Sir, - When Bishop Flynn said that the recent opinion poll about the Church reflected the increasing secularisation of Irish society he was making a different, and more profound, point than John Waters (April 1st) gave him credit for.
If a majority of people think that priests should marry, or that women should be ordained, or that the Church should change its teaching on sexual matters, it is because from a secular point of view these conclusions seem incontrovertible. From a broader and more spiritually informed point of view, there are equally strong counter arguments.
Uninformed opinions have little value, but the fact that they are uninformed is only partly the fault of those who hold them. The problem is that the Church has been very bad in recent years at informing people and at presenting its own case. Out of a lack of intellectual or spiritual depth, or a loss of nerve, or just an understandable wish to "meet people on their own terms", priests and other religious educators have shrunk in recent years from asserting a spiritual or eternal viewpoint which will inevitably compete with, and often contradict, the values of the world.
At the same time those, like the bishops, who still try to expound orthodox Church teaching continually betray their dismal lack of presentation skills. This problem goes to the highest level. The Pope's own writings are, of course, the densely argued work of a trained philosopher, but that alone can hardly be the reason why they emerge into English as the work of a committee of civil service translators, none of whom have English as a first language.
There are problems, then for any Catholic who wants to understand in any depth what the Church teaches and why. He or she, having first of all with some difficulty tracked the sources of information down, must then struggle with opaque and unappetising verbiage to extract it. It is no surprise that so few persist (these, presumably, being the "minor intellectuals" that Mr Waters mentions, though he does not identify any of the major ones with whom they are implicitly compared).
It is true that a great many Catholics regard the Church as increasingly remote and irrelevant (and not just the nominal Catholics, who have always existed in vast numbers and will distort any research). But the reason they do so is not that they have looked into the Church's teachings and the ideas behind them, and found them unconvincing. Church teachings reach them either through an inept direct presentation or, more often, translated selectively and with considerable licence into the more accessible language of the news media. The ideas behind the teachings never reach them at all.
Few people nowadays have the time or the inclination to take in anything that is not presented to them clearly and attractively. Finding ways to do that is one of the most urgent tasks facing the Church. - Yours etc.,
Kenilworth Square
Dublin 6