MacGill summer school: Shannon-based sociologist Fr Harry Bohan has criticised sections of the media for being judgmental on issues outside of the liberal agenda.
Addressing the MacGill summer school, in Glenties, Co Donegal, on the theme "losing the sense of community", Fr Bohan said people were aware of the scandals and breaches of trust that had plagued Ireland in recent years, which were effectively the betrayal of the present generation by preceding generations.
But he warned that, in emerging from a period of cleansing of the past, society should be careful not to heap its sins on the sins of the fathers.
"There is obviously a certain rejoicing in the debunking of politicians and heroes, churches and traditions, moral values and past achievements.
"But there is a real danger now that we are willing to delude ourselves that we are somehow better, more honest, more trustworthy, more enlightened, more moral than those who went before us.
"We could convince ourselves that greed, for example, has no part in our world, or abuse of drink and drugs, that all the abuses of power belonged to the past and that judgmental, authoritarian people and organisations belonged only to another age. Listen to the editors of some national newspapers in recent times stand in judgment of Charles Haughey, on almost everything that in their opinion does not fit the liberal agenda, an agenda that has so far not been critiqued. One wonders is this about a search for truth, or is it about selling newspapers?
"If we fail to think more deeply, we risk building a society that is made up, not of living people, but of abstractions with a life that is lived in the shallows without roots and depth."
Fr Bohan said that a new definition of spiritual leadership was emerging which manifested itself in ordinary people searching for spiritual inspiration, inside and outside the established religions.
"Religion and the established churches can only become the bedrock of a community once again if they are to offer meaningful spiritual growth.
"Ritual, habit and tradition are no longer enough to hold people in the faith of their parents. That is the central challenge and duty facing organised religion - to regain its spiritual leadership through giving people what they need, spiritual growth. Nothing else matters. Not power over others, not status in society, not the parish finances, and not defending the status quo."
Denis Bradley, former vice-chairman of the Northern Ireland Police Authority, sharply criticised the institutional church.
Mr Bradley, also a former priest, said : "Rome is killing our spirituality, and we are finding it very uncomfortable. Rome is the only expression we have on coming communally together to express our beliefs . . . I believe that our bishops, whether they are good or bad, have no right to speak the Celtic language.
"They have no right to speak into or about a spirituality which we are so desperately in need of. Our priests, whether they are good or bad, have no place, and no right, and no authority, to say anything that is relevant about anything to do with spirituality which we need at this moment. Rome is strangling us to death. And that may have to go on until we rebel and say 'no longer, no longer'.
" And when people talk about the need to deal with celibacy, the need to do this . . . that is all completely irrelevant. We need a spirituality that gives us a world view and makes us comfortable in the local."
Independent MEP and TD Marian Harkin said it was a question of what society needed to lose and what it needed to hold on to. She said that in the past, the community ethos saw to it that those who were different, those who were mentally ill, or just plain awkward and did not fit in, people in the way, were often sent to the local mental hospital.
"That community ethos also presided over a system whereby those with a disability were often consigned to the back room, women suffering from domestic violence were quietly told that 'you made your bed and now you lie on it', where any girl who found herself pregnant outside of marriage was sent to places like Castlepollard, or took the boat.
"That community, sometimes unknowingly, and sometimes knowingly, colluded in a system where children were physically abused in schools and sexually abused in their own homes and in the sacristies of our churches. That community was often a cold place for women."