In Archbishop Desmond Connell's sermon on Sunday there is acknowledgment of the profound change that has taken place over the past two decades in the position of the Catholic Church in this State. His general thesis was that recent legal innovations, notably in the area of the family, have undermined traditional values and altered the "moral vision" of society. The media, according to Dr Connell, were one of a number of pressures in favour of permissiveness and materialism and against Catholic standards. Parents had to bear an increased responsibility for their children's moral education as support by the law was withdrawn.
Dr Connell, the hierarchy and the faithful are not alone in their concern for the deterioration of many aspects of society in recent years, though when it comes to defining what has gone wrong there would be less agreement. Drugs, crime, poverty are these functions of the decline in the family, a contributory factor, or a condemnation of traditional complacency? Much of what has happened since the 1970s has mirrored trends in other countries, and it is not easy to see how the laws existing at the end of that decade could have stopped the rot, as Dr Connell might see it, if they had been kept in place. They were widely regarded as aspirational at the time, and of decreasing relevance to how people lived their lives.
It is one of the ironies that the first bastion to go - the ban on contraceptives - was the victim of a Supreme Court ruling that it violated family rights. But, pace Dr Connell, it was not the media or other external pressures that brought it about, but popular disaffection. Private conscience which the Irish Times poll two weeks ago showed now guides the moral decisions of 78 per cent of Catholics - was already beginning to exert its influence.
It has always been a question of debate whether legislating prohibitively on matters of private morality, leaving aside the wider question of whether the teaching of one church should be regarded as the norm, helps to prevent social change. The ban on divorce did not stop couples from breaking up, and arguably it encouraged people to enter into stable non marital relationships to avoid all the complications of irretrievable breakdown. Women's rights have been strengthened but where did the impulse for this come from, and why were men for so many years given unequal rights over their wives in property and other respects without clerical protest? The rapidity of change is, to a large extent, a rejection of the old coercion.
That is not to say that many of the problems, identified by Dr Connell do not exist. But the answer is not to impose rules that are flouted but to encourage respect for the law by using it for the purposes for which it exists to enable people to live in civilised tolerance and fairness together. That is the business of the State, and it must be sensitive to the concerns of society. The churches have a different role, and should not need the State's protection.