With much talk of decline in social capital and decay of community, we should be grateful for what has been on display in Croke Park every Sunday this summer, writes Deaglán de Bréadún.
Every society has its holy places. I have had the privilege of visiting the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem and the Holy City of Qom in Iran for example. Here we have Lough Derg, Croagh Patrick and other locations of sanctity and mystery such as Clonmacnoise.
Yet for all our history of religious devotion, we have no truly great cathedral along the lines of Cologne or Strasbourg.
It may be argued that the time for constructing such an edifice has passed, now that the old faith, never abandoned "in spite of dungeon, fire and sword", has declined and lost much of its grip on the people.
I write that in sorrow rather than triumph. True, many of us who came to maturity in the 1960s and 1970s found the Church an oppressive weight on our shoulders.
We were reacting to a narrow-minded and censorious Catholicism - more Franco than Francis of Assisi.
Earlier this year, the Financial Times published a study of the Catholic Church by Frederick Gluck, a former managing director of Mckinsey & Co consultants.
This was a clinical and unsentimental, but not in any way disrespectful, exercise. He found that the institution was promoting practices, values and beliefs which were out of date and no longer regarded as relevant, even by many of its own adherents.
Among these were: clerical celibacy, the ban on women priests, opposition to the use of contraceptives (even for disease prevention), condemnation of divorce, blanket opposition to abortion, opposition to homosexuality, etc.
The faithful would say the Church does not tailor its message to the fashion of the times, but nevertheless it has shown itself to be adaptable when necessary - remember when eating meat on Friday was a sin?
From a classical liberal secularist position one should of course welcome this religious decline, but there are drawbacks in pragmatic terms.
The problem is, that when you remove religious oversight from society, you still need someone to tell people how to live.
But let me colour in a small ray of hope. We may not have great temples of faith and the humbler ones we do possess may not attract the same level of devotion, but we do have at least one marvellous edifice which enshrines important values and provides hope that all is not entirely lost.
I refer to that Temple of Sport, Croke Park. A place of major importance in sporting terms, it also plays an almost invisible role in the formation of our young people and their outlook on life.
This is not meant in any flippant way. Look at it pragmatically. Almost every Sunday in summertime, and not least yesterday, teams gather there for contest and the level of sportsmanship is usually very high.
Yet on the pitch at Croke Park there are no brown envelopes. Everything is open and above board.
I have not heard of any drug scandals with hurlers or footballers popping pills to improve performance. The greatest names in Gaelic games stride the pitch, their honest effort visible for all to see.
And, as amateurs, most of them do so for no reason other than enjoyment and local pride. The better the team, the greater the level of sportsmanship, it often seems.
In the annual hurling championship, I have a penchant for supporting talented underdogs like Wexford, Offaly and Clare, but however sickened I may be by the superior skills of, say, Cork, Kilkenny and, more recently Galway, I hardly ever have had grounds to complain that they gained an advantage illicitly.
The influence of this on the younger generation should not be underestimated. Men in soutanes may have turned out to be Pharisees in some cases, but men in sports shirts are fairly exemplary, at least on the field of play.
A trivial consideration? Not at all, since the eternal question remains: how, then, should we live?
These giants of sport provide as good and plausible an answer as we are likely to get in these confused times.
Consider the way the Maor Camán rushes onto the field with a drink for a member of his team: I have often seen him offer the bottle to the fellow marking his own player.
I am always greatly impressed by the sheer unselfishness of Kilkenny hurler DJ Carey who would as soon pass the ball to a team-mate for the greater good of the county as make a bid for glory himself.
I might want to weep when Cork's Joe Deane or Seán Óg Ó hAilpín get the better of the team that I favour, but they always do so by sheer skill and the fairest of means.
In the absence of strong religious faith and the decline in general acceptance of the precepts of good behaviour as traditionally spelt out by Mother Church, we should be grateful and derive consolation from the high standards of these modest men on display, week in and week out, on our very own Field of Dreams.
Deaglán de Bréadún is Foreign Affairs Correspondent at The Irish Times.