A vocal minority will always win out over a silent majority, no matter how large the latter is. My question is: why has the Church become so silent?

Take the recent decision not to accept the resignations of Bishop Eamonn Walsh, and Bishop Ray Field. The media battle on that one was lost shortly after the publication of the Murphy Report. Very rapidly, the focus moved from 'criticised in the Murphy Report', to 'mentioned in the Murphy Report'. Just being mentioned merited resignation.

It was possible, just about, to pull that one out of the fire, by a sustained campaign pointing out the difference between 'criticised' and 'mentioned'. The Dublin archdiocese decided not to even try to fight that battle, a decision presumably based on a desire to show real repentance.

The only problem was that Bishop Walsh and Bishop Field were innocent of wrongdoing, according to the Murphy Report, other than being members of the hierarchy.

An individual may decide to martyr himself - and I am not using that term sarcastically, but in the original sense of making a sacrifice for the faith, but can a Church decide that people must be sacrificed for the greater good? ''It is expedient that one man die for the good of the people'' was Caiaphas's argument, not Christ's.

If we take the collective responsibility argument, and failing to 'challenge the culture', the only fair option would be for everyone who was a bishop pre-1996 to resign.

Forefront

Few men have done more to 'challenge the culture' of concealment than Bishop Eamonn Walsh. In 2002, he was at the forefront of a plan which would see Justice Gillian Hussey chair an independent commission of inquiry into how the Catholic Church had handled the issue of child abuse. That is not the action of a man with something to hide.

Bishop Ray Field became bishop after the culture had begun to change from within. According to the available evidence, he did nothing that would merit resignation.

The Nazis had a concept called Sippenhaft, or collective punishment. The relatives of someone deemed to have committed a crime would be all punished, or even a whole town where the person lived, despite bearing no individual guilt. It was used as a mechanism of terror to ensure compliance.

In modern times, the Israelis have used a form of Sippenhaft against Palestinians. When a Palestinian bombed Israel in a suicide attack, innocent relatives might have their homes bulldozed. Is this what we want? That anyone in episcopal leadership in the Dublin archdiocese is 'guilty as charged'?

But if the communication in the wake of the Murphy Report was extremely poor, the way the decision not to accept the resignations was communicated defies belief. It was buried at the end of an extensive letter to priests. Then, neither Archbishop Martin nor the two bishops made themselves available for interview or comment.

If they were politicians, we would decry the tactics. It does not quite rate with Jo Moore, a New Labour press officer who sent an email on September 11, 2001 after the attack, but before the Towers collapsed, suggesting that would be a good day to bring out bad news about councillors expenses, but it is not what you expect from a Church.

We belong to a Church charged with bringing the Good News, but seem to cower and hide from the media where people access news. In the absence of coherent communication, the gap is filled by the vocal minority, by commentators and agenda-setters who have little or no time for the Church.

Communicator

Archbishop Diarmuid Martin is an exceptionally gifted communicator. When it comes to clearly setting out an idea or concept, there are few to equal him in Irish society.

It makes it all the more ominous when he chooses not to communicate. People immediately begin to fill the gap with speculation. Do the yet-to-be-published remaining chapters of Murphy contain something damning? Is there something that he knows but is not saying?

And what are we to make of the Vatican, which politely tells us that it has a policy of never commenting when resignations are not accepted. But why? It's a policy that seems suspiciously convenient.

There are so many areas where the Church needs to repent, and sadly, while the most serious, child abuse is just one of them. It has also failed spectacularly to communicate on many levels, and not just in the media.

Someone once said to me that the Church operates on the mushroom principle - keep them in the dark and throw large amounts of manure over them.

A rather brutal contrast to one of the primary images for Christ, the Word, a symbol of God's loving communication. A Church that fails to communicate clearly and humbly is failing in its primary mission, to bring people to God.