Inter-denominational schools: ah, how the heart sinks at those very words, and at the virtuous intent they convey. All those determinedly secular middle-class mothers, veterans of various Nicaragua, Guatemala and anti-apartheid support groups in their youth, who used to roll their own cigarettes in Bewleys on Saturday mornings, where they mastered the right-on, knowing, put-down look, or the head-bobbing sign of agreement. Far out, man, writes Kevin Myers
Dabbled on the outskirts of lesbianism, vegetarianism and not shaving their legs under their long Indian print dresses, all of which proved conclusively that they were pretty hip. But one day they settled down with their boyfriend, a law graduate who ran a free legal aid centre, and bought their first car, a Morris Traveller or a Deux-Cheveaux, and moved to Ranelagh, and while he sort of imperceptibly drifts into the family law firm - specialising in conveyancing - she starts producing 2.4 babies called Conor and Simon and Alexandra and Emma.
Respect all religions
Then it's schools: where do you send them? Well, of course the interdenominational school, naturally, where they can learn to respect all religions equally, and where no religion is seen to have a monopoly on right, for we all have so much to learn from one another, from our different philosophies, and our different world experiences. And there'd be pictures of Mahatma Gandhi and Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King on the walls, and the children would be raised in a world where there was no difference between religions or races.
Sorry, Ranelagh-woman. Wrong. For the history of religion is the history of emphasising difference, not celebrating it. Yet in the Ranelagh world of benign unbelief, it's easy to pass off affable agnosticism as ecumenism. And if unbelief means that people don't kill people out of religious conviction, well and good: in fact splendid, and I'm all in favour of it. But the fashionable tepidities of the Dublin 6 bien-pensant are mere coffee-morning tittle-tattle compared with the dark passions which go into the making and the maintenance of religious beliefs.
There is a single, central difference between the Catholic Church and the main reformed religion here, the Church of Ireland, and that difference has remained unbridged and unbridgeable despite 40 years of the ecumenical movement. No amount of interdenominational pussy-footing in Ranelagh is going to change the towering importance to the Catholic Church of the doctrine of transubstantiation.
The Roman Catholic dogma is that during the consecration, the host actually becomes the body of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, and Redeemer of All Mankind; not symbolically, not in a complex piece of imagery, but in full reality. This piece of human flesh, of tongue and breast and bowel, is then consumed by the worshipful.
Warm and forgiving
Well naturally Ranelagh-woman doesn't want to go into the gory details of all that. She's Catholic all right, but not that kind of yucky Catholic. Her form of Catholicism is inclusive and warm and forgiving, and it's all about the Third World and AIDS and soon, she hopes, women priests.
Once again, Ranelagh woman. Wrong. That's not Catholicism. That's being nice. Which is not the same thing. Eating a person's body is not being nice. It's being weird. But Catholicism is weird. All religion is weird. And the doctrine of transubstantiation is certainly weird. But without it, the Catholic Church is an organisation with lots of buildings and money, rather like AIB.
Of course, an entire generation or more have been brought up on happy-clappy Catholicism, with not too much talk about the differences between the Churches. But the fellows at the top, they know the irreducible chasm between the Churches is the Eucharist; and that's why they insist the communion wafer can't be distributed to all comers, just as you wouldn't invite any old stranger off the street to mind your children. Go on. Pop some real God into your mouth.
No, it's not easy to accept. It's not meant to be. It's doctrine, not a simple mathematical equation. So that's why religion isn't a minor lifestyle choice, along with Habitat or Next, AIB or Bank of Ireland. Religion is something which commits you to life-governing beliefs. The key is in the word: its root is ligare, Latin for bind, as in ligament.
That's why the lesson of Dunboyne isn't about sectarianism, but about the intellectual religious integrity of its head teacher, Tomás Ó Dulaing. He at least understands that "interdenominationalism" ceases at the consecration; and that consecration is the central pillar of the Catholic Church. Far from it being a pillar for the Church of Ireland, it is a barrier between it and Rome, and he equally understands that Protestant children cannot be expected to be taught as doctrine something that is anathema to their church.
Protestant faiths
But, of course, the Catholic Church over recent decades neglected to teach its faithful how it profoundly it differs from the Protestant faiths. Its priests were far too busy building ugly concrete wigwams in which to conduct folk-masses, with altar-girls performing Riverdance and strewing rose-petals over the congregation, to remember what lies at its heart.
The reality is there is no such thing as interdenominationalism, and that at best, there is multidenominationalism. Of course, the failure of the Catholic Church to define and defend that central truth has confused the Catholics of Dunboyne, not to speak of An Foras Patrúncachta, never mind our right-on Ranelagh woman. It is an object lesson that, even intellectually, sound walls make good neighbours, and that rapprochement based on well-meaning ignorance invariably ends in tears.