It is a measure of how far society in this State has progressed in the last generation that many people will see the speech by Archbishop Connell yesterday at the Mater Hospital in Dublin not as an expression of irrefutable logic and rationality, but as a partisan contribution to one of the major political debates of our time. Dr Connell himself acknowledged this when, in the course of a carefully argued appeal to reason, he unexpectedly reverted to an emotional call to the "memory of centuries of unjust discrimination against our faith", enhanced by a claim that "penal conditions" might, in certain circumstances, be imposed on Catholic hospitals that would rapidly destroy them.
No one would be churlish enough to suggest to Dr Connell that, when those conditions did, in reality, exist, the Catholic Church found its effective answer. His argument is as relevant to the debate about the State funding of hospitals (and schools) as the claim that the door was opened to on demand abortion by a cautiously formulated decision of the Supreme Court. Or that the availability of divorce is likely to accelerate the already swift pace of change in traditional Irish society. Scare-mongering is not argument.
The counterbalance to that kind of historical reminiscence can be simply illustrated by the much more likely case of a patient at one of the Catholic hospitals without ethical or religious objections to a legally permitted procedure not approved by the Catholic Church. Would he or she, in Dr Connell's phrase, not suffer "unjust discrimination" if the treatment was refused? And if a doctor in one of these State-funded, hospitals was not permitted to follow his or her conscience by providing such treatment, would this not also be discrimination? These are not new or insubstantial objections, but they are ones that church apologists would prefer to ignore or dismiss as subordinate to the main issue.
Dr Connell's speech abounds in the modish use of language designed to suggest, that entire fields of science, medical and psychological, are now moving in the direction of support for the exponents of faith. Yet when he contends that the contemporary appreciation of the profound significance of the sexual constitution of the human person" should prompt caution about the moral acceptability of sterilisation, it is difficult not to reflect on the deep wounds inflicted on many Irish psyches by a different Catholic orthodoxy, which has not been discarded, and wonder at the new sensibility where sterilisation is concerned. Suggesting that a contemporary appreciation exists that is generally applicable, and, universally accepted is, in any case, simply misleading. In the context of the Constitution Review Group's recommendations, the note, of judicious caution in its approach to the rewriting of Article 44 is not invalidated.
If the outcome of the group's proposals, and the serious debate which must follow, is the drafting of a Constitution that truly reflects contemporary society, then the role of the churches and of other traditional institutions must necessarily be diminished, in, favour of individual rights. How that is expressed is likely to be one of the most hard-fought issues in constitutional reform, yet there can be no question, in this day and age, that the roles of church and State must be clearly differentiated. The voting public is more sceptical than Dr Connell perhaps thinks about ex-parte reasoning.