Although he didn't put it in these terms, Mr Kirke was making a very obvious point: there is no such thing as completely bad publicity. No matter what is written about Opus Dei and no matter now much negativity attaches to it, the organisation will gain rather than lose as a result of the torrent of words that have been written about it. And now that it appears that the movie is a bit of a dog, without any of the cliff-hanging manipulation that made a merely adequately written book unputdownable, there seems little doubt that, self-flagellation or no self-flagellation, Opus Dei has come out of this whole controversy in a stronger state than it went in.

The publicity rule works both ways, of course. Every time the Vatican issues a warning about the evil of Harry Potter, or somebody reminds us that the current pope used to obsess about this kind of stuff when he was playing Sancho Panza to John Paul II's Don Quixote, JK Rowling's sales figures shoot up. Likewise with The Lord Of The Rings, which one Vatican functionary was moved to condemn last year. Likewise with The Da Vinci Code, which has benefited from regular attacks from the Vatican as much as Opus Dei has been blessed by Dan Brown's fervid imagination.

Likewise with the Vatican officials who got their cassocks in a twist last week because RTE dressed an actress up as a bishop.

These regular ejaculations of concern from the church about the effects of popular culture have another effect. They make us look closely at how it is doing its own business, at the way it prioritises the important issues facing it, at how it deals with the many problems that confront it.

How can it be, many people will ask, that it can find time to condemn children's novels or summer blockbusters but remain silent on issues of grave importance, for example child sexual abuse, carried out by its own priests and perpetrated on its own members and followers?

The Catholic church clearly has a problem with prioritising, with working out appropriate responses to particular conundrums, and we were reminded of that again last week when three Augustinian priests were forced to put their names to a statement apologising for saying a mass at Easter with an Anglican clergyman.

Fathers Iggy O'Donovan, Richard Goode and Noel Hession wrote to Archbishop Sean Brady, to the papal nuncio in Dublin, Giuseppe Lazzarotto, and to the head of their order, the Augustinians, to say sorry for their "ill considered" breach of church discipline. They also gave an "absolute commitment" not to behave in such a way in future. In addition, the Irish Province of the Augustinian Order issued a statement expressing regret at "the pain, confusion and damage caused as a result of the concelebration at its church in Drogheda".

The speed with which the church moved to humiliate three of its priests, who faced being defrocked if they did not sign the statement, contrasts with its tardiness in responding to child sexual abuse in Ferns and other places; it contrasts indeed with its response to the damning Ferns report, which came out last year and which has still not provoked a response from the Harry Potter-baiting pontiff. Not a single word of regret has slipped his lips.

Nothing either from the papal nuncio, to whom it was apparently so important to have the three priests apologise. And so we are in the ludicrous position where the Augustinian order talks in terms of "pain, confusion and damage" in relation to a mass concelebrated with an Anglican while the papal nuncio says nothing, nothing at all, about the pain, confusion and damage caused to so many children and their families in Wexford by people he is supposed to represent.

There's no point in having a theological argument over this. Strictly speaking, O'Donovan, Goode and Hession did break the rules, and they therefore stood to be criticised, chastised, or censured by church authorities.

But it is equally true that they did what they did not because they wanted to be renegades, or "bad boys of the church" but because they saw a chance at Easter, during all the 1916 palaver, to do something that would publicly demonstrate the desirability, practicality and possibility of inter-church co-operation.

That their humiliation at the hands of their leaders was itself so public tells you all you need to know about the view of ecumenism amongst the leaders of the Catholic church. That the same leaders have been just as lukewarm in condemning the outrages outlined in the Ferns report tells you all you need to know about their view of child sexual abuse and about their part in it. Remember that the next time somebody writes a newspaper article telling you that Pope Benedict isn't as bad as predicted. On the evidence of the last six months, he's a whole lot worse.