Sadly, it is a measure of how far the Catholic Church has fallen in public esteem that a member of the Oireachtas could this week maintain that it could not be trusted to be truthful or capable of reforming its ways or regulating its activities to a standard expected by civil society today.
Such an enormous fall from grace is underscored by the fact that the comments by former minister of state Liz O'Donnell provoked little outrage. What she said seemed to ring true for many people in knee-jerk reactions in the wake of the publication of the Ferns report.
In her contribution to the Dáil debate on the Ferns findings, Ms O'Donnell cut to what many regard as a key contributory factor in creating the sort of detached, parallel universe in which the church seemed to operate when allegations of appalling abuse by a small minority of priests were notified to those senior men in authority. She noted that "the church is neither democratic nor accountable".
"In many ways it is a secret organisation - with its own diplomatic service, civil service, laws and self-regulatory codes, which have failed the public," she said. She then went on to call for an end to the special relationship between the Catholic Church and the State.
Ms O'Donnell has expressed the understandable anger - and sadness - felt by many practising and non-practising Catholics at the demonstrable failure of the church to deal with abusing priests over many decades. It is a horrifying reckoning. But, if one is to stand back from it, this is not a time to throw out the baby with the bathwater.
Understandably, the Taoiseach, Bertie Ahern, over-reacted to the criticism that the cosy phone calls from All Hallows to the Government should come to an end. Whether Ms O'Donnell was using "All Hallows" in a generic rather than a personal sense is a matter of conjecture.
For all of that, a watershed in church/state relations has been reached in the wake of the Catholic Church's failure to deal responsibly with child-abusing priests. For the first time in the history of the State, the Government, and the Minister for Justice, Michael McDowell, in particular, have been emboldened to ignore canon law and have, by the establishment of the Ferns and now the Dublin diocese inquiries, forced the church to abide by the laws of the State. That is an appropriate response.
The Catholic Church, however, has still not responded adequately to the breach of trust by its paedophile priests. In order to move forward, vindicate the good character of the majority of priests and begin the process of trying to reassert its authority, it is necessary for the most senior church figure in Ireland to openly confront the issues raised.
It is not good enough to state that the church is not a cabinet, that each diocese is a separate domain. There is a clear need for a charter to deal with abusing priests in all dioceses.