church, Ireland is a very small player indeed.
Pope John Paul II still sees Ireland as somewhere rather special, second only to Poland, as a jewel in the crown of European Catholicism. This was clear in his short beatification homily for Edmund Rice last Sunday, when he said that once again Ireland had given the church and the world a striking testimony of complete fidelity to Christ".
He also prayed that Ireland's heritage of holiness" would provide the inspiration for peace in Northern Ireland. "You wouldn't hear him saying the same things when beatifying someone from France or Uganda," says Lovett.
The view among Curia officials who know something about the Irish situation is that there is no alarm, but some concern about recent happenings in the Irish church, particularly the revelations of clerical child abuse.
"There is a recognition that these things are a major psychological blow to many people in their faith but have to be seen in the context of other, wider problems which existed beforehand notably the rapid pace of secularisation and change", said one senior official this week.
Such happenings have also doubly blocked" the Irish church's attempts to put into action the kind of galvanising programme of re-evangelisation which the Pope has called for in the years leading up to the millennium; doubly blocked because such a programme was going to be difficult enough anyway in an Ireland which was moving towards the more secular European cultural mainstream.
There is an opinion, too, that the Irish Hierarchy could have handled things better. This is tempered by some sympathy for the bishops, hamstrung by two things: the inadequate understanding of child sex abuse in secular society, which until relatively recently had failed to recognise the offence as a long- term, addictive sickness; and its emergence among Irish priests in the full glare of the media spotlight.
However, there is little real alarm. There is a tendency to overplay the depth of spiritual crisis in Ireland to say that Ireland is now going the way of all other countries," said one official. "But Ireland has quite a lively religious culture. The churches are still very full, even on weekdays."
When it comes to the state of Catholic belief and orthodoxy, Ireland is considered to be on "a different planet" when compared to countries like the US and Holland, says one long-term Vatican insider.
The explosion of clerical child sex abuse cases in the US in the late 1980s led to a special meeting of the US bishops in Rome and a public statement from the Pope. A few years earlier the threat of schism in the Dutch church between liberals and conservatives had resulted in nothing less than a special Roman synod.
Little Ireland's brace of errant bishops and few dozen paedophile priests will lead to nothing so drastic. The Irish church's problems are seen as one of the prices it is paying for the country's belated entry into the world of late-20th-century materialism, consumerism and sexual freedom. For the present, they are not considered threatening to the fabric of religious faith in western Europe's most Catholic country.
One thing which Rome does worry about is the collapse of Irish vocations. The Pope sees this collapse in Europe and North America as one of the most distressing manifestations of the evils of a western world that has relegated God to the ha'penny place.
There is also criticism of the perceived poor calibre of some Irish bishops. However, other Roman observers point out that the church has only itself to blame for this, in that the majority of the Hierarchy were appointed largely on the word of one man, the long-serving and ultra-conservative former papal nuncio, Archbishop Alibrandi.
One of those known to feel that the Irish church has been ill served by some of its bishops is the new nuncio, Archbishop Storero.
Among most Ireland-watchers in the Curia, Bishop Brendan Comiskey is not well regarded. The main reason he is still Bishop of Ferns, according to one source, is that, although there had been plenty of complaints about how he was running the diocese, the numbers of priests or people openly against him did not justify his removal. However, another official expressed admiration for his courage in overcoming a deep personal crisis in the merciless glare of media attention.
Cardinal Daly was and remains highly regarded as a pious and mentally agile church leader who took a brave stand against violence in Northern Ireland and yet is a man of broad, international culture, in touch with the philosophical currents of the time.
There is almost as much surprise among Irish people in Rome as in Ireland at the passing over of the existing bishops and the appointment of Archbishop Sean Brady as Cardinal Daly's successor, despite his years as head of the Irish College in Rome.
Some Vatican sources suggest that with his appointment the centre of gravity of the Irish church, dominated in recent years by the cardinal, might shift from Armagh, as it did in the last century and the 1950s and 1960s.
They say the Northern Ireland question will no longer be the church's major problem, as it has been in recent decades but the secularisation of life in the Republic, and particularly in the Dublin region, could move to the top of its agenda.
With Dr Brady playing a lower-profile role in Armagh, and acting as chairman rather than president of the bishops' conference, there would be more space for other bishops to emerge on the public stage.
Archbishop Connell of Dublin, if he wants to, could become a key spokesman. Bishop Donal Murray in Limerick, who many believe would have made an excellent Archbishop of Dublin, could use his theological expertise to lead the church's critique of contemporary Irish society.
Overall, Ireland's problems are seen by the Pope and the Vatican very much as part of Europe's problems. One of the few recent Irish events which did excite significant comment on Vatican Radio and in the church's official paper, L'Osservatore Romano, was last November's divorce referendum result.
It was not only the Italian newspapers, with their almost total lack of interest in non-IRA Irish affairs, which saw this as a defeat for Catholicism. There was a view in Rome that the Irish electorate's narrow vote for divorce was a double blow for the church in Europe: it was in the same week that the Polish people, by a similarly narrow margin, voted back in a communist-led government.