THERE is quiet excitement among a dozen sisters of the Redemptorist order as they gather for evening mass, along with 30 or so other devout souls, in a plain, modern chapel with a practical, circular design. A discreet row of flags heralds Pope Francis, due on August 25th for what promises to be a tumultuous weekend.

In the surrounding smoky terraces of north Dublin, papal bunting is absent. Posters celebrate other Irish rituals, like the imminent Gaelic-football final. The zeal that John Paul II’s visit in 1979 generated is nowhere to be seen. Some 2.7m people, or 80% of the population, cheered him. These days, the nuns reflect a small and defensive subculture, almost as far from the mainstream as Dublin’s Sikh or Buddhist minorities. In tonier parts of the city, there is equally little interest in say, Catholic teaching on marriage, and much more chatter about the impending divorce between Britain and the European Union.

Like many a devout Hibernian over the centuries, the sisters cherish continental links: their order began near Naples in the 18th century. In earlier centuries, the very survival of Irish Catholicism owed much to the refuge offered in France and Belgium to Irish monastics. But today’s Irish-European axis is different. Only a generation ago, Spaniards came here to learn English in a Catholic ambience. Now it is Ireland’s secular hedonism that attracts young tourists.

As Dublin awaits an open-air papal mass, the biggest event in a packed programme, local reactions range from indifference to hostility to dismay over the fact that users of specially laid-on buses may still have to walk seven kilometres. The police tell people to wear stout shoes and consider whether they are well enough for the march. A temporary morgue awaits those who are not. It is true that 500,000 tickets were snapped up. But not all takers were pious. A group called “Say Nope to the Pope” urged people to get tickets and discard them.

The nay-sayers’ rage reflects a dark side of Ireland’s former theocracy whose horrors are still emerging. They include the back-breaking work imposed on “fallen” women and the neglect, sometimes fatal, of their offspring in church-run institutions; and the abuse and violence endured by boys in clerical schools. In Ireland as elsewhere, efforts by bishops to cover all this up provoke as much indignation as the actual misdeeds. For people who have been blighted, the World Meeting of Families, a triennial Catholic festival which brought Francis to Dublin, sounds like a joke, even though some participants are on the faith’s liberal edge. Nor will Irish sufferers be impressed by the pope’s belated vow to meet some of them, or by his 2,000-word reply to new revelations of crimes by clergy in Pennsylvania. They just want Ireland’s clerics brought to book and made to pay compensation. Given the vast transformation that has taken place in the politics of religion in Ireland, they feel history is on their side.

Aeons of difference

The island is still experiencing the dissolution of toxic bonds between church and state that were sealed in the 1930s. Catholic zeal had political traction for an emerging nation. Catholics resented a small Protestant minority that controlled more than its share of land, banks and firms. Catholicism was presented as an answer to every problem in a way that students of the Muslim Brotherhood would recognise. The priesthood was a path to personal advancement which attracted many dubious types.

Over the past few decades, anger over clerical abuse combined with social modernisation to create a cascade of change. When John Paul came, gay sex was illegal; in 2015, Ireland voted overwhelmingly for same-sex marriage. In 1983 a ban on abortion was entrenched in the constitution; last May 66% voted to strike out that article. Church-going is still high by Western standards: one in three attends Mass. But in 1990 four-fifths did.

With the old church-state cronyism a fading memory, the question is how far the pendulum will swing. Some expect more battles, especially over schools, which at primary level are still dominated by the church. A law passed this year bars over-subscribed schools from favouring baptised Catholics. (Schools run by minorities, like Anglicans and Muslims, can still discriminate.)

Modernisers are now focusing on the content of state education. To devout Catholics, it seems that the religious gruel served to today’s kids is thin. Powerful bodies like the Christian Brothers, at whose rough hands generations of Irish boys learned and suffered, have vanished. (Those Redemptorist nuns are an unusual case of a religious order which has downsized gracefully, by selling off land and handing an over-sized church to Egyptian Copts.)

But the tone of Irish primary education seems too Catholic for the liking of campaigners for religious neutrality. Preparing children for communion, a Catholic rite of passage, still features. Art and nature study have a devotional edge. Lobbying for reform is an odd coalition: a group called Atheist Ireland, plus the low-church Evangelical Alliance, and Ahmadi Muslims, who complain of bullying by Irish Sunnis.

In the long drive to modernise Ireland, the equality laws of the European Union, and the European Court on Human Rights (ECHR), have been vital. Reform of Ireland’s laws on homosexuality began in 1988 with a ruling from the ECHR that criminalisation violated a gay man’s privacy. And in 2014, a woman who was abused by a school principal won a 30-year fight when the ECHR upheld her claim that the state was responsible. This made it harder for church and state to pass the buck over horrors that occurred at institutions which they had co-managed.

All this helps explain why, caught between Brexit Britain and the EU, Irish people prefer the latter. Their forebears may have looked to the continent, and Rome, for spiritual succour. Today’s Irish see Europe as a bulwark against theocracy.