It has been a good year for Ireland but not for the churches in Ireland. We've had the Belfast Agreement and, where the economy is concerned, truly the great majority of us have never had it so good.
Peace and prosperity, as with hope and history, have begun to rhyme in our once "most distressful country", and it is a rhythm to which we intend to become accustomed. It remains our tragedy, however, that those from whom we are entitled to expect most in moral leadership continue in the main to abjure that responsibility.
With some fine exceptions, many of our senior churchmen seem content merely to minister to their respective tribes, leaving all else to the realm of the pious, the platitudinous, the utterly useless. Indeed, there is a sense after this year that people on this island no longer look to the churches for moral guidance. It seems increasingly that many of our politicians are being placed in that role.
Where, for instance, among our church leaders are there those of the stature of John Hume, David Trimble, Seamus Mallon or Mo Mowlam? Or even leaders of the stature of Gerry Adams, Billy Hutchinson, David Ervine, Gary McMichael?
Not that the politicians have sought this new role. There is a need, and it is being filled. "The hungry sheep look up and are not fed," John Milton said in criticism of clergy in his day. It could be said that this is now also the case in Ireland. It was probably inevitable that the moral authority which church leaders had could not be sustained against the continuing and simple contradiction of churchmen talking reconciliation while practising division.
Their authority began to evaporate because of the difficulty ordinary people (for whom Christianity is as simple as loving God and one's neighbour) have in understanding why they cannot receive Communion in each other's churches or marry across denominational divides without precipitating a crisis at clerical level.
Even the peculiar genius of creative theology has not helped them understand why loving one's (Christian) neighbour must be a reason for rancour rather than celebration. It has not helped either that this year, too, we learned of the extraordinary swathe of corruption which seemingly co-existed with what was the highest attendance at church services in the world.
This divergence between religious observance and ethical practice suggests a cynicism of wondrous audacity. The adherence to form while ignoring the substance, and on such a scale, suggests a profound contempt for society in general and the churches in particular.
Ireland may have a population of Catholics and Protestants in the main, but this year's exposures indicate that this has been a post-Christian society for a long, long time. Responsibility for the existence of the institutionalised hypocrisy which masked and sustained this must also rest with our church leaders.
It has not helped either to hear the authoritative in various denominations describe division between the churches as "a scandal" while seemingly content to leave it at that. So often this has inspired a similar anger and revulsion as followed the exposures of widespread corruption.
There is so often about such "scandalous" utterance the same palpable stench of careless hypocrisy. The word "scandal" in the context is rarely said with the outrage it demands and deserves. It is frequently used as mere tokenism to deflect criticism, so allowing the status quo continue.
In his address at the Mater Dei Institute in Dublin last month, the Archbishop of Dublin, Dr Desmond Connell, spoke of his concern that the current climate of criticism "and even hostility" towards the [Catholic] church was making many young people ashamed of their history and, in particular, of their Catholic past.
It may be so, but would it not be more accurate to say that many young Irish Catholics, and Protestants, are not so much ashamed of their churches' past as of their churches' present? And who could blame them after this past 12 months?
It began with the row last December about the President, Mrs McAleese, taking Communion at Christ Church Cathedral in Dublin. Catholics were told this was wrong, that it was "a sham" for a Catholic to take Communion at another denomination's Eucharist services, and that Mrs McAleese should not do it again.
In May the Moderator of the Presbyterian Church, Dr John Dixon, explained why he could not in conscience attend a Catholic Mass. The same month at its general synod in Dublin, the Church of Ireland produced an anodyne interim report on sectarianism within the church, which was strong on wordage but soft on the issue. The final report is due next May.
Last July we had the shameful spectacle of Drumcree, for the fourth time, and in those first days there was the stunning silence of Protestant church leaders as a wave of sectarian attacks against Catholic homes and churches was unleashed across the North, culminating in the deaths of the three Quinn children at Ballymoney.
In September the Catholic bishops of these islands produced their One Bread One Body document explaining "in all humility" why Catholics can never receive Communion in Protestant churches, while Protestants may do so in Catholic churches rarely and then usually in extremis.
Earlier this month, we had an editorial in the Church of Ireland Gazette concerning the private life of the Taoiseach, Mr Ahern, with its sectarian undertones and gratuitous "dig" at the Catholic Church, suggesting it was handicapped in commenting on matters of sexual morality because of the cases of clerical child sex abuse, as though this phenomenon were peculiar to the Catholic Church.
Also in recent weeks we had the beginnings of moves by the Orange Order to discipline the First Minister, Mr David Trimble, and the Ulster Unionist Party chairman, Mr Denis Rogan, for attending the funeral Mass in Buncrana, Co Donegal, last August of young boys killed in the Omagh bomb.
Elements in the Orange Order need no encouragement when it comes to such sectarianism, but they have it. Members are forbidden by the order's rules from attending Catholic services. When the leader of the Presbyterian Church holds the same view, that is an incentive to such disciplining of Orangemen, not least as Mr Trimble is himself Presbyterian.
It also makes it difficult for other church leaders to criticise such prohibition, for diplomatic reasons. What church leaders do instead is talk of "respecting difference". This, for instance, is what Cardinal Basil Hume asked the British Prime Minister, Mr Tony Blair (a member of the Church of England), to do in a successful attempt to dissuade him from taking Communion at Mass with his Catholic wife.
It was the response here of senior Catholic churchmen to Dr Dixon's candid comments on his conscience and Catholicism, but what these churchmen of all denominations really mean is that we must respect their divisions.
That is the daily, lived consequence of what they dilute into "difference". Such a diminution of experience through language allows them to foment their divisions under the guise of promo ting "Catholic identity" or "Protestant culture". It enables, particularly in the North, the continuation of that cultural apartheid for which we have all paid a hefty price this past 30 years, this past 300 years.
The Catholic Church does it by insisting on educating Catholic children apart from their Protestant peers. Protestants do it by allowing the Orange Order to persist in promoting what is, or soon becomes, naked hatred of Catholics. Neither is an example of loving one's neighbour, neither could be described as Christian.
In this context, the most ecumenical of our major churches, the Church of Ireland, has to explain how it is consistent with its ethos that 20,000 of its members belong to the Orange Order. It may be argued that its anti-Catholic rules are honoured more in the breach than the observance, but there are those in the order who view them literally and use them to foment that evil which continues to lead to murder.
"All that's necessary for evil to succeed is that good men stay silent," Edmund Burke said. Mr Trimble, who we now know to be familiar with Burke, and other such honourable Orangemen might ask themselves whether it is not time for their silence to end on the sectarian elements in their order's constitution.
As a people who have been crucified for centuries by the divisions in our churches, we are entitled to demand that these divisions be addressed seriously by all the denominations and that real, visible, concrete changes are made to allow all our people to live at peace with one another.
In his Mater Dei address, Dr Connell also said: "A people ashamed of its history is a people deprived of identity and roots . . . It leaves them without a tradition to provide an identity."
Whether that of which people are ashamed is in the past or the present, it has to be asked whether promoting a tradition or identity which contains at its core a denigration of the beliefs and traditions of others is not in itself a matter of great shame. When that tradition/identity is predicated on hatred, it cannot be respected. It must change or be rooted out.
The history of this island is, to adapt James Joyce, a nightmare from which we are beginning to awake. Anything in our past or present which inhibits current moves towards a healthy society must be by-passed and ignored. And if that includes recalcitrant institutions and/or churchmen and churchwomen, so be it.