Recently I spent a few days in Prague. Each morning during Mass an old woman came into the church and her reverence proclaimed the depth of her prayer.

I thought about the story of her life. She would have seen the Nazi tanks rolling into her city in 1939. I need not describe the tyranny that followed and lasted for 50 years from Heydrich, exterminator of Jews, down to the liberation in 1989 from the hardest of hard-line Communist regimes.

Whatever about the defects of recent Irish social conditions, I feel that she would have preferred our experience to that which her people endured.

That year, 1939, when her trouble began, was the year after our Constitution came into force.

Unfortunately it is now derided as a Catholic document, but I for one am proud of whatever may have been the Catholic influence that helped to shape it.

In the darkness of the Europe of that time, from Spain to Soviet Russia, it was a beacon of light for its vindication of personal dignity and its firm assertion of natural rights against the inroads of political expediency.

Furthermore, to dismiss our Constitution as Catholic is to forget that it expressed the historical experience of our people, who for centuries endured the injustice created by a body of positive law that systematically violated their human rights.

Our Constitution, because it was based on natural law, acknowledged rights that no civil authority can take away.

I am concerned that today there is a climate of criticism, and even hostility, towards the church, which is making many young people ashamed of their history and, in particular, of their Catholic past.

But a people ashamed of its history is a people deprived of identity and roots.

A self-confident generation, on the other hand, is nurtured by parents and teachers who are convinced of the values they seek to pass on and who know how to place inevitable human weakness in a perspective of justice, of compassion and of determination to do better in the future.

Nowadays it is widely assumed that the influence of the Catholic Church in previous generations was overwhelmingly repressive.

I wonder does this assumption stand up to proper historical scrutiny.

It is certainly an assumption that is particularly easy to make from the standpoint of our current more permissive culture, but several examples might make us reflect.

Let me refer to a piece in the Daily Telegraph of March 18th, 1930 about censorship.

It contains the report of the British Board of Film Censors for 1929 and it lists the reasons given for the exception taken to films. If I were to give that list - being careful only to omit the item: "References to the Prince of Wales" - and to ask who was the author, I have little doubt that I would be told that it was Archbishop McQuaid.

And what about the American adoptions in the 1950s? Certainly this issue has led to important questions being asked in recent years, especially about the rights of birth mothers.

But the adoptions have been condemned for what people perceived as cruelty perpetrated by the church in facilitating the removal of the children from their native country.

It is ironic that almost at the same time the adoption of a child from China was hailed as a joyful event.

Let me stress that I am here concerned only with public attitudes and imply no judgment of my own.

Recently a notorious case concerning care for a disturbed minor came before the High Court. The child was held in a remand centre, although there was no question of his having broken the law.

The RTE report in passing asserted that in the past the child would have been cared for by the church.

Why not now?

The religious indeed had been running a centre to which the child could have been sent.

But when that centre was obliged by the civil authority to accept juveniles on remand, the religious retired from the centre rather than stay on as jailers.

None of what I say is intended to deny or diminish the heart-rending abuses that occurred in Irish society; and when those abuses were perpetrated by people identified with the church, the scandal has been all the greater.

But too little is heard about the historical context and the dangers of being anachronistic, of judging the past too naively by present-day standards.

A healthy society will acknowledge and take steps to remedy its past abuses. But its strength will come not from wholesale rejection of its past but from reliance on the heritage, the tradition, the ideals and the vision which both created the integrity of its tradition in the first place and then made it attentive to advances in experience and knowledge.

We hear too little of the poverty in 1930s Ireland and even less about the hunger marches in Britain at that time.

We hear little, if any analysis of the annual budgets over the last 50 years to help us to guess how much support the State was able to provide for the task of caring for the destitute, a task which was accepted by generations of religious.

The fact is that the church, utterly dependent on the support of a largely impoverished Catholic community, cared for the poor, and the State was content to leave it like that.

Is a fatally-blinkered hindsight causing us in today's Ireland to misjudge our past?

I say these things for one reason only - to ask for justice towards the church and to challenge the kind of revisionism that is making our children ashamed of their past.

This leaves them without a tradition to provide an identity. It leaves them rootless before the accelerating winds of change.

Many parents are struggling to transmit their faith and values in this tempest.

Teachers today face a particular challenge as they try to help parents restore pride in their Catholic and Christian heritage, as well as give children a sense of joy and conviction about their faith.

Young people in Ireland today are part of a wider Western society, characterised by rapid cultural transformation, the replacement of a monocultural environment by cultural plurality.

But cultural plurality is not just an external phenomenon. It is an internal dissonance.

The young person finds within him or herself the presence of a number of competing cultures.

The tensions caused by secularism, consumerism, individualism, hedonism and the marginalisation of religious belief are to be found within the young as part of their cultural inheritance.

Human persons are not simply a product of the cultural environment, not simply passive, static recipients.

The young people of today are not only children of a particular culture, they are the parents of the culture of tomorrow. They can shape culture anew.

The Gospel which we bring is one that can liberate from all that oppresses, one which invites and enables us to transform everything human into the image of Christ.