The churches should participate fully in public life, to the extent of having church personnel presenting themselves for election, according to Labour TD Éamon Gilmore.
At the Humbert-Davitt Summer School yesterday, Mr Gilmore said there was now a more healthy relationship between politics and religion.
He began by referring to the Rossport Five, and called on Shell to lift the injunction it had successfully sought in the High Court. "The circumstances have changed," he said, pointing out that Shell had ceased work on the controversial pipeline.
Recalling his early days in politics, when he campaigned for individual rights against a moderately theocratic state, he said: "I now find myself more often in harmony with what church representatives say than otherwise." He cited raising Third World aid to 0.7 per cent of GNP, social inequality and problems like crime and substance abuse as issues on which his party often agreed with church representatives.
Fr Enda McDonagh, professor emeritus of moral theology in St Patrick's College, Maynooth, also referred to the Rossport Five. "It is a kind of disgrace that these five men are in the 58th day in jail. They are there under a power-driven, commercial organisation like Shell, one of the biggest companies in the world, which should be ashamed of itself."
Dr McDonagh said all churches should campaign to make the 21st century the one in which war and armed force were no longer seen as a legitimate instrument of policy. The 19th century had seen slavery outlawed, though it had previously been seen as legitimate.
Later Llewellyn King, the publisher of the White House Weekly, told a debate on Europe and America: "The US is in a very serious time of uncertainty and doubt about its values. It is the only superpower in the world, but this is something of a pyrrhic victory."