It is 9.20 a.m. at a rural primary school. "What the hell does an archbishop know about my life?" snapped a mother, snatching her six-year old from the path of a truck while manhandling the toddler back into the car and jamming a soother in the colicky baby's jaws. Another - a church stalwart and mother of four - nodded wanly. "I just can't see who he's talking about. Is it us? Does he think of us as people at all?"

Hard to tell, really. Moira, a mother of six (some planned, some not) who phoned Marian Finucane with the notion that her views might be relevant, was swiftly disabused by the priest who chaired the Maynooth meeting for the archbishop.

"With respect," interrupted Father Vincent Twomey, in a tone implying everything but respect, "the archbishop was talking to a group of student, eh, theologians. The issues are extremely profound and extremely difficult . . ."

So butt out, mammy, what would you know?

But Moira hung in there, defying the archbishop or anyone to tell her that any of her children were more or less loved because they were a "gift" or merely planned. "The archbishop was talking generalities, not individuals," responded Father Twomey.

So what did the archbishop actually say? Here's the man himself on Morning Ireland: "Unless a child is received as a gift rather than produced to plan, the child unconsciously picks up that - that his origin is based upon power, rather than upon love. He doesn't really belong to the family as a person but much more as a product . . ."

Now let Father Twomey expand: "Basically the modern attitude is that all of reality, including our bodies, is raw material which we can tamper with at will and the result of that technological mentality is to turn bringing a child into the world from something which is pure gift, from something that happens as it were . . ." "By accident?" interjected Finucane. "Well, if you wish to say, by accident, but we would say, over and above the actual union by husband and wife, that therefore it has this quality of something given, something that the parents don't produce, as it were, themselves . . ."

An accident, then.

Anyway, as Father Twomey was saying . . . "The wanted child, the archbishop was saying, is a far more difficult concept and a perhaps far more subtly dangerous concept than the idea of the wanted child."

Eh? Go read that again, sure, but it won't do you any good.

But let Father Twomey continue: "The notion of a wanted child today, he [the archbishop] was arguing, actually has produced an attitude whereby we invest so much, unconsciously, expectations in that child that in actual fact the child probably can't actually live up to it . . ."

All of which leads to children who become unhappy and resentful against "a parentage based on power and may produce the kind of teenage revolt we know so well".

And you thought you were just being responsible in producing only as many children as you could nurture and support?

So what studies do Father Twomey or the archbishop have to back up these grave contentions?

Dr Connell: "It's just, if you like, a feeling I have . . . a feeling of a certain attitude towards children."

And the source of that "feeling"? Anecdote, basically. Or what Father Twomey prefers to call "philosophical analysis, if you will". By priests. Totally unbiased by ex cathedra pronouncements of course.

No mention from the philosophical analysts, however, of that awkward hybrid, the child produced by natural family planning methods who is surely less than a "pure gift" in the Catholic Church's eyes and more of a product. Yet the archbishop has "no quarrel" with family planning once it is practised by natural methods.

No mention either of the fact that by the archbishop's logic, after 30 years of the Pill, a youth-dominated State that should be teeming with unhappy, resentful teens and 20-somethings is in fact one of the most vibrant young countries in the world, teeming with an energetic, creative and productive youth.

The fact that they're not racing each other to Mass on Sundays is interesting, though. Might they be ingesting the disillusion of their elders? Indeed they might. The suggestion that good, decent people are "rejecting God" by disagreeing with elderly celibates on the subject of our own fertility control is offensive in the extreme.

We are an educated, well-read people now. We know about the informed conscience.

The Irish Catholic Church, by contrast, is in serious trouble. Ordinations last year were down to 63, fewer than a fifth of the number 30 years ago. The phenomenon of an Irish Mass without a priest is already upon us. Good priests find themselves tainted by the criminal and morally bereft behaviour of some of their comrades. (By way of a sideshow, within 36 hours of the archbishop's pronouncements, a Scottish bishop was promoting his book by reminding us that he had already fathered a child by one woman before running off with another.)

