I look on its difficulties . . . such as the recent squeaks of outrage at the concelebration of the Easter Eucharist by Augustinian priests and a Protestant minister . . . with considerable satisfaction. If ever clerics straightforwardly defend their turf, it is at times like this. Oh we're all in favour of ecumenism, a trio of archbishops said, as they always say.

Only not this bit of it. And not at this time.

Apparently 'sensitivity' to 'ethos' means that many, many more centuries of talking must pass before anything substantive can happen. Ordinary people wouldn't mind a bit of action in their own lifetimes, but churchmen can always choose to consign troublesome questions to eternity.

There was the threat of democracy, too.

Our attention was quickly drawn upward, to the present pope and various graciousnesses he has displayed towards various non-Catholics. That's who'll do any ecumenism that gets done around here, we were told: His Holiness (a title that by no means trips easily off my tongue). As outrages to hierarchical structures go, the Easter Mass was a piece of upstart impudence on a par with the criticism by retired soldiers of Donald Rumsfeld's conduct of the war in Iraq. 'Who do these no-account Augustinians think they are?' you could hear them saying in the Vatican.

'Where is this Drogheda?'

Ecumenism, Archbishop Martin gave us to understand, is an ecclesial matter. That is, it is the province of the church of which he is a senior and successful member. And . . .

guess what . . . the church cannnot be wrong. Because the church IS Christ.

How it comes about that he and the other bosses are the church and the Augustinians in Drogheda are not, he did not say and I do not know.

And yet, I dimly see Archbishop Martin's point. I have one reluctant foot in his camp.

Because I live within the European Christian tradition which is unimaginable without the products in art and architecture and music and thinking and feeling of the religious impulse. And I'm an Irish Catholic by culture, and I like that, and value it. I have the impression that especially here in Ireland the survival of our self-conscious identity was dependant on the survival of the link with Rome.

It is impossible to see a cross scratched into a rock or to stand at the site of a Penal Mass or to hear the invocations and curses and greetings in Irish which are purely religious in reference without acknowledging that religion is and was the comfort and the hope of the oppressed. And could folk religion have survived here without the strength and resources of a global institution?

The Catholics I know are not oppressed, but they practise their religion within what they feel is a community that is larger than any one place and which stretches back in time and forward into the future, and their feelings about that constitute part of their identity. It isn't possible to pick all the rest of them and reject that part. Not if I love them. Not if I want to trade on an easy understanding of them. Part of what we all have in common . . . the devout, the lackadaisical, the agnostic . . . is that we share an idea of what religion is. And that idea is the construct of the church of which Archbishop Martin is a high official. It holds us together as personal preference never would. Maybe there has to be a conservative institution to do just that . . . to conserve the words of the prayers we have all known since infancy, and the rituals of worship, and the emotional light and shade of the Christian year.

Maybe there have to be actual churches within which to gather. Maybe there has to be an actual priesthood to whom to refer the great questions that are too painful to live with by ourselves. And if the workplaces and the workforce of a church have to be sustained from generation to generation then maybe there has to be a fiercelyself-protective sustaining institution.

A Catholic church bedecked in pomp and riches that occupies itself with policing diktats like the denial of contraception to the poorest people of the planet and of condoms to Aids sufferers, while covering up murderous harm done by its own priests, is nevertheless an institution which is believed by hundreds of millions of people to give form to the godseeking within them.

But the institution is not the mission. And what was harmed by the ecumenical initiative taken in Drogheda? The institution or the mission?