Of all the images from Cardinal Secrets that refuse to go away, the one of the groin-thrusting, hip-swivelling Father Tony Walsh, performing his Elvis act for the All-Priests Show, is the most horribly persistent.
For anyone still baffled by the speed of this country's trajectory from island of saints and scholars to leaderless moral swamp, the eye-watering antics of Tony Walsh, caught on video, may hold some clues.
Nothing better illustrates the changed relationship between the clerical Catholic Church and the laity than the All-Priests Show. From this distance, the concept of such a show is barely credible. Vast numbers of Irish families hauled themselves out on winter nights to chilly parish halls to hand over scarce money to watch priests in cabaret. What in God's name was the attraction ?
The answer is that these performers had a unique selling point. They wore their full clerical garb. So even as they gyrated across creaky stages, they were able to hang on to their priestly mystique by virtue of the visual props. For all the ersatz smouldering, the audience was never allowed to lose sight of the fact that these men remained first and always, the virginal, celibate conduits for the church's uncompromising teachings on all matters sexual.
For the show's USP (Unique Selling Point) to work, the only requirement was that the audience be accepting of these verities. So when Tony Walsh donned the dog-collar to do his groin-thrusting worst to All Shook Up, the reaction of his indulgent audience was that of an adult to an amusingly precocious five-year-old.
The show's peculiar attraction lay in its incongruousness, in the notion of a virginal priest aping an act of which he could know nothing.
That was the foundation on which Walsh built his audience, made up of the most devout parishioners, the same people who were to be found thumbing the beads at daily Mass, sweeping the church and arranging the flowers, ensuring there were pristine, fine linen cloths for the altar and assorted fancy biscuits with the tea for when the priest came to call.
The image of Tony Walsh gyrating for the faithful therefore represents multiple betrayals. He betrayed his church, his decent fellow priests and the children whom he marked for life; now his final message is that the joke was on the audience all along.
"Thank God my mother is dead, I honestly believe this would have broken her heart," said a friend this week of a devout woman whose prayer book regularly fell apart from use, who in another, apparently more innocent time, laughingly described herself as an "All-Priests groupie".
For many from those generations, the idea that anyone, never mind a priest, could fixate on a child as a sexual object is almost beyond imagining. As a result, the glib assertion that "at least Eamon Casey did it with a consenting adult" has gained currency. But memories are short.
Annie Murphy came to Ireland, not as a brash temptress, but as a highly vulnerable young woman in desperate need of guidance. As offences go, it ranks well below child rape, but if it was not a grave betrayal of trust, then what is?
And what of all those other betrayed souls? Who now remembers that running in tandem with the stunning Casey revelations were the many stories of young Irish priests who had been summarily ejected from the priesthood for the crime of wanting to marry the women they loved?
The face of one of them has never left me; his anguish was that of someone who believed himself to have been banished from the light of God.
MEANWHILE, married Anglican priests unable to stomach the admission of women clerics to their own church were given a haven - complete with wife - in the Catholic Church that had caused such anguish.
In such an institution, riddled with hypocrisy, misogyny and contradictions, it can be difficult even for the well-disposed to discern the positive. But the positive is most certainly there, in unsung daily deeds of love and courage.
The nun who steps across pools of vomit every morning, to get to her life-changing project for neglected children; the priest who provides refuge for drug addicts and children deemed to be beyond redemption; the bishop who simply bypasses his superiors and quietly jettisons canon law in his handling of child abuse cases.
There are times when the bitterness of church people towards the media is understandable. Yet it was their leaders and advisers who handed the church's most powerful platform to the likes of Fathers Tony Walsh and Michael Cleary and Bishop Eamon Casey. It was their leaders and advisers who never bothered to mask their contempt for the media, or for the faithful compelled to use the chat shows and the letters pages as the only forum in which they could share their profound hurt and disillusionment.
The irony is that it may well be through those same grubby truth-seekers in the media that the church finally embarks on the long, painful journey to healing and reform. History may show that this was when the voyage finally began.