The present leader of the Labour Party, Mr Ruairi Quinn, has told us we are living in a "post-Catholic society". I wonder if he really meant post-Christian. Certainly in the Ireland of today there are a great number of people who regard any creed as no more than a set of prejudices.

Like the majority in Ireland I was baptised and became a practising member of the Roman Catholic Church. In my formative years I grew up in a family who, despite the hardships of life, retained an inner joy and a deep faith.

When in my late teens I revolted against what I regarded as absurd church technicalities it was Dom Eugene Boylan, abbot of the Cistercian monastery in Roscrea when he died, who taught me to think beyond legalisms to the core of Christian belief. Dom Boylan was a writer and philosopher who adopted many of the views of Vatican II long before the great Pope John XXIII envisaged the holding of that council.

I wonder how Eugene Boylan or any of the people I knew and respected in the Ireland of the 1930s and 1940s would view the Ireland of today? Each in their individual ways had within them a deep personal credo. Nowadays their faith would be rejected as alien.

However, those who oppose traditional spiritual values have failed to replace them with any acceptable alternative. Once you deny the existence of God, however you define Him, it is too easy to ignore the need for a sound system of values.

It has been my experience that very many who have drifted from faith occasionally resort to prayer in times of stress.

However, of the faith that was such a rock of strength to previous generations, almost nothing remains. The sum of their philosophy is the substitution of faith in one's fellow man as a workaday equivalent to faith in God.

Faith is what provides man with the arithmetic of the cosmos, a means to harmonise himself with the mysterious universe in which he finds himself. Without that arithmetic we are idiots living in a bedlam.

I accept that all people must write their own life and emotional chapters. Loving is about giving and taking and never grabbing the whole cake for yourself. But you cannot impose that on anyone, as any parent who has acquired wisdom will vouch.

You cannot tell others, even your own children, how to arrange their emotional lives or even their sexual lives. All you can do, when problems appear, is to demonstrate an awareness of the crisis in that person's life and a willingness to confront it in a spirit of human compassion.

The writer Morris West, in his excellently-researched books, sees cardinals, bishops, and priests as human beings like all of us. They too are the sum of their pasts. They are subject to the same influences, doubts, and uncertainties. By virtue of their office they are committed to that most elusive abstraction, man's relationship to an unknowable Creator.

The powers they exercise, the grace they dispense, are totally independent of their own worthiness. It is, of course, better if they are saints and not sinners. Generally, like the rest of humankind, inside or outside the ministry, they are something in between.

IT is a pious legend that the priesthood sanctifies a man or that celibacy ennobles him. In a BBC interview the late Cardinal Heenan pointed out that priests, like all human beings, are vulnerable to the same range of temptation as afflicts other mortals. All are subject to pride, ambition, sloth, negligence and avarice.

Seminary training did and does attempt to weed out those with psychological defects. Clearly, and in quite a number of cases, this has not been successful in the intermediate past. The public has been justifiably shocked by the prosecution and conviction of priests and religious for paedophile activities.

The fact that the number involved is relatively small does little to ease the pain and suffering of the victims or the horror of the revelations to the laity. Whether these men were inadequately assessed before ordination or whether the means of assessment then available were inadequate is a factor that I am not qualified to judge.

I have met, conversed with and observed men, both clerics and lay, who were subsequently charged and convicted of abusing children. As a counsellor to the unemployed in two continents over several decades, I am trained to assess. Yet I freely admit that in none of these cases did I have the slightest suspicion of their shoddy secrets.

In some, the work they did within their own competence and training was outstanding and won justifiable praise. It seems as if two disparate people were housed within one human frame.

The volume of letters of complaint against local clergy which each bishop receives in his daily post is extraordinarily high. For the most part they consist of opposition to even minor change or imagined grievances in the minds of the authors.

It is an unfortunate fact that the traditional diocesan executive structures are not honed to deal effectively with serious complaint. Even then who can say what constitutes effective action since psychiatrists and psychologists express varying views as to whether the condition of the paedophile is irremediable?

It is a historical fact that the universal church has suffered the trauma of sinful and evil popes, cardinals, bishops, priests, and religious. It is also a fact that the Man from Galilee has sent His Holy Spirit to cleanse and renew His church time and again throughout the ages. It is my personal conviction and belief that the same spirit is immanent with the same divine attributes in our midst today.

The church in most European countries is too closely linked to the powerful ruling classes. Many of the bishoprics became political appointments. Too many of the prelates are, by breeding, conservatives, accepting the social order as a thing immutable.

It was not the church in, say China or South America, which fought for human rights and led a dispirited people out of slavery. Even today the liberation theology of many brave priests and religious in South America is the subject of deep suspicion by church leaders, despite the fact that the present Pope actively encouraged his flock in Poland in their opposition to communist tyranny.

There is, I believe, a new spirit stirring. It is still like a plant in old, unfriendly soil, attempting to grow and blossom through the rubble of history. Many factors prevent it emerging freely into the sunlight.

When the deprived and dispossessed look to the church for protection, refuge and help, they do not want merely a theologian's answer. They seek the tenderness, love, and compassion of the Man from Galilee.

Can any of the Christian churches today demonstrate the zeal and fire of the early Christians who were so demonstrably filled with the Spirit of Christ that the pagans were led to exclaim "See those Christians, how they love one another"?

Change within the church will not be easy. It is a bureaucracy older and far more complex than any other political structure in the world. We have had good popes, even many great, wise, and saintly, but they could work only with the instruments at their hand. To destroy an edifice is a simple matter; to replace it is the work of years.

There is no easy answer. Change, in the form of rapidly falling vocations to the religious life, clerical scandals, and declining congregations, is overtaking the church with ever accelerating speed. The present, largely conservative, bureaucracy of the church leadership in Ireland seems unable or unwilling to confront these challenges.

I am still an optimist. I believe the Spirit which is immanent in all humans of goodwill is moving the people of God, even in post-Christian Ireland. Change is coming and will come from the people of God working with the Spirit. Change prompted by the Spirit will ensure the survival of the church into the new millennium.

Fintan M. Tallon is a retired counsellor living in Dublin.