By GEOFFREY ROBERTSON - GUARDIAN
Added: Tue, 14 Sep 2010 21:56:50 UTC

When commentators attack others, readers should clearly be told where they're coming from. In the case of Austen Ivereigh, for example, he is not a dispassionate commentator but a prolific propagandist for the papal cause.

His piece is in one sense absurd for it criticises me over a lecture I had yet to deliver and, furthermore, Ivereigh is not a lawyer. The UK had diplomatic contacts with the Holy See in 1914, at a time when it had no claim to statehood because it had no territory (the Papal States had been extinguished by the Risorgimento in 1870). So it could only claim to be a state, once again, when Mussolini gave it a palace and gardens under the Lateran treaty in 1929. There is no dispute about this other than by Ivereigh – the Vatican, in its official statement to the UN, bases its claim to statehood on the Lateran treaty and only on the Lateran treaty. The Lateran treaty is crucial to the FCO's recognition of the Holy See as a state for the simple reason that it is the only basis upon which the Holy See itself claims to be a state.

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TAGGED: LAW, POPE, VATICAN/ROMAN CATHOLICISM