The dilemma of the Roman Catholic Church and its abusing priests is extreme. As the tale unfolds,... Rocky road ahead as Cathol

No Church, of course, is without its sexual sinners. Protestant leaders would find it difficult to know what to say. Burdened by their history, Catholic and Protestant clergy rarely sup at each others' tables. They are distant co-labourers in the spiritual vineyard, satisfied if a rather remote courtesy obtains.

That is one reason the State has at last felt obliged to intervene in the Republic. The other was the conviction that the Church was either incapable, or unwilling to make amends itself.

Its options for the future are clouded. A generation ago, strong bishops - a John Charles McQuaid in Dublin, a Jeremiah Newman fulminating in Limerick or a Michael Browne in Galway - would have imposed a clampdown. The trap would have been shut with an iron hand.

But that is no longer an option. If they were presiding today, McQuaid and his cohorts would be mercilessly lampooned and ridiculed in the media.

An alternative option, then, is relaxation, leading in the direction of a married priesthood, until, in a span of years, celibacy became a minority choice. But this, at any time in the foreseeable future, would split the Church and, under this Pope, would not be entertained in Rome.

The remaining option is to muddle on, if not as before, at least to the extent of making the best of a system patently under strain. But this, on recent experience, would appear to be the road downwards, into falling vocations and more a la carte Catholicism.

So the options are stark and challenging, particularly because this is so much an Irish problem. The evil of abusing priests has flourished here, but also in Great Britain and the United States, the two nations where the Irish Church has had such an historic input. The diocese of Boston, the most Irish in America, is revealed as having one of the worst records.

Clearly the day is gone when a powerful, secretive, absolutist institution can be allowed, outrageously, to use its own in-house legal code - canon law - as a pretext for ignoring the civil and criminal law in a democracy, to the point where serious criminal offences, the rape of youngsters by priests, are suppressed and the victims intimidated.

The intervention of the secular power will have grievous consequences for the Church. Investigation is on foot in Dublin (67 allegations); there are 27 allegations in Tuam, 12 in Cork; there have been 26 in Derry, 15 in Down and Connor - and so on: the total is some 250.

In the past the gardai, when told of complaints, looked the other way. Files, disgracefully, disappeared. When a farmer from the village of Fethard-on-Sea in Co Wexford went to the police in 1983 about the activities of the evil Fr Fortune in the district, the garda dismissed it and warned him he could be sued for slander.

In fact, the State was to ignore the priestly sexual sickness in the Wexford diocese of Ferns for 16 years, a guilt of Government, but missing from last week's report.

As it is, media critics of the Church are still attacked, even though its bishops, with one hand, were buying insurance policies against being sued in the courts at the same time as, with the other, they were concealing from the law the deeds of their priests.

For an explanation, one has to go back into history. For the Roman Church in Ireland is, in its fundamentalist, all-embracing nature, very much the creation of the British.

It was the malevolent British 18th-century penal code which cemented the phenomenon of being Catholic as a special way of being Irish. Within a generation, being Irish meant a special way of being Catholic.

Denied the vote by British Protestants, forbidden to hold property, unable to bequeath any already held to eldest sons in toto, forbidden to run schools, and so on, by the mid-20th century, independent Ireland survived as the last confessional Catholic State in Europe.

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