THIS is an election year. The right to vote was hard won. Why then is it so hard to escape the impression of widespread apathy about politics? There are various reasons for disillusionment: scandal and examples of mismanagement, the predictability of much political debate, the suspicion that events are determined by factors outside the control of politicians.

But the fundamental problem lies deeper. It concerns the nature of participation. A person who participates wholeheartedly feels fully alive, fully involved. That may happen at a football match or at a performance of Riverdance. The issues which make up most of the political agenda are considerably less riveting.

A similar lack of enthusiastic participation is not unknown in the Church. There too people complain about not feeling involved.

The intense experience of participation which arises from sport or culture is transitory. It gives, nonetheless, a glimpse of the kind of belonging and commitment of which we are capable and for which we hunger. A hunger for meaning, for belonging, for joy, far loving and being loved, lies deep in every human being.

That deeper, more lasting belonging can only be achieved where people meet without ignoring the great mysteries of life, death, evil and love. The Christian good news is that those deeper questions are not just an illusory yearning, they are the reflection in us of the fact that God first loved us. We are beings who are loved by God, whose capacity for joy will be stretched and filled by his glory.

Pastoral renewal means coming to a new realisation that in the Church we share our faith in the divine love which can heal the rawest wounds, promise justice to the most desperate oppression, bring hope into the deepest despair. It is a context where we try to meet without illusions - as fallible, mortal, wounded people who know that we are in the loving hands of God. That shared vision gives a sense of belonging together which no mere structures can provide and which no debates can create. But it has to be worked at - as anyone who has struggled with the renewal process learns painfully.

It needs to be worked at not only in order to renew the life of the Church but to contribute to the health of society. The gospel vision of human existence sheds light on every dimension of our lives, including the social and political.

IT would be regarded as odd in the context of a Dail debate if someone were to ask what life is all about, where it ultimately leads and how we can live as our Creator intends. Such questions are often thought to bear no relation to public policy.

This may partly explain why, for instance, in the divorce referendum, the political parties were unanimous about an issue on which the country was quite evenly divided. It is because there is more to people that we can comfortably make room for in political debate. The process can, therefore, spectacularly fail to reflect what people really think.

The truth is that there is a lot more to us than our role as citizens. We are living persons, with passionate convictions, with loyalties, with family ties, with religious beliefs and moral values. To all of this the State says: "that is your business, not ours".

That is the Catch-22. If our deepest questions and convictions seem out of place in the public arena, it becomes a forum for the shallow discussion of profound issues. Where, for most citizens, do the basic civic virtues - the thirst for justice, the concern for one's neighbour, the loyalty to one's commitments - come from if not from the very beliefs which are not the State's business?

Those who do not share one's religious beliefs will not be convinced by arguments based on faith. Questions of public policy have to be argued on the basis of what is best for society. But that does not mean that we should apologise for having deep religious convictions, or that we should resent the fact that others have convictions, religious and non religious, which differ from our own.

The problem is above all about the quality of participation. A society which communicates the message, "your deepest beliefs are no concern of ours", can hardly then complain about lack of wholehearted participation.

Education is an area where this is especially crucial. The Education Bill will seek to establish or reform structures of participation. There are good arguments for some of the proposed reforms and they have been widely and constructively discussed.

What laws and structures cannot ensure is the degree to which people may participate with all that is important to them. Virtually everybody who speaks about education recognises the importance of educating the whole person. Education concerns the intellectual, the moral, the artistic, the physical, the spiritual and religious dimension of the person. Nobody would claim the State is competent in all of these areas.

To conclude that these aspects of the human person have no relevance to the life of the State is to diminish the quality of participation. To regard them as irrelevant to education would, however, be utterly disastrous. It would create a system which could not educate the whole person. There would be no place for an understanding of life.

That, in a nutshell, is the reason for concern about the ethos of schools. If the school is to educate the whole person, it must be a place where the pupil finds his or her family's view of the meaning and ultimate destiny of human life freely expressed.

FOR many families, that will best be achieved in a school which is an organic part of the community of faith to which the family belongs. That is what is meant by a Catholic or other religious ethos. It means that families and the school operate out of a shared vision of the meaning of human life. No democratic structure can provide that kind of sharing. But structures could certainly undermine it by regarding education simply as the State's business.

A predecessor of mine summed it up: "If education belongs of right to a non religious, secular state, it follows that religion is as much an intruder there as it would be if it claimed recognition in the Customs or the Excise or the Post Office, and it would be as unfair to apply a religious test to teachers as to any other category of civil servants . . . With us Catholics, education is not a secular business; a school is a continuation of the influences which in their homes go to form the characters of the children." (Edward Thomas O'Dwyer, 1913f)