An obvious inference to be drawn from last week's survey revealing what was described as "a broad backlash against institutional Catholicism", and in particular a sharp decline in attendances at Mass, is that this backlash is the consequence of recent scandals besetting the Church, writes John Waters.
I believe such a conclusion would be mistaken: both the scandals and the falling away of large numbers of Catholics are similar symptoms of something deeper, and it is this deeper truth we need to be thinking about. The evidence of a cause-and-effect relationship between scandal and secularisation is largely circumstantial and somewhat misleading.
Some years ago, I predicted that the decline of Catholicism in Ireland would not significantly manifest itself for a long time, and then would show itself not decrementally, as was being assumed, but suddenly, like a rotten tree toppling over. This now appears to be happening.
According to a Millward Brown IMS survey, conducted on behalf of the "Power to Change" campaign being launched today, weekly Mass attendance in the Republic of Ireland has fallen to just below 50 per cent.
This must be alarming for those who told us that the perceived decline in Irish Catholicism was a temporary condition which would be reversed once the Church addressed in public its problems over abuses of authority and power.
It now seems that the practice of Catholicism is largely confined to the elderly, and that, as the demographic wave sweeps forward, the Church's influence will wane completely.
I believe, in fact, that this process occurred some years ago, and that what we are now seeing is simply the somewhat delayed registering of a death that happened some time ago. It has been obvious for a generation that the Church had ceased to maintain an emotional connection with most people under the age of 50 or so.
THERE are many reasons for this disconnection, and Cardinal Cahal Daly touched on some of the more obvious in his recent sermon at Maynooth, when he seemed to suggest that a lot of what in the past was taken for strong religious faith was no more than conformism, observance of routine and blind obedience, mixed with significant amounts of hypocrisy.
But there were deeper factors underlying these conditions: the fact that Irish Catholicism was always enforced upon, rather than tendered to, its flock, causing it to propagate fear rather than ameliorate it; the secularisation of Catholicism in the sense of its growing disconnectedness from the natural world, which will always be the most manifest locus of divine power; the rationalisation of public language in such a way as to diminish tolerance of the necessary irrationality of spirituality; and, above all, the suspension of belief in the possibility of magic.
This latter phenomenon was accelerated by the abolition of the Latin Mass, a sincere attempt by the Church to make its rituals more accessible, but with the unfortunate side effect of diminishing the power of their content.
The result of all this has been that, for the vast majority of those who continued to attend weekly Mass, the ritual had no meaning other than that of familial and, to a lesser extent, social expectation.
Most young people went to Mass purely because their parents told them they must, and ceased going once they had left home, maintaining a pretence by attending when back on weekend visits.
This kept the figures at levels somewhat misleading as to the piety of the young. But even the power of parental disapproval began to wane in the past 20 years or so, leading to the introduction of the Saturday evening Mass, essentially a way of making religious observance fit in with the social lives of gradually-lapsing Catholics.
A frequent mistaken assumption was that this growing disenchantment with Catholicism was ipso facto a rejection of God, and last week's survey puts paid to that with the revelation that two-thirds of those surveyed claimed to have a personal relationship with God. In a sense, it is the Church rather than the faithful which has - literally - lost the faith.
Where the recently-revealed child abuse and other scandals manifest themselves in this equation is not, in my belief, as a cause of increasing disillusion with Catholicism, but as a rationale for no longer maintaining the pretence. The wrongdoing of Catholic clergy has, in a sense, given permission to many Catholics to do what they might not otherwise have been able to: walk away.
When a harried mother tries to get her hungover son out of bed for Mass of a Sunday morning, she must now brave a stream of condemnation of the activities of paedophile priests and so forth from someone who in truth has lost connection with Catholicism for far more interesting reasons but who finds the scandals a convenient way of undermining the familial expectation concerning religious observance.
Parents have no answers to such tirades, with the result that, more and more, the teenage population is being left to lie abed in peace.
And so, whereas clerical abuses are a most grave matter in themselves, they are not the primary reason why people are turning away from the Church, and to decide that they are is to sidestep, perhaps unconsciously, the necessary searching examination of how Irish Catholicism really came to lose the faith.