Pronouncements in recent days by Pope Francis and the Irish Catholic bishops touching on election campaigns both in the US and here reflect a humbler church, much more careful about demanding obedience from its flock on their electoral obligations.
Times have changed. In part, no doubt, it’s about acknowledging a newer reality of a more independent faith community whose widespread public defiance of teaching does little for the church’s public authority.
These days the church, not least the Irish bishops and particularly Archbishop Diarmuid Martin in their statement and commentaries on the election, emphasise the place of informed conscience, and, in the spirit of the papacy, are less demanding that abortion, although important, be seen as the one and only touchstone upon which a politician or party is to be judged.
Pope Francis, following his attack on Donald Trump's Christian credentials for suggesting a wall between Mexico and the US, also insisted quickly that he was not telling US Catholics how to vote: "I am not going to get involved in that. I say only that this man is not Christian if he has said things like that." And, accused by the latter of being "a very political person", Francis simply responded that he had no problem with such a description: "Aristotle defined the human person as 'animal politicus'. So at least I am a human person."
His Trump remarks are unlikely anyway to do the latter much harm in looming evangelical South Carolina, but might be more damaging in heavily Catholic states like New Jersey, New York and Pennsylvania – 21 per cent of the US population identifies as Catholic, but much of it is Hispanic and deeply hostile already to Trump.
The Pope’s lighter, less prescriptive touch is a far cry from the days when US bishops excommunicated Catholic politicians like Ted Kennedy for their willingness to defy diktats over abortion legislation.
Or indeed when Boston’s Cardinal Law in 1998 rounded on President Mary McAleese for her impertinence in supporting women priests, saying that he was “Sorry for Catholic Ireland to have you as President.”
The Irish church’s statement on Thursday is an important, and welcome critique of the state of the nation, economically and politically. Much of it will read uncomfortably for our mainstream, too complacent politicians. It is sharply critical of inequality, not least in education – “Social equity has a logic of its own which must be worked on to achieve its aim. Our comparatively wealthy Ireland has still a long path to travel in this task”.
And it rightly blames the crisis in the health service and homelessness on a “failure of politics”. Crime and the need to strengthen the Garda are touched on, and, yes, abortion, and the need for “another kind of austerity, that of simplicity in life-style in harmony with nature, through which all of us indicate where our real values lie, rather than in the empty values of consumerism and a rush for the superfluous.”
All of these issues the informed conscience must properly weigh.