THE response of the spokesman for the Catholic Hierarchy, Bishop Thomas Flynn, to the recent survey by two American sociologists showing that the proportion of Catholics who favour radical change in their church is greater in Ireland than in any other Catholic country was intriguingly definitive.
Asked by Andy Pollak to comment for the Irish Times readership on the survey - which indicated high levels of support among Irish Catholics for married priests, women priests and a more open papacy - Dr Hynn said simply that "Ireland is becoming a secular country".
This may or may not be the case, but how it could be deduced from the results of a survey which concerned itself exclusively with issues' relating to the politics of the Catholic Church is unclear.
The survey asked seven questions, one on married priests, one on women priests, one on whether lay people should have more say in the church, one on whether priests and people should be allowed to elect their bishops, one on whether more power should be devolved to bishops in their diocese, and two relating to the openness of the papacy to the input of lay Catholics.
None of the questions was concerned with Gospel matters, and yet the spokesman for the Hierarchy could dismiss the survey by observing that the church's job was "simply to preach the Gospel, and the Gospel has not changed in 2,000 years.
"It's difficult to preach and live the Gospel," Dr Flynn added. "It was difficult in Christ's time - people turned away from Him because they found it hard to accept - and it's difficult now."
What are we to make of Dr Flynn's remarks? Can anyone point to a single word in the Gospels betraying the slightest interest on the part of Jesus Christ in whether priests should be male or female, married or single, whether bishops should be elected or whether popes should even be Catholics?
What Dr Flynn was saying is no less than that the Catholic Church's view of its own self interest is synonymous with the wishes and interests of God Himself, that only by acquiescing in the world view of the Catholic Hierarchy can we gain access to God, and that those who dissent from this view are making a deliberate choice to walk away from God.
In a sense, yes, we have heard it all before. But it strikes me that, heard in the specific circumstances of the present, these assertions have a somewhat different and more ominous ring.
In the past, while the Irish people were in thrall to institutional Catholicism, it was perhaps, at a societal level at least, a little less worrying when clerics lost the run of themselves and threatened to excommunicate all and sundry at the drop of a mitre. But now we have reached a more critical phase. For all its imperfections, Catholicism allowed us to live within sight of the Other, in the knowledge of God even if not in the favour of His anointed.
Though consigned to the margins of the institutional church, the dissenting individual could live in the slipstream of Christianity which the church created willy nilly. While the greater whole remained in tact, the broken pieces could reside in the hope or belief that they belonged some place in the complex design of God's people, to be reconstructed by the final archaeology of the Day of Judgment.
But the whole no longer remains intact, and so, in the context of a more general rejection of Catholicism, declarations like Dr Flynn's have an altogether different meaning.
In saying that Ireland is becoming a secular country, the bishop may appear to be stating the obvious, but at another level he is issuing a selffulfilling prophecy. For he is telling us, on behalf of the bishops, that we cannot have God without them. He is telling us that, unless we agree to see the world as bishops see it, the knowledge of God will be withdrawn from us all. Because Irish spirituality has always been a one pole circus, this brings us to a very serious situation indeed.
The big picture is very much as Dr Flynn's statement, taken at the level of pure observation, would indicate. In becoming less Catholic, Ireland has become less interested in the sacred. In a single generation, the joyless, authoritarian nature of what we wrongly term "traditional" Irish Catholicism developed in Irish people an acute allergy to religion, and this, together with the manifest hypocrisy of some bishops, proved a lethal dose for Irish spirituality. But because of the unique position of Catholicism as the franchise holder on our spirituality, our loosening of the church's hold on us has involved a loosening also of our embrace with God.
Apart from some desultory mid 70s flirtations with born again religions, we have never sought to imagine a God other than as mediated by Catholicism.
Dr Flynn might well have added that Ireland is actually becoming a Godless society, albeit one in which many of the negative elements of Irish Catholicism - intolerance, sanctimoniousness etc - have been preserved.
BUT we do not reject God because we have rejected the church. We reject God because we have too closely identified Him with an institution which we have begun to perceive as behaving in an unGodly way. Nothing and nobody has emerged to assist us in separating God from church. It is unlikely that anyone will.
God, with de Valera and the GPO, is one of the great embarrassments of modern Ireland. With the exception of a handful of artists addressing a dwindling and increasingly uncomprehending audience, nobody bears witness to the possibilities of faith as other than the residual eccentricity of a range of irrational minorities.
Apart from a few minor intellectuals professing allegiance to institutional Catholicism, there are virtually no lay voices prepared to explore the sacred dimension in public. The media delve into the minutiae of religious politics, but rarely if ever bear witness to the idea that there might, actually, be something in all this God stuff.
Unapologetic and straightforward notions of Godliness are now to be found only in the most unlikely places: the meeting rooms of recovering addicts, the words of a pop song, the simple prayers of a child. This is largely because virtually all the organs of public discourse have, in opposing institutional Catholicism, failed to make any distinction between the dancer, the dance and the choreographical control freaks. To take this metaphor to the point of exhaustion, we need a Riverdance of the spirit, but there is no one to help us create it.
As a result, D Flynn's observation becomes true by default. Ireland is turning into a secular society not because of the decline of Catholicism, but because we have allowed a retreating church to hold God to ransom.
The bishops now appear to be saying that they plan to take God with them into oblivion.