Father Gerard Moloney, editor of Reality, the Redemptorist publication, has said that "increasingly, there are attempts to deny the church any role or voice in Irish life, to push it as much to the margins as possible."
Writing in the magazine's May issue, he said this was happening "at almost every level of Irish society. It is especially obvious in sections of the national media, where religion in general and church-related topics in particular - unless they are of a scandalous or frivolous nature - are not dealt with at all or only in a negative or destructive way."
Father Moloney was prompted to make the remarks by the experience of Redemptorist missioners in a suburban Dublin parish recently. A group of local parishioners promoted the mission.
Posters were erected on lampposts in the area. Three complaints were made to Dublin Corporation about the posters. It transpired they were in breach of litter laws as only election posters or advertisements for public meetings can be put on lampposts. The missioners were presented with a £50 fine by Dublin Corporation, he said.
This caused outrage among people attending the mission and Dublin Corporation reconsidered. The fine was replaced with a warning, he said.
"What this incident reveals more than anything else is the extent to which attitudes towards the church in Ireland have changed and are changing as we begin the 21st century," Father Moloney said.
The people who complained to Dublin Corporation about the posters "deliberately went out of their way to make these complaints . . . They may have been motivated solely by environmental concerns but it is far more likely that their real motivation was simply to `get' the Catholic Church.
"They did not want the church to be promoting itself or its mission, and they certainly were not going to allow it use lamp-posts or any public areas in which to do so," he said.
He acknowledged that a major reason for this behaviour has been the anger and hurt of many people at the church's abuse of its power and position in the past, but "we must acknowledge, too, that there are others with an antichurch and anti-Catholic agenda, who wish to see the church in Ireland destroyed."
He continued: "It's time the church stopped allowing the scandals and difficulties of recent years to inhibit it from courageously yet humbly proclaiming its message. It must acknowledge what is happening and reclaim its voice, before it finds itself an increasingly isolated and ignored institution on the margins of modern Irish life."
