Recently in this column Joe Foyle wondered why "God is missing but not missed" from the common discourse of Ireland. The reasons he gave were interesting but came nowhere near the nub of the matter.

Although the advance of liberal secularism is clearly God's verdict on Catholic hierarchical paternalism, we simply have not woken up to this. We still blame God for this paternalism instead of crediting Him with its demise.

In the 17th century, the Catholic Hierarchy alienated the scientists of Europe by silencing Galileo. In the 18th, it alienated most other intellectuals by indiscriminately rejecting the Enlightenment. From 1789, it alienated the disciples of liberal democracy by opposing the perfectly Christian notion of political and social equality. Having identified Christ with obscurantism, tyranny, inequality and selfishness, it made sure He would be (almost) rejected by history itself.

Since the future lay with science and democracy, the Hierarchy was effectively secularising the future. Anti-clerical secularism would inevitably take its revenge in Ireland also. What's surprising is that it should have taken so long to do so.

The delay is largely down to British imperialism and the Protestant ascendancy. While Europe's Catholic intelligentsia were being alienated from the church from the mid-1600s, Ireland's were being alienated by Protestant England. Ireland's history was therefore dominated until this century by political separatism rather than by ideological secularism.

As the Catholic clergy shared the exclusion of the Catholic masses, they were not alienated from them by privilege as in Catholic France. Instead, in the 18th and early 19th centuries, they gained a position of unexampled influence. Their services to the cause of schooling the Catholic masses, deliberately deprived of education by a frightened Protestant ascendancy, will never be forgotten.

However, the political liberation of Ireland in the 20th century was the beginning of the end of Catholic clerical domination. The reason was simple. At independence, the church gained a position of fatal dominance over the intellectual and political life of Ireland, putting itself in the invidious position of the French Catholic Church in the 18th century.

In occupying the position of intellectual conservatism and dominance previously held by a Protestant and English ascendancy, it was setting itself up as the bete noir of the next phase of Irish liberation.

Meanwhile the Enlightenment had brought a political, social and economic revolution to the rest of western Europe. This eventually revolutionised the content of Irish education. The church might control the ethos of most Irish schools, but it could not prevent the secularisation of the curriculum. This enabled an economic revolution and a growth of intellectual independence and sophistication.

Fatally, although Ireland had thrown off a "big house" social and political system in the 1920s, the church retained a "big house" clerical structure. The opportunity to abandon this with the second Vatican Council in the 1960s was thrown away by the arch-obscurantist, John Charles McQuaid. Irish Catholicism remained at its summit paternalistic - as Cardinal Conway admitted at the time. Clerical paternalism functions by maintaining a mystique of moral superiority around the clergy themselves, so it is peculiarly vulnerable to sexual scandal. In the 1990s, a series of these struck the Irish church with the force of a hurricane.

Just as Voltaire and others destroyed the mystique of French clericalism by satirising the sexual peccadillos of churchmen in the 1700s, the fourth estate here luxuriated in a series of clerical own-goals, beginning with the revelation in 1992 of Dr Éamon Casey's affair with Annie Murphy. Since then, the wider attack upon the church which began with the Enlightenment has left the Hierarchy shell-shocked and disorientated.

The most recent example of this was Dr Desmond Connell's lament for Ireland's old political and intellectual order in The Irish Times on October 14th. That he should propose the return of Ireland's legislative sovereignty to God - or by implication to himself and the rest of the Hierarchy as God's representatives - is a measure of how rapidly Ireland has changed in five years.

There is a retributive element in all of this which justifies rather than undermines a belief in the Christian God. Humanity, driven by the irrepressible human desire for freedom and equality, has seen off a series of tyrannies these past 300 years.

Would the Christ who washed the feet of the apostles regret the advance of social and political equality? Would the Christ who lambasted the hypocrisy of the Pharisees have wanted that of Dr Casey and other clerics to remain forever secret?

Although the Hierarchy has fought tooth and nail against the reduction of its worldly power in this period, it is far healthier morally as a consequence. At the end of the 20th century, who could take seriously the church's claim to identify with the weak and the poor globally were it still a serious European political power, even possibly a full member of the EU?

In fact, if the church is to re gain its credibility generally, it should explicitly recognise the contradiction inherent in seeking worldly power through its bishops while seeking to serve and to evangelise through its priests and its laity. Christ was unequivocal about worldly power - it was the temptation of the devil. That is why his choice of crucifixion rather than domination still guides the history of the church.

If the church is to restore God to centre stage in Ireland, it must be faithful to the Mass rather than to Peter's weakness - the tendency to reach for the sword. There is a mass of misery in Ireland today and it is there, as originally, Christ will be found, not in verbal exhortations aimed at the empowerment of an elite - however well intentioned.

Were Ireland's Hierarchy to recognise that the church's greatest historical mistakes resulted from a mistaken search for worldly power, this could free Ireland from the fear of Catholicism which lies at the root of unionist obduracy on this island.

It could also make the faith as bright and new as it was when Ireland was an example to Europe - helping to free many throughout the world from the fear that the Christian God is in the end a God of coercion. What an event that would be to mark the new millennium.

Christ and history are in agreement. Both rebuke Peter's inclination to power and both tend towards the empowerment of the weak. Why should this be a reason for disbelief?

Sean O'Conaill is a retired teacher living in Coleraine