The Legion of Mary called to see me the other night. It was Tuesday, about 7pm, not long after I'd got in from work. Two women were at the door, one armed with a notebook and some holy pictures. They looked like census enumerators obsessed with Jesus.

They introduced themselves and asked me my name. I told them. The woman with the notebook wrote it down, as though she was a garda and I had just been caught driving under the influence of Communion wine. I wondered why she needed to do this and she said it was to help her identify which houses she'd called to. It didn't seem like she'd spent much time contemplating the Data Protection Act.

She began putting together a gift of some Legion Of Mary material – prayers, pictures of famous Legionnaires, that sort of thing. Then she asked me if I ever went to mass.

This clearly was none of her business, although she asked with an obvious sense of entitlement to an answer. In the circumstances, the correct response would have been: "Actually, outside of weddings and funerals, I haven't been to mass since Garret FitzGerald was Taoiseach, not that it's any concern of yours."

But I felt I should be polite, so I gave some wimpy answer about working on Saturdays and being too tired on Sundays. Upon which my Legionnaire friend proceeded to give me a lecture, about how that wasn't an excuse, and wasn't there a church right across the road, and wouldn't there be masses every night? Slightly less politely I said goodbye, went back into the kitchen and threw her reading material in the bin.

I know I should let this go, but the encounter has rankled with me all week. Where does this woman's sense of entitlement come from, so strong that she feels confident enough to arrive at somebody's door, lecture them and condescend to them about something as private as religion?

And what kind of organisation is the Legion of Mary, that so casually dispatches its stormtroopers to challenge complete strangers on their failure to show up in church on Sundays?

I think I'm more angry with myself, for not closing the door as soon as I realised who was there. By my silence I encouraged her. If my visitor had been a canvasser from Fianna Fáil (which, for all its faults, has done far less damage to Ireland than the organisation so beloved of the diminutive fundamentalist who gave out to me), I would have had her off the premises before she could say Nama. But out of some atavistic attachment to the church, some deferred respect for the nonsense that was bashed into me decades ago by nuns, Christian Brothers and priests, I felt I should listen, engage her in conversation, not challenge her the way she felt comfortable challenging me.

In my mind all week too was the report from the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse in the Dublin Diocese, publication of which was delayed for a few weeks by legal concerns. We don't know what's in it precisely, but it's clear that it will be yet another heartbreaking tale of lives ruined, power abused and innocence destroyed.

More than that, it will be an account of how that abuse and destruction was repeatedly brought to the attention of people at the very top of the Dublin diocese, who then did all they could to hide it, protect the abusers from the authorities and move them to new locations where they could abuse again.

There are some people at the top of the church these days who are genuinely shocked by all of this, who want all the information out there so that there can be a proper reckoning of the damage done by bishops and priests to so many people. But it seems equally clear that there are many who still don't get the scale of the human tragedy involved.

The woman who called to my door seems like one of those. I don't mean that she knew of abuse or approved of abuse – that would be a wrong thing to suggest. But her manner of expressing herself, the hectoring certainty in her voice, suggests that the scandals of the last 20 years have had no effect on her belief in the Catholic church, in priests and in the importance of mass. She blithely goes about her smug business without even a smidgin of humility or self awareness, a true champion of the Catholic church in all its tainted glory. I hope not to see her again.

Read all about it: the mail's homophobia

One might have more respect for Donal Óg Cusack's decision to confirm what the dogs in the GAA street already knew had he not sold his story to the Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday, probably the most homophobic, misogynistic newspapers on these islands.

While Cusack's tale of being gay in the GAA was being digested around the country last weekend, the Mail was being widely chastised for printing a column on Stephen Gately's death by Jan Moir, which reeked with contempt and hatred for homosexuality. It was the latest in a long list of homophobic interventions by Mail journalists; Cusack's decision to allow the newspapers to profit from his homosexuality seems counter-intuitive.

ddoyle@tribune.ie