MOST of the people in this country are Roman Catholics and Roman Catholic clerics have cornered, on the whole, the market in making pronouncements about right and wrong. Most people leave the spiritual side of things to them.
Politicians may hint at moral authority: I do not see the point of the new billboard poster of Bertie Ahern looking soulfully into the future unless something of the kind is being suggested. But they are not comfortable with the vocabulary of morality.
Mary Harney should not have used words like "should" and "wrong" about water charges and I'm sure Bertie came down off his cloud pretty damn quick to tell her so. If abolishing water charges was actually wrong, as opposed to right, it was up to a bishop to say it was wrong.
But the problem with having a clergy which departed in the direction of celibacy from the model of the homely fishermen whom Christ chose as his disciples is that the clerics sometimes don't have a clue about ordinary life.
Extraordinary life, yes: ordinary life, no. The most famous example of the rift between the two was when the Vatican and the majority of First World men and women failed to understand each other in the matter of family planning.
Most people simply do not agree that planning the size of a family is wrong. They in fact think it is wrong not to plan.
And there really isn't anything a church can do against people's own sense of what is right and wrong. It can only hope to be responsive to the changing nuances within the popular view.
RECENTLY, a few leading Irish Roman Catholic clerics made it their business to comment on shops being open on Good Friday and Easter Sunday. A spokesman for the Archbishop of Dublin said that he opposed "the increased commercialisation of Sunday" and called for legislation to protect what makes Sunday special and different.
Now it so happens that I agree with him. I think there are many excellent reasons for keeping Sunday special. We come of traditions that shaped the week and the year: I'd like to keep some of that ancient shapeliness. I don't want the pubs to open on Good Friday and Christmas Day, as if any one day were just the same as the next.
And I certainly don't see why English chainstores should open here on Sundays and repatriate the profits to a country where the Lord's Day Observance Society has had the clout to prevent the same stores opening. You don't have to believe in the Lord to believe in the Lord's day.
However, some clerics were not as careful as Archbishop Connell and they fell into a vocabulary about shopping - not trading - which is no less offensive for coming from priests. They spoke of people's "greed" and their surrender to "the consumer culture" and of how, in their passion for consuming goods, people were unwilling to keep even one day "sacred".
Part of this is just the howl of the defeated in a turf war: the amount of time or space now generally agreed to be sacred is shrinking - or rather, the sacred is migrating from churches and church ceremonies to, say, childbirth, whales and dolphins. This does, of course, threaten the keepers of the traditionally sacred - the priesthoods.
BUT to call shopping greedy is to betray a real misunderstanding of what shopping is in the contemporary world. It is a misunderstanding between clerics and lay people almost as profound as the one about family planning.
And like that one, it stems from the fact that clerics lose their feel, somewhere in the seminary years, for the terrain in which the vast majority of the lives lived on this planet are rooted.
It is not the rule that clerics shouldn't make love that matters - though perhaps there's a lot about themselves they can never find out if they've never been physically intimate with another person. It is not non commission of an act - even if it is the act of love - that matters. It is ignorance of the, long, repeated, unexceptionality of the days of a human life.
The lives of non priests are rooted in family - in a little clump of progenitors and children of different generations, who link out sideways into other little family clumps, through schools and shared wells and leaving messages for the coalman, into the viscous mass of a society. They are not solitary individuals, over against a mass. They are the mass.
The imperative within that little family clump is providing, provisioning. That's the rhythm that keeps the week coming around - the one that makes sense of the notion of a "day of rest". God was providing for us when he made the universe. The fathers and mothers who work outside the home provide for the home. The mothers - and, increasingly, the fathers - deploy the money brought into the home to the very best effect. Part of that deployment is known as shopping.
AND because shopping is part of the human effort to live together, it brings out some of the most excellent traits in the shopping human being. The shopper is aware, poised, keen eyed. The heaped shopping cart, put together with a wealth of experience, decisiveness, empathy with imagined others, and co ordination of information and imagination, all accompanied by a specialist interior monologue ("a few parsnips would be nice roasted with the turkey"; "how many toilet rolls are we using in the week now, with the older ones away?") - the shopping cart is, and represents, the security of the family unit.
And similarly - watch the emotions held (barely) in check by the elder party when buying shoes for a young one. Watch the skill of a rich woman trying on an expensive suit.
More questions than a computer can deal with are running through her sleek head. She's doing a thing she does very well when she shops. Her skills are at a stretch. There is hardly an expenditure of money that does not involve the intellect and the spirit.
As nothing else does, I may say. Shopping is glibly written off as the "religion" of the modern masses.
Would that there were a religion which so empowered people, so that they'd come home from their religious observances with the same sense of indubitable, incontrovertible achievement as the man who has just concluded the purchase of an eight year old car which has genuinely hardly been driven from a timorous old lady who could hardly be persuaded to take a few hundred pounds for it.
Watch the tired but triumphant body language of the housewife conscious that she has brought back the makings of a week's meats to the house. See the healthy self satisfaction of the jet setter who found an Ungaro on the sale rail of exactly the right cerise to go with the shoes she got in New York...
Just as awe now resides in landscape, and love in children, autonomy now resides in shopping.