No matter what gesture the Church or the Pope come to make in an attempt to address recent revelations about clerical abuse in the Irish Church, it is unlikely to satisfy a society in which many forces are at play which the Church does not appear to understand.

Often, these days, one is moved to think that the leaders of the Roman Catholic Church, in Ireland or the Vatican, have a minimal understanding of the culture into which they must speak. Last week, when the Irish bishops went to Rome to discuss with the Pope and his officials the continuing crisis in the Irish Church, it was as if nobody involved had been able to predict what was obvious and inevitable.

Beforehand, coverage of the visit was illustrated with photographs of the bishops smilingly lining up with the Pope before their encounter. The Irish Times last Monday was able to carry a front page photograph of Bishop Drennan of Galway bending down to kiss Pope Benedict's ring. Surely is was obvious that, regardless of the merits of Bishop Drennan's position in refusing to resign in the wake of the Murphy Report, that such an image would have resonated in the way it did?

Dismay

Why is it that the official Church, to the growing dismay of those who seek with faint heart to defend it, has not a clue how to present itself to media unprepared to give it as much as the occasional bounce of a ball? The bishops must be fully aware that every word they utter and every thing they do will be scrutinised by people who would much prefer if the Catholic Church were buried under its own rubble, and yet, time and again, they respond to events in ways that make the outcome only too predictable.

To say the least of it, last week's meeting appears to have been poorly planned and badly stage-managed. There seemed to be a failure on the part of participants to understand precisely what the tone of the encounter should be, or what was expected back in Ireland by media, public and/or victims of clerical abuse.

Within minutes of the release of the post-meeting press statement, the Irish media were announcing that it was inadequate. I was in Cork and received a couple of calls to go on radio shows and speak about what the statement said or failed to say. I declined both invitations on the basis that I did not have time to study the statement and, anyway, I did not want to become involved in the media game whereby, no matter what the Pope says about clerical abuse, it is always going to be ''too little too late''.

Interpretations

In both instances, the researchers were able deftly to outline for me the interpretations that would dominate the news for the next 48 hours. The statement contained no apology to the victims, no acknowledgement of the complicity of senior Church figures in cover-ups. The Pope, indeed, had ''washed his hands'' of the scandals. The statement's emphasis on rebuilding the Church showed a failure to grasp the more immediate necessity for reparation and atonement.

All the next day, representatives of victim advocacy groups lined up to declare that their members had been further hurt by the statement. They had been expecting the Pope to come to Ireland to apologise personally to victims, or at least to invite representatives of victims to meet him in Rome. They were dismayed that resignations were not on the agenda and because the Vatican had not accepted any culpability.

Process

Attempts by Church leaders and supporters to point out that this was just part of a process leading to the Pope's forthcoming pastoral letter were shouted down. Church spokesmen pointed to the language of the statement, which plainly states that the sexual abuse of children is ''not only a heinous crime but also a grave sin''. To no avail. Did the Pope think a pastoral letter was going to heal the damage to those who have been abused? One unfortunate Vatican correspondent who tried to outline things from the official Vatican perspective on The Pat Kenny Show was drowned out by a victim shouting, ''Stop saying that - you're hurting me!''

The prospect of the Pope's pastoral letter to the Irish Church had already been greeted somewhat unenthusiastically by victims, and of course the media's only interest in this document, when it comes, will be in finding things in it that are ''too little too late''.

Gesture

Although it has been noted that such a gesture has been made on only two previous occasions, in Germany 1937 and China a couple of years ago, the mechanism is not regarded as addressing the issue of the Church's accountability to the civic power, which is the question both victims and media are most interested in.

Crimes were committed and covered-up, the argument goes, and so the Church has to put this right before it begins to address any issues of an internal organisational or spiritual malaise. Whether this is true or not does not matter: it is what is being said, hour by hour, day after day, and so is the only ''truth'' the Church really has to deal with.

Support

Any objective observer would have to concede that it is probably impossible for the Pope to find words to meet both the ever heightening sense of hurt among victims and the public antagonism, sustained by media agitation. But it also has to be said that, in the context of the horrors outlined in the Ryan and Murphy Reports, there is little possibility of summoning up support for the Church's dilemma. In truth, almost nobody, regardless of beliefs, wants to defend this Church, or indeed any church except the Church Christ founded, and that is nowhere to be seen.

Perhaps, after all, it is not possible for the Church to recover from this. Perhaps, finally, the enemies of Irish Catholicism are about the get what they want. Among my reasons for being in Cork last week was to speak to a group of priests who were having their annual get-together. I found a bunch of good men bowed down by circumstancess which are not of their making. I tried to talk to them of fundamental things, but it was difficult to avoid the elephant in the room, and they, for their part, were anxious to express their horror and revulsion about what has emerged. In speaking about all this, we employed words which replied on the presumption that the Catholic Church in Ireland has a future, that things will get better. But perhaps there is no future. Perhaps things will only get worse.

Problem

Even if any hope is to be identified, it is difficult to say where a beginning might be made. First of all, though, there is a need to state the problem clearly. The problem is not a public relations inadequacy, or a managerial failure. Nor has it to do, in conventional terms, with a ''crisis of faith''. It is not, primarily, a question of ''renewing the Church''. What is offended in us by these horrors is not some sense of a breaching of legal principles or civil conventions.

The outrage generated by what has emerged comes out of the very core of human understanding. What has been offended is not our belief in bishops, but our instilled sense of the world revealed to us by Christ, which somehow managed to break through the corruption of the institutional Church. The outrage felt by the Irish public is the dissonence created by this trauma.

Wickedness

We were not born believing men wearing purple to be incapable of wickedness, but we were born holding within us the idea that we were loved beyond anything by something greater than anything in this world. Perhaps what most outrages us is that this convenant has been breached and nobody seems to be saying so.

Worse, of course, is that it has been breached at the hands of those who declare themselves the intermediaries of this source of all human hope, and now all they talk about is the need to rebuild the institution.

Unless the forthcoming pastoral letter addresses both this fundamental issue, and also the question of the criminality of what has occurred, it seems to me that it would be better if the Pope said nothing at all.