Pope Francis has been and gone. In a thousand different ways, his trip to Ireland was a most peculiar event, which inspired a range of conflicting emotions. The vast majority of Irish students probably didn’t care either way. That is a statement in itself.

One thing did become crystal clear, however: in 2018, to a large extent, religion is just another form of showbiz. The Pope is a celebrity. And many of the people who made the effort to see him did so in much the same spirit as others had in the relatively recent past, when they turned out to ogle Queen Elizabeth and Meghan Markle and would tomorrow for Kim Kardashian. There was, it seemed, far less real engagement on the ground in Dublin city, than at the annual Pride march.

On Saturday, the Gardaí put a huge effort into keeping the streets free of traffic, so that the anticipated crowds could line the pavements, on the route along which Pope Francis would travel, without cars impinging on the spectacle. There was only one problem. The crowds didn’t turn up. Dublin has seldom felt so like a ghost town.

One Garda joked that there were more helicopters in the skies than people on the streets. Brand new security barriers running all the way up to and beyond Christ Church had the pristine look of a ridiculously unnecessary luxury.

Merch sales were disappointing. Commercially, it was a damp squib. While he was here, the Pope tried to play the part as best he could, smiling and kissing the heads of children. But there were moments too when his body language reflected a deep sense of unease, bordering possibly on incipient despair. He looked lost and lonely. It was impossible not to feel for him as a fellow human being.

Perhaps he knew he was coming to a different kind of Ireland. Perhaps he had been told that hard questions would be asked. That there would be protests. That some kind of initiative might be needed to quell the mounting anger towards the Church that so many Irish people feel. But what might that initiative be?

You have to ask: in an organisation as utterly corrupt and self-serving as the Roman Catholic Church has shown itself to be all over the world – including in Ireland – why this apparently nice man was chosen to be Pope? There is an obvious answer.

The Church is in damage limitation mode. The curia, who are the real power-brokers in the Vatican, realised some years ago, that it was becoming impossible to stem the growing tsunami of revelations concerning the utterly grotesque, and to be clear about it, irredeemably criminal abuse of minors by members of the clergy, including high ranking bishops. They also recognised that the outrageous cover-ups, which were sanctioned and encouraged by the Vatican, and put into effect by the hierarchy in every single country in the world where Roman Catholicism is practised, could no longer credibly be hidden or denied.

And so they decided that they needed someone out front who may smile and smile – and, to paraphrase Hamlet, not actually be a villain. Pope Francis was that man. He was chosen precisely for his PR value. He could become the pleasant face of a still deeply sinister and extraordinarily twisted organisation.

You could see from his Dublin itinerary that this was damage limitation time. The visit to the Capuchin centre. The trip to Sean McDermott Street. Meeting the survivors. The choreography was obvious. This is a Pope who cares about ordinary people. It might even be true of him personally.

But he is the head of a phenomenally wealthy organisation which always has the begging bowl out, and which has never paid a penny in tax in this country. If he is genuinely concerned about poverty on the streets of Dublin, or about homelessness, why not instruct the religious orders to unconditionally hand over land to the State, for use in the building of social housing?

But for all its pious work on behalf of the ‘poor’, in which good and kind individuals are indisputably involved, the Roman Catholic Church doesn’t do philanthropic stuff like that. What they have they hold. To a very large extent, it is about power. And they leverage it at every opportunity.

In the end, if the Pope wants his appeals for forgiveness to be taken seriously, he must insist on the Church and the religious orders here making proper restitution to the victims, and to the State.

When he had the opportunity to address the Pope in Dublin Castle, early on Saturday evening, the Taoiseach Leo Varadkar did not let Irish people or the survivors of abuse down.

He named the Church-run institutions where Irish people were abused and mistreated: the Magdalene Laundries, the Mother and Baby Homes and the industrial schools among them. He referred specifically to illegal adoptions and clerical child abuse. He acknowledged that the State had played a part in all of this. But he also referred to it as a stain on the Catholic Church.

“Wounds are still open,” the Taoiseach said, addressing the Pope directly, “and there is much to be done to bring about justice and truth and healing for victims and survivors. Holy Father, I ask that you use your office and influence to ensure this is done here in Ireland and also around the world.”

The most important word here is justice. And that means full financial restitution.

The Taoiseach went on to describe the abuse as “unspeakable crimes, perpetrated by people within the Catholic Church, and then obscured to protect the institution. It is a story that was all too tragically familiar to people in Ireland.”

By any standards, this was strong stuff at what was an official ‘welcome to Ireland’.

“There can only be zero tolerance,” he insisted, “for those who abuse innocent children or who facilitate the abuse.”

And he insisted that from words must follow actions. It is not enough for the Church and the Pope to apologise. What he stopped short of saying is that the State must have complete access to documents which are currently in the hands of religious orders, and of the hierarchy. But the message was clear.

Had she still been alive, my mother, Peggy, would have been thrilled that Pope Francis visited the Capuchins on Church Street during his visit to Ireland.

