DUBLIN — Shortly before he died in 1989, the novelist John Broderick was asked by an interviewer what it meant to be Roman Catholic and Irish. “Anyone who is reared in a Catholic atmosphere,” he replied, “takes in that Catholic atmosphere more or less through their pores.” That we are a few decades removed from 1989 is clear enough. It became more so on Friday, when Ireland voted resoundingly to overturn its 35-year-old constitutional ban on abortion. And yet it takes more than one vote, or even two or three, to reverse that kind of osmosis.

It has become common in recent years to declare the end of Catholic Ireland. By now, it’s a familiar story: the clerical abuse scandals which made headlines in the 1990s so undermined the institution that it has been on a slow slide into irrelevance since, with Friday’s vote to repeal the country’s ban on abortion the latest — and in some ways, most significant — in a string of losses that have included the decriminalization of homosexuality and divorce and the legalization of same-sex marriage.

The importance of Friday’s vote as a blow to the institutional Catholic Church should not be understated. At times, it seemed as much a referendum on the church’s historic treatment of women as it was about abortion itself. Stories dating back decades of women who had been at the receiving end of the church’s intolerance have not lost their power to rouse public anger.

But if it’s clear that the institution of the church no longer commands the moral authority or the loyalty in Ireland that it once did, the end of Catholic Ireland, too, is an overstatement. Ireland remains defined by its relationship with Catholicism, because it has yet to develop another way to be. What isn’t yet clear is what the social and political consequences of this new relationship with the church are.