When I read of the dramatic decline in the influence of the Catholic Church in modern Ireland, I admit to a feeling of sadness. This is less because of my own shaky religious convictions than on what I perceive as a loss of a core element of Irish culture. For several hundred years, outsiders tried to replace our version of belief with an alternative import. The first Elizabeth used a big stick, as did Cromwell; when that approach was not successful, later colonisers tried a carrot. Those who accepted were immortalised in the scornful couplet:
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They sold their souls for ha'penny rolls
For soup and hairy bacon.
As it turned out, one part of the country accepted a reformed faith that owed much to the Scottish origin of many of its inhabitants, but the remainder stood firm. In most countries, the demands of commerce and the urgings of hormones would have evened out such divisions, but Ulster has proved immune to all blandishments.
There are those who say that Islam is the religion of the future, because it admits of no variations; it is a creed of certainties. The Catholicism of my youth was one of similar, almost algorithmic, sureness. Life furnished no problems that our theology could not solve. If you weren't in your pew by a certain point in the Mass, it was a mortaller. We knew the difference between backbiting, calumny and detraction and if we were not sure what the catechism meant by ''amusements dangerous to chastity'', this was a tribute to the good stewardship of our moral guardians.
The bishop could even make up sins peculiar to his own diocese. In the early years of the century, when there was much agitation about land rights, one bishop inserted into his catechism, ''Is it a sin to withhold land annuities?''
At confirmation, the child was supposed to answer that this was indeed a sin.
Then there were the patron saints. The theory was that the Almighty had a kind of inner cabinet with special responsibilities. It had the delightful simplicity of being a facsimile of the way the country was run: influence and ''pull'', what we now call lobbying. So you prayed to St Anthony if you lost something; St Jude was Minister for Hopeless Cases; pregnant women prayed to St Gerard Majella, though how he was supposed to know what they were going through was not clear.
Then there were saints that came into fashion rather like pop singers or writers of bestsellers today: St Therese of Lisieux, St Martin de Porres, Padre Pio. I had a habit of ferreting out obscure saints in the hope that they might be glad of a bit of custom and might give me more individual attention than the overworked inner cabinet.
Inevitably, the natural patriotism of the race required that we should have our own saints and it was a close thing between Laurence O'Toole and Edmund Rice, with Matt Talbot ''at twelves and drifting,'' as Runyon might have put it.
I remember, too, the evening devotions, especially in May: the rosary combined with Benediction. The hymns were the O Salutaris and the Tantum Ergo, the latter to the air of the German national anthem; there had to be three altar boys and we were known by our jobs: thurible, incense and gong.
If much of what I have described fits more comfortably under the heading of culture than religion, let it be. Society as a whole accepted that this was how things were: your beliefs were fixed and known, your moral compass set for life.
We were shocked when Edna O'Brien told us that young women away from home in the big cities might be less chaste than their parents and their nun teachers believed. That was nothing compared to our surprise when we learnt that a popular bishop, one who actually laughed and told off-colour jokes and drove too fast, had become the father of a child.
Then came the whole morass of sexual abuse by consecrated clergy and vowed religious, criminal behaviour that has led to where Ireland is today - a secular country that was once a bastion of Catholicism.
But, in the course of sloughing off its religion, it has also cast off much of its cultural heritage, and at the core of my rational, wavering faith, I regret that loss.
The Irish Times recently reported that in the part of rural Ireland I come from, with a total population about the same as Tuggeranong, the local coroner returned a verdict of suicide in 12 of the 14 inquests he held in the last year. Perhaps this is what we can expect when there is nothing to replace the algorithms of religion.
Anyway, that's what I think.
- Frank O'Shea is a Canberra writer.