Peggy’s brother, Tommy, was a Capuchin and a poet, who went by the name Fr. Damascene. He died, a relatively young man, on the missions in Africa. He sacrificed his life in service to the Catholic Church. His vocation had taken him far away from Ireland and so I didn’t know him very well. But I remember, from when he made a return visit to Dublin and travelled out to our house in Rathfarnham, that he had an air of quiet dignity. He seemed like a good man, kind and likeable, and with a sense of humour. He believed that a way of life that emphasised the virtues of solitude, simplicity, self-denial and penance, would enable him to do good things. I am sure that he succeeded admirably in that calling. Thinking of him, and of my mother’s family, I do understand that their faith means a lot to committed Catholics. They are as entitled to their beliefs as anyone else. That this right – including their freedom of thought, of speech, and of conscience – must be protected is one of the fundamental tenets of a democratic Republic. But every other citizen is entitled to precisely that same protection. No religion should be given preference by the State. In Ireland, the Catholic Church is insisting that it must still have primacy in education. That is the next big battleground.

They cannot justifiably be allowed to exert that pernicious control any longer.

The advance hype had said that 500,000 people would attend the Papal Mass in the Phoenix Park. But the ease with which traffic zoomed around Dublin on Sunday morning told a different story. As the crowd gathered in the Park, it became obvious either that the numbers had been greatly exaggerated or that there was a huge platoon of no shows. It became a bit of a Donald Trump moment, as different interests tried to spin the result to suit their agenda.

In The Irish Times, Dr. Patrick Plunkett, who was in charge of the field hospital on the site, said that he believed that 130,000 people had attended. He had no reason to underestimate. The Vatican claimed, Sean Spicer-like, that it was 300,000. One of the organisers, Fr. Damian McNiece, offered a more conservative 200,000 but admitted that he hadn’t got a clue.

What we do know is that there were 1,000 doctors and nurses there, along with 900 private security, 500 gardaí and 500 members of the defence forces. During the week, it had occurred to me that the Gardai were acting like PR people for the Church, including Assistant Garda Commissioner Pat Leahy’s prediction that 100,000 people would line the streets of the capital. To say that someone got the numbers wrong is self-evident. Bizarrely, a Garda spokesman refused to give any estimate as to how many did show up, and accused the media of over-focusing on the low turn-out for Papal events over the weekend, and of obsessing over numbers.

You’d have to think: who do the Garda Siochána think they’re working for? Is there any evidence that the majority of the 130,000 who did turn out have any real idea what the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church are? Have they given any thought at all to what they are supposed to believe in? I suspect not.

For example, how many people who profess to be Catholic really believe that the bread and wine which is fed to people during Mass, at what is called ‘holy communion’, is the actual body and blood of the founder of the Christian religion, the man who is thought of as Jesus Christ? The doctrine of transubstantiation holds that, while the appearance of bread and wine remains, the wine turns into actual blood and the ‘host’ into flesh, as a result of being consecrated by the celebrant priest. This is not a mere trivial detail. It the key difference between the Roman Catholic Mass and Protestant services. But the vast majority of Catholics don’t seem to have any idea what it all means. And if they did, how many would take it seriously? No more than a tiny proportion. This is a house of cards, a structure built on sand.

So what is the extent of genuine, engaged religious belief in Ireland? To explore this, Hot Press has asked questions of numerous politicians and public figures in relation to their, mainly Catholic, religious identification. Very few can explain even the basics of the religion with any clarity or confidence.

We recently interviewed the former Minister for Education, Mary Hanafin. A teacher by training, she comes from a heavily religious background – and yet even she wasn’t able to answer the simplest questions about her faith. She laughed and pleaded that she isn’t a theologian.

In the context of this Special Student Issue of Hot Press, all of this really is worth thinking about. Whether you grew up in a family that declared as Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Atheist, Jehovas Witness, Rastafarian, Scientologist or Moonie, there is a responsibility on every individual to interrogate whatever beliefs that are passed on to them.

This is what being sentient human beings, capable of thinking independently, involves. The question is a relatively simple, straightforward one. What do I believe in. And why? What evidence is there to support that version of recent human history? How well – or otherwise – does it stand up to close scrutiny?

For example, how much sense does the doctrine of the ‘virgin birth’ make: that the man they call Jesus of Nazareth was the result of the impregnation of his mother, Mary, by God himself in the form of a ‘spirit’ they call the Holy Ghost? And that Mary remained a virgin even after delivering the child? Nowadays, DNA tests would likely enable us to come to a conclusion pretty quickly. Back then, it was a story that Joseph chose to believe because he was “visited by an angel.”

In various Hot Press interviews people have made disparaging remarks about ‘cults’ as if they are somehow different from older religions. But that is precisely what Christianity was when it began. And when you look at the story at the heart of it, can we really say that the new myths being sold by more recent religions are any harder to believe in?

While he was here, the Pope did his best to make a positive impression. Most striking was the apparently unguarded moment when – using the Spanish word ‘caca’ – he called those within the Church who had committed sex abuse, and those who covered it up, as shits, or as the RTÉ religious correspondent Joe Little (who did an excellent job throughout) euphemistically put it, “human excrement.”

He met a group of survivors of abuse. There, a statement was passed to him by Clodagh Malone. She asked him to read it out at the Mass in the Phoenix Park. It mattered a lot to people like her and Paul Redmond, who also attended the meeting, that he did. It was hopelessly poignant to hear what that note had to say: the Pope reassured all of those women and the children who were taken from them and given up for adoption or sold to Roman Catholic couples in America that “it was not a mortal sin” to have searched for