ANY TIME I write something even vaguely critical of the Catholic Church, I receive a scatter of letters from priests who express varying degrees of shock and outrage. The tone, a mixture of woundedness and censure, is the unconscious result of a reflex action which presumes the presence of God on their side of the argument. "Hit me now," it says, "with the Baby Jesus in me arms".
It is the product of years of being listened to with unquestioning respect by people who believe in the clergy's divine right to speak for God. It takes almost for granted that the corrective will have the required effect. It is the written equivalent of a quiet word round by the sacristy door.
Invariably, the letter writers avoid the substance of whatever point I may have made and address themselves to the notion that I am some sort of sworn enemy of Catholicism. The implication is that no criticism of the church could possibly have any substance and can therefore only have been advanced out of bad faith. They wonder what the church has ever done to me.
No other adult institution in this society could conceivably respond to criticism in such a fashion. It is strangely interesting that the institution which has not merely occupied the intellectual high ground in this society since the foundation of the State and which has provided the vast majority of the State's citizens with an education should be reduced to writing such inadequate complaints to those who criticise it.
In the past, if some upstart dared to state opinions unfavourable to the church, he was disposed of by a few quiet whispers. Because the culture in which the church functioned was rock solid, the occasional deviant was quickly brought into line.
A central tenet of that culture was that the church was right. I don't mean simply that the church was right in everything it said and believed (though that, too), but that right and church were synonymous concepts. In such a climate, it was obvious that anyone who differed from the church was wrong, and it did not require much more than a raised eyebrow to bring the error to appropriate notice and have the deviant admit his or her sin.
EVERYTHING, we are told, is changed, and yet this central assumption lives on in the minds of many of the church's personnel In spite of continuing revelations, a variation on this theme is once again surfacing as an argument for papering over the cracks of recent scandals - and not simply in the confused responses of elderly priests but in the emerging response of cultural Catholicism.
In the early days of the scandals, the church tried the humility ploy, the ignorance ploy, the we're just gifted amateurs ploy. Now, with the help of prominent lay intellectuals, they have adopted the Bulwark of Irish Society ploy.
Based on the notion that church and right are synonymous, this position holds that since the Catholic Church is the repository of Christian values in this society, any undermining of the institution will mean the erosion of the values which hold our society together.
This logic is remarkably similar to that used by Lord Justice Denning in his infamous "appalling vista" judgment. It is tantamount to saying it is better to turn a blind eye to the faults of the church rather than risk undermining the moral authority which that church has had in Irish society by exposing its faults or wrongdoings.
Such a position would not only be morally indefensible, but would ultimately have precisely the opposite effect to that which was intended, for it is surely inconceivable that the church can retain its moral authority without facing up to its mistakes.
We need to remind ourselves that the issue about which we have cause to be concerned is not spirituality or faith, and most certainly it has nothing to do with God. The church lost these territories a long time ago. The issue is that of our disintegrating technology of social cohesion. This is actually a cultural problem and we should not allow ourselves, in attempting to look at it, to be sidetracked by the old pieties.
There is a truth at the heart of the assertion that Catholicism has been, as J.J. Lee put it in his volume, Ireland Politics and Society 1912-1985, "the main bulwark of civic culture" in Ireland. Prof Lee wrote about religion as "the main barrier between a reasonably civilised society and the untrammelled predatory instincts of individual and pressure group selfishness, curbed only by the power of rival predators".
While this is indeed an accurate observation of the emerging nature of modern Irish society, I am not so sure that Prof Lee has placed the Catholic Church in its correct perspective with regard to how this culture has developed.
There is an argument about the importance of Catholicism to Irish society, but it requires to be made with detachment and precision. Undoubtedly many of the church's personnel, in both their words and their work, have long nourished the core of our national conscience.
But this was deeply corrupted by snobbery, preferentialism and economic apartheid. The Catholic Church, as the manager of the Irish educational system, cannot be allowed to walk away from the responsibility for the divided society which that system has bequeathed us.
BUT although one might quarrel with the nature of that conscience, there is no doubt that the mechanism it created did function reasonably well as the central conscience of Irish society.
One might reasonably say that it functioned in public better than in private, but that does not gainsay the fact that it worked for a long time. Only now that it is beginning to disintegrate do we get a sense of what it might mean to live without it.
For all its shortcomings, the form of Catholicism with which we were raised did succeed in communicating to the generality of the population some level of discernment with regard to right and wrong.
And so, to the extent that we still have a common societal conscience, it is inextricably bound up with the teaching of the Catholic Church. And since a common conscience is the moral transmission system which makes social life possible, it might well be argued that, even presuming that we no longer wish to belong to an organised religion, even if we no longer wish to believe, even leaving God out of the picture completely, we cannot afford the risk of removing Catholicism from Irish society.
But this actually has little or nothing to do with God or faith or spirit, and it is dishonest of the church and its apologists to invoke old mantras now to save its institutional skin. Catholicism does not have a divine right to survive in this or any other society and it most certainly does not have the right to drag God down with it by invoking the prospect of Godless society unless we go back to an uncritical acceptance of its rule.