While the Holy Ghost Fathers and other Catholic orders are facing up to the painful consequences of declining vocations, the power of the church and the religious orders in Irish education is still formidable.
In all 360 of the State's 780 second-level schools - over 45 per cent of the total - are Catholic voluntary secondary schools. The Catholic Church owns a staggering 95 per cent of primary schools.
That control means ceremonies such as First Communion and Confirmation are integral parts of the school year at primary level. In Catholic primary schools, the religious curriculum is still in the control of the church.
However, Catholic-owned schools have been reassessing their management structures in recent years. In the 1969-70 academic year, 2,300 members of religious orders were involved in second-level education. By 199798 that had declined to 660, with fewer than 5 per cent of those aged 35 years or younger. That trend means Catholic control of schools can no longer be enforced by strength of numbers and can only be preserved by looser trustee arrangements which involve the local community.
According to a church spokesman, "There isn't a second-level school in the country under the patronage of the church and the religious congregations that's not looking at new arrangements to try to guarantee the ethos of the school.
"We're shifting from a situation where the local parish priest was the sole manager of the school to one where schools are run by a board of management which also includes teachers, parents and local communities.
"You don't necessarily need to have priests or religious managing or teaching for a school to have a Catholic ethos. We've moved way beyond that."
Over the last three years, four study groups from the Conference of Religious in Ireland, CORI, have been looking at future school ownership models on the presumption that within five to 10 years all Catholic voluntary secondary schools will be owned by trusts on which lay people are heavily represented.
Senior figures in CORI have indicated that the church may "reposition" itself in the education world and target its remaining human resources on disadvantaged areas. As Sister Teresa McCormack of the conference's education office put it last month: "It is not just a numbers game, although the numbers sharpen the focus."
The church's rethink on education has had other ramifications. In July one Catholic priest opened a can of worms that could cost the State tens of millions.
The parish priest of Trim, Father Andrew Farrell, announced in a local newspaper that the parish would reduce the church's contribution to four local primary schools because fewer people were practising the faith and contributing to parish funds.
He complained that "loyal parishioners who contribute to the parish support are subsidising the education of the children who no longer contribute". He called on parishioners to lobby politicians to have "this unfair and inequitable indirect tax abolished".
If the management of the Holy Ghost schools is handed over to a private company, then the Government is also going to face a debate on the State's effective subvention of some fee-paying schools. At present the Department of Education contributes to the running costs of certain fee-paying schools and pays many of their teachers' salaries.
The fees that parents pay to enrol their child as a day pupil in these schools go mainly on optional extras that give the students of such schools a substantial, and State-subsidised, advantage over their less well-off counterparts.
All of which suggests that the church's rethink of its involvement in education may prove to be a greater headache for the State than it will for a well-prepared church.