CATHOLICS will remember the refrain, O Mary conceived without sin, pray for us who have recourse to thee.

It is a touching prayer, but its tone and the general thrust of Mariology has perhaps done more to divide rather than unite Christianity.

Theologians, of course, disagree on this. Robert McAfee Brown once said Catholics had gone the first mile in trying to establish theological rapport on the issue of Mary's place in Christianity, although he did stress, as do many Protestants, that the dogma of the Assumption, for example, is a portion of Catholic theology that seems to be at the farthest remove from the New Testament.

Protestants have been worried that Mary's cult leads to a "flattening out of God", a neat description by Karl Barth. And reservations about Mary's status have also been raised by the Catholic theologian Mary Condren, who says "Her image emphasised the radical disjunction between the sacred and the sexual, between the religious hope women and the reality of their lives.

The official view, however, would be reflected in Pope John Paul's recent book, Crossing the Threshold of Hope, in which he says Marian devotion is not only a sentimental inclination but that it "also corresponds to the objective truth about the Mother of God". Much of the debate, indeed, has been about titles. When Catholics call Mary "Mediatrix" are they demoting the "Unique Mediator" Christ, eclipsing Christ, even displacing Him?

All of which is meat to theologians and begs the question is it not enough to aver that, in the words of Herbert McCabe, Mary is "radically holy" and to stress in the Catholic ethos the Karl Rahner expression that "there is One Mediator, and many mediators"?

Many Christians, however, while accepting the durability of the Virgin legend, are turning away from Mariology and its many tiered intricacies towards a simple practice, based on the Eucharist and Christ centred prayer.

Here would seem to be the future of European Christianity with distinction between sect and denomination becoming even more blurred as the laity, and hopefully more women, become immersed in promoting Christ's message.

DEBATES about Mary's intacta state and whether her Assumption was less than a "bodily passage" might continue to rattle the beads of Roman thinkers, but for the laity Christian practice will have to go beyond this to become liminal, and missionary in the sense of crossing boundaries. Such at least should be the intent in a broad Christian church with perhaps the Eucharist being stressed even more, as well as Table Fellowship in its widest sense.

Indeed, if ever there was an exciting Christian symbol, that of Table Fellowship stands out for its vision. It implies everyone is welcome at God's table, and while in early Christian times this was so, within a few hundred years, it seems, the number of invitees dropped, and Christ's table as promulgated by the Christian church became smaller. Any women were in the background preparing the meal!

Herein lies the Christian challenge. As Bonhoeffer expressed it, Jesus was "the man for others". He was the one who included, not excluded, who ensured all seats at the table were full.

Christianity, indeed, could be partly defined in terms of such inclusiveness. It should also ask relevant questions, not on the issue of Mary's sinlessness at birth but on whether a Briton can vote Tory and still be called a Christian. A more important question for Irish people might be whether a vote for Sinn Fein is a vote for the armed struggle and therefore outside Christ's non violent pale.

Or should Christian inclusiveness invite the believer to support Sinn Fein, thereby strengthening its doves and those intent on dialogue? The Christian might ask, too, whether there are circumstances in which a law on mandatory reporting in child abuse cases should be disobeyed.

Should, too, there be a Christian response to Ireland's pending immersion in European military arrangements?

Indeed, it would seem that, for the third millennium, the major Christian input should be in the educational, social and economic arena, far away from divisions of dogma. Irish Catholic Church leaders know the demoralised and the poor are leaving the church daily, if indeed many of them ever arrived. The task of the churches in such an environment, therefore, is to insist at least that they are heard. They could direct our politicians no farther than Sweden, where church going might be less than 5 or 6 per cent, but where there is huge emphasis on enhancing the individual.

It is not put quite like that. The phrase often used is "keeping human capital alive", and the intent in one sense is purely economic. Train people, reskill them, keep the unemployed active, and when there is an upswing in the economy such "latent" workers will be available to fill the resulting job places.

SUCH is the theory and it seems to work. It's all about social democracy and how a relatively poor country at the start of the century became one of the world's most prosperous. It is about co-operation between people and respect for human rights.

It's about the Protestant work ethic, a dogma perhaps, but one of more relevance than the fineries of Mariology and various religious mysteries which have deflected many Irish Christians from developing a theology of human worth. It is also about politics, which more than many other arena decides how we distribute the nation's goods.

And it is about being a good human, the foundation on which a true spirituality can be found.