When Cardinal Connell spoke recently about "religio-cultural amnesia", he meant, I understand, society's forgetfulness of positive elements of Catholicism.
But there is another aspect to which he did not allude: the meanings now attributed to what is regarded as the negative side of the church's historical role and activities, distorted by the imposition of present-day understandings.
Between the ages of eight and 13, in the middle years of the 1960s, I attended a school run by the Marist Brothers, an order which, as the joke had it, offered places to those rejected by the Christian Brothers on the grounds of being insufficiently well-adjusted.
I have no whitewash to offer. The brothers were tough bastards and the regime involved routine corporal punishment. It was an exceptional day if you reached lunchtime without receiving 20 or 30 strokes of the cane. In five years I had three different brothers, and remember each clearly.
I could plausibly depict them as psychotic sadists, who abused their power and inflicted endless torture on helpless children, but that would be a distortion. We can no more have a complete understanding of that time and its events than you could, on a Spanish beach in July, comprehend the experience of standing in the snow in a Kinnegad December, with a drip from your nose.
Brothers Kevin, Vincent, and Fintan (not their real names) were all either young or middle-aged. There was an older brother, the longtime school principal - Brother, say, Dick - regarded by generations of boys as the most fearsome of them all. I elided him except for choir practice, and in that context encountered an exceptionally warm man, who took great pride in developing what little musical talent he could detect.
I remember with the utmost clarity the cane each brother used. Kevin had a thick, stiff, slightly curly one, about three foot long, which he generally employed with moderate force. Vincent favoured a much thinner model, darker and more flexible, of similar length. Brother Fintan had two canes: one, a short, stumpy model, bound with insulating tape; the other a long, lethal rattan, which he left hanging in the cupboard, for special occasions.
We used to wonder: did the brothers have chats about the difficulty of getting a good cane these days, as they sat around the fire, lovingly binding their implements with black tape?
I haven't seen Aisling Walsh's film, Song For a Raggy Boy, about life in a Christian Brothers' institution in the 1930s.
But something that strikes me from the pre-publicity is that the Aidan Quinn character, who acts as a buffer between the inmates and the institution, befriending the boys and protecting them from the Brothers, had an odd resonance in our school, in a more complex context.
The odd thing was that you could have your hands beaten into hamburgers at 10 a.m., and an hour later be sitting exulting in the approval of the same brother as he praised your handballing or accordion skills.
There was no sense, in the main, that punishment was administered by a brother on his own behalf, out of anger or spite. The brothers were, of course, subject to human imperfection, and could be petty and vindictive. Brother Fintan in particular, would make occasional charges for the long cane in the cupboard, and slaughter all round him to let off steam.
But mainly they were doing a job, more or less as society expected them to do it. I have a similar sense of it all as from the story of the hangman Albert Pierrepoint whispering "you'll be alright now" as he slipped the noose over a client's head.
There was a scandal about one brother who sexually abused boys, but that happened much more recently.
Back in the 1960s, corporal punishment was officially sanctioned and culturally approved, because it was believed that to spare the rod was to spoil the child. It should be possible to reject that philosophy today without deciding that individuals who implemented it were tyrants or sadists.
Brother Fintan had a league table at the top of the blackboard, awarding marks for good performance and penalty points for failures and misdemeanours.
The winners got off homework for the weekend; but, if your team ended up below 100, you got six slaps per minus point, and this account had to be cleared in the week following. He offered an amnesty to boys who brought in notes from their parents saying they didn't want to get slapped, and then he would neither beat you nor teach you, but leave you to pick up what you could.
The only ones to bring in notes were boys from the lowest socio-economic quarters of the town, who did so without exception. Make what you will of it, but nobody else even dreamed of requesting that note.