Well, folks, it's now official. According to the national broadcaster, RTÉ, and the Broadcasting Commission of Ireland ((BCI), which regulates privately-owned broadcasters, you cannot advertise that the Catholic Church does any good.
Both of them have banned an advertisement from the Irish Catholic newspaper. Part of the wording of the advertisement ran as follows.
"These are hard times for the Catholic Church, so hard that its easy to forget all the good the Church does. To remind us of that, the Irish Catholic will be running an Advent series, starting this week, showing how the Church puts Christ into Christmas through the countless good deeds of thousands of ordinary Catholics."
According to both RTÉ and the BCI, these sentiments are unacceptable for broadcast. The BCI helpfully identified the sections of the script which were inappropriate. They were the first sentence where it talks about the good which the Church does, and the reference to "good deeds of thousands of ordinary Catholics".
To which the only possible response is: Jesus wept.
On a daily basis, we are bombarded with advertisements for Ireland's drug of choice, alcohol, which is presented as the liquid route to instant happiness. Parents are pestered for toys for which a second mortgage is required, thanks to advertisements. Sex is used to sell everything from cars to pot noodles.
To rub salt in the wound, broadcast promos are run over and over for programmes which advertise the bad deeds of the Catholic Church, and they are perfectly acceptable. But you cannot refer in a broadcast advertisement to the fact that the Catholic Church does any good.
How did we get to here? How in the season of Advent can an innocuous advertisement from a small newspaper which upholds Catholic values be banned?
I suppose I should declare an interest, which is that my husband writes a column on parenting for the Irish Catholic. God help us, this newspaper was once considered so subversive that along with other religious publications it could not be advertised at all.
Then, under the Broadcasting Act 2001, it was given permission to advertise. Now RTÉ and the BCI are refusing to accept the advertisements on the grounds that it contravenes Section 65 of the Broadcasting Act.
This is RTÉ's justification:
""Section 65 prohibits RTÉ from accepting for broadcast any religious advertisement which, either implicitly or explicitly, addresses the merits or otherwise of adhering to a particular religious faith. Your publication, by virtue of its title, identifies a particular faith - the Catholic faith.
Words used in the text of your proposed script are words describing merit, e.g., "good", "positive". Such terminology may not be used in any advertisement for a religious publication."
The critical reaction to this decision by politicians in the Seanad shows that this interpretation was never intended under the legislation. The Broadcasting Act legislates on the coverage of religion in ads, not just religious publications. If the logic of RTE's interpretation were followed, the Vincent de Paul, as a flagship Catholic organisation, should be required to remove "giving a helping hand" ads as they refer to positive actions on the part of a religious organisation.
The Irish Catholic is not an in-house magazine of the Irish Catholic Church. It is not owned or funded by the Church or the bishops. Indeed, some of the latter are known to fume privately at some of the opinions expressed by its editor. David Quinn.
He has been among the staunchest critics of the Church's failure to come to terms with child abuse, and has suggested some of the most radical solutions.
As a commercial newspaper with an orthodox Catholic editorial line, it could be argued that the Irish Catholic provides some much-needed balance to the overwhelmingly negative picture which is painted of the Catholic Church, and as such provides a public service - the kind of public service which RTÉ is supposed to provide.
It is difficult not to believe that there is a Pavlovian response to the word Catholic going on here. Kenneth Woodward, the religion editor of Newsweek, referred to anti-Catholicism recently as the "last acceptable prejudice". He talked about the chattering classes, where anti-semitism would be completely outlawed, but anti-Catholicism is "less conscious, less stigmatised, and therefore less noticed".
By anti-Catholicism, I most certainly do not mean coverage of scandals. The Church was unwilling or unable to bring out its own dark secrets, and the media deserve credit for forcing them to do so. Nor do I mean criticism of Church structures, or of leadership, because both are necessary.
What I mean is a relentless harping on about the faults and failings of the Church, and a continual recycling of stories already in the public domain in a way designed to cause maximum damage. I mean a presumption of bad faith in everything the Church does.
Some media portray the Church as a powerful monolith in the full knowledge that in reality it operates more often like a somewhat shambolic large voluntary organisation.
The Broadcasting Act refers to "political ends" in much the same way as it does "religious ends". But when was the last time you heard of a newspaper advert being pulled because it was overtly political, not in the party political sense, but in the sense of influencing politics?
Maybe we should ask Seamus Brennan whether newspapers are always neutral players in politics. Yet if a Sunday or daily paper had its adverts pulled there would be uproar about the lack of freedom of speech and the attempt to censor legitimate coverage.
The Irish Catholic adverts do not breach the guidelines on religious advertising just because it wanted to report good news.
It was not looking for converts, but instead just referring to coverage of facts that are accepted in most places where a rigid secularist conformity does not hold sway.
There is a new orthodoxy as capable of ex cathedra declarations as the old was. John Bruton had it right when he referred to this as "a form of secular puritanism, which should have no place in a liberal society".
We have indeed come to a sorry pass when, due to narrow and well-nigh bigoted interpretations of laws, there cannot be a reference to putting Christ back into Christmas. At least not if Catholics are doing it.