The American specialists who spoke about Irish Catholic Church matters at the Humbert school last week presumably knew a great deal about their respective subjects: but they showed little evidence of knowing much about Irish history and culture.

Patrick Wall, a former Benedictine monk and now a Californian lawyer, said that the Irish people should ''seek reparations'' from the Pope for clerical abuse. ''The Pope has to pay. He took your money through the past few centuries.''

Anyone with a feeling for Irish history would know that through those centuries, the Irish people looked on the Pope as a defender of their faith in times of persecution: there are poems written in 17th and 18th Century Irish which affirm this point most lyrically.

Far from the Pope ''taking'' the money of the Irish people, anything that was given throughout those centuries was freely given and with pride.

Mr Wall should read a detailed account of the Eucharistic Congress of 1932, just to grasp the sense of chest-bursting pride that the Irish people felt because the Pope's emissary was coming to Ireland, and Dublin awash with a sense of universality.

When an English king stepped on Irish soil, he was welcomed because he was ''A Friend of Our Pope''. Notice the ''Our''. The Irish people had a sense of possession and ownership over the Holy See.

If the present Holy Father has not acted correctly over charges of clerical abuse, certainly, that is a matter for investigation. But that is a different question from the ludicrously ignorant claim that the Popes, over the centuries, had coercively ''taken'' from the Irish people.

Similarly, Robert Blair Kaiser, another American, who has authored books on the Catholic Church and has been a correspondent for Time magazine - a publication with a long anti-Catholic pedigree - attacked Cardinal Cullen for establishing a clerical culture in Ireland in the Victorian period. He lamented that Ireland had not built a Celtic Church, rather than a Roman one.

This is a completely unbalanced view of Cardinal Cullen. Between the fall of Daniel O'Connell and the rise of Charles Stewart Parnell, Paul Cullen was effectively the only leader that the Irish nation had. He was an organising genius. If it hadn't been for Cullen, the people would have been leaderless - and would have felt wholly disempowered.

Moreover, there were still, at this time, many dangerous piseogs and superstitions which gripped Irish folk culture and which Cullen's Church, rightly, fought to eradicate. One of the most common of these piseogs concerned the belief in ''changelings''. Parents would be told - it was, in effect, a form of primitive witchcraft - that their babies were not their own, but ''changelings'' placed by evil spirits.

As late as 1905, Lady Bantry - in her diary of life in West Cork - had to appeal to the local parish priest to persuade a young mother that her baby was not a changeling sent by bad spirits, and that she must feed the child.

Cardinal Cullen's Church brought a sense of education and an awareness of a universal world to the Irish people. Perhaps it was clericalist, but it squeezed the absentee landlords and Unionist government officials who excluded Catholics. The clergy were sometimes all the people had to represent them.

Patrick Wall, incidentally, says that anyone seeking to investigate contemporary abuses should ''follow the money''. In exchanging a monk's cowl for the affluent practice of a Californian law firm, he certainly took his own advice.

Fashionable opinion is all

One of the wisest observations that the writer George Orwell ever made was on the tendency to conformity in prevailing values. ''At any given moment,'' he said, back in the 1940s, ''there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question.

''A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing, either in the popular press or in the highbrow periodicals.''

I thought of that recently when, at a Dublin dinner-party, all members around the table opined that Bishops Field and Walsh should have been dismissed from hierarchy, although it became clear that most of the individuals airing this view had no real knowledge of the detail of these cases. Just Orwell's theme: fashionable opinion is all.

Gay rights paradox

Those who think that life often works through paradox must have been bemused by the gay rights march through Dublin on Sunday in which participants were demanding the right to marry, proclaiming their entitlement to love and commitment (and religious union).

It just seems such a turnaround from the whole tendency of the liberal agenda in recent decades which has been to attack marriage, to claim that cohabitation is the same as wedlock, and that the marriage contract is only a ''meaningless piece of paper''.

Strange how things turn out, indeed.