The Archbishop of Dublin, Dr Desmond Connell, has warned that "the climate of criticism and, at times, downright hostility towards the church" is making young people ashamed of their history and their Catholic past.
Addressing religious education teachers graduating from Mater Dei Institute in Dublin yesterday, Dr Connell said "a people ashamed of its history is a people deprived of identity and roots.
"A self-confident generation on the other hand is formed by 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, of determination to do better in the future.
"None of what I say is intended to deny or diminish the heartrending 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 pitfalls of anachronism. 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 forces that created the integrity of its tradition and rendered it attentive to advances in experience and knowledge."
Dr Connell warned against a distorted remembrance of the past, "a blinkered hindsight". He noted how little was heard about poverty in Ireland in the 1930s.
"Nobody has analysed the annual budgets over the last 50 years to help us 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 church, utterly dependent on the support of a Catholic, largely impoverished community, cared for the poor and the State was content so to leave it."
"Why do 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, and rootless before accelerating winds of change. It will be your task to help restore pride in our Catholic heritage and to inspire renewed joy in our faith."
He said the 1937 Constitution was "now derided as a Catholic document, but I am proud of whatever may have been the Catholic influence that helped to shape it. In the darkness of the Europe of the 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.
"It is widely assumed that the influence of the Catholic Church was repressive, especially when judged in the light of our current permissive culture," he went on, "but more than 40 years after Parnell, the British - for similar reasons - dismissed their king from his throne in 1936, and now more than 100 years later, the heir to the throne is under discussion about his matrimonial prospects."
On the adoptions of Irish children by US Catholic families in the 1950s, Dr Connell said "they were roundly condemned in programme after programme for the cruelty perpetrated by the church in facilitating the removal of the children from the country.
"No doubt, with hindsight, one would be more careful today, but a few months later, the media hailed as a joyful event the adoption of a child from China. Apparently it was perverse to send children to a cognate culture, the United States, but altogether commendable to receive a child in Ireland from a totally alien culture. How far is this from hypocrisy?"