So, faced with total debacle in his church, who does the archbishop turn his guns on? - Why, none other than that long-suffering carrier of the flame, the one traditionally charged with the duty of passing on the faith. The Irish mammy.

THAT'S US. Crucially, our mothers were Irish mammies too and some have long memories, revived in response to another of Dr Connell's contentions this week: that contraception "dishonours" women.

One, who broached the subject of the Pill with her male gynaecologist after being told that another baby could kill her, was shown the door with the words: "Go home and live as brother and sister with your husband". So she went home to her six children and her authoritarian husband and gave birth to three more children - the last when she was 48 - with agonising physical, emotional and financial consequences. She was no rarity.

This was the culture that rejected the Mother and Child Scheme while keeping married women as economically-dependent, baby-making machines; one in which young girls were entirely to blame if a bit of snogging got out of hand because boys, once aroused, couldn't be expected to control themselves; one that fostered the ostracisation of unmarried mothers (never acknowledging that a boyo had to be involved); the Magdalen laundries; the forcible removal of "illegitimate" babies to become commodities in the export market or units of labour in brutal orphanage regimes. Not the marks of a State that held its mothers or children in enormous respect.

And yet, to listen to the archbishop, this was any Irishwoman's heyday: "A man normally respected a woman then, if only because of the danger into which intercourse could lead her."

Respect based on fear is no respect at all. And surely, your Grace, you mean "the danger into which intercourse could lead them."

Anyway, it's all of a piece with what comes next. By buying into the "contraceptive culture" and "its resentment towards motherhood", he argues, women (no mention of men, mark you) not only lose this "respect" but they "willingly surrender their proper claim to respect and equality of persons".

In other words, they will get no respect - however feeble the brand - and have no right to it either. Dangerous words for anyone to utter in these violent times, especially a powerful male.

Oddly, he fails to note that reliable contraception has also been the single most important factor in giving real choice to women. It enabled them to go out to work and freed them from the old economic dependency - often the only reason for staying in a marriage - all of which has pitched society into a transition with which some men are struggling.

There are a lot of angry men out there, your Grace, some of whom can't even spell contraception.

A powerful nostalgia for the halcyon days when one's flock (or woman, or child) behaved like proper sheep is only human. What is much more saddening about the archbishop's speech is not just the absence of Christian charity and empathy but the missed opportunities.

Lost in the strident language of certainty and accusation are valid points which are already the subject of lively debate among the laity. His concern that because of contraception, women "are expected to be readily available" for sex, for example, is shared by the most notorious feminist of the age, Germaine Greer. She has reiterated that view - amid a great deal of comment, none of it from men unfortunately - along with many others close to the archbishop's heart, in her just-published book.

The truth is that far from shying away from these discussions, women - long accustomed to the Medical Council and the church secretly debating and then pronouncing on their most intimate decisions - yearn for unbiased information and honest, open debate. Just as they agonise - increasingly with the support of their male partners - every hour of every day, on how to rear their children to be moral, valuable citizens in this era of explosive transition and exposure of corruption at every level.

As for his concern about parental "anxiety to win and retain the child's affection", which stems, he argues, from the contraception mentality and a new "parentage based on power" trip . . . Well, any 30-something can tell him he's landed the wrong culprit. In the old days, children were their parents' property. It was pure luck if they were accorded any rights or respect and the consequences of it are plain to see.

So it's obvious that "the anxiety to win and retain the child's affection" is based on nothing more sinister than parents trying to make up for what they didn't have themselves. And we know - because we talk about it all the time - that in many cases, this has gone too far. So another just-published book hurtling up the best-seller lists, by Asha Phillips, is called Saying No.

Transition is never easy, your Grace. No one knows that better than your average Irishwoman. But with practical support and empathy, as opposed to the language of medieval damnation, we can make it together.