My Grandfather's statue of Mary stopped praying just before Christmas. Her hands had been clasped together for more than a lifetime, watching over him day and night for almost a century, travelling with him from Mayo to Canada and finally to the little terraced house in Dublin where, eventually, we all lived together until he died.
Mary marked his waking and sleeping, the way going to Mass marked his days. At night he'd genuflect before her and pray in the cold for what seemed like hours. He ended his devotions by kissing the roses round her feet; it was a sign the stories could begin.
Religion was a source of wonder and comfort to him, a book of hours to spin him through long days in dull jobs he was lucky to have, where only the Angelus bell got you a break from your labours. There wasn't a distinction between it and spirituality: the two were like intertwined DNA and RNA strands, needing each other to make sense of the whole.
It was a fairly typical Irish story. But what's changed between then and now is the fracturing of religious and spiritual beliefs. The Irish Times survey of Catholic practice shows only 40 per cent of Irish people believe weekly Mass attendance is very important, with a mere 14 per cent of younger people affirming that view.
Much as some may wish to blame the Celtic Tiger, that beast is innocent, for once. Before, every time a growth spurt happened, devotional practice increased. The richer Irish Catholics became, the more they built churches, and paraded their religious beliefs. Ireland is now not only on its way to becoming a nation of dissenters, it has reached that destination. Apocalyptic warnings of where this will lead us appear before us almost every day. We stand accused of shopping too much, spending too much and watching too much television.
With such low-rent priorities, we are probably making a hames of rearing our children, too. The implied message behind some such commentaries is that only an absolute set of rules such as the Catholic Church proposes can put us back on track.
Spreading moral panic is a useful way of distracting attention from the deeper issues, but it doesn't make them go away. The question is not so much why Irish people are turning their back on the Catholic Church, but why the church has failed Irish people, and why it has done so now.
For the past 30 years the church has been rent asunder by power struggles between its right and left-leaning elements. This amounts to a row over who owns Jesus. The Jesus of the right is a patriarch who cares most about tradition and rules. The Jesus of the left is a man whose own beginnings as an outcast informed his lifetime's work.
You can see these two Jesuses operating within the local parameters of the Irish church. One Jesus responds to modernity by criticising everything about it. His supporters seem willing to build a church on the notion of the chosen few, which might have made sense back in Palestine 2000 years ago, but which now sound dangerously totalitarian in tone.
This Jesus empowers men like Cardinal Ratzinger to operate inner sanctums such as the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith rather like mind police. Dissenters are shut up and not allowed to debate. Although anecdotal evidence suggests that view doesn't represent the beliefs of many ordained and religious people in the church, it is the position adopted by the Irish church officially, which makes it an important path to career success within the church.
The other Jesus inspires men and women to work for social justice, whatever the consequences. This is the Jesus of the homeless, the outcast, the unwelcome. This is also the Jesus of ecumenism, a movement seriously damaged by the dominance of those who sponsor the idea of the chosen few. His only function at present within the Irish church, however, is to inspire the few idealists who remain, such as the President, Mrs McAleese.
I took on the upkeep of my Grandad's Mary to save her from being thrown out a few years ago. He'd been dead for years; I'd forgotten her existence, never mind what she'd meant to him. That summer we visited a small church in Roussillon where the children were amazed to see a lifesize version of her, brightly coloured and with candles burning underneath.
They greeted her like a long-lost friend. Hey, she was a celebrity, here she was in France. Perhaps it was the end of an era when a rogue football hit her, severing her praying hands at the wrist. The children were quiet; they knew she meant something, whatever her meaning might be.
The silencing of the radical Jesus within the Catholic Church has muted its message to many, and especially to the young. It may suit them to hone the idea of a church of martyrs, where the weak get going as soon as the going gets tough. Those who hate all organised religions won't mourn its passing. The right-wing church's message of rules over idealism can't capture people's imagination, or help them embark on the kind of spiritual journey no hanging crystal or perfect feng shui will ever deliver on its own.
mruane@irish-times.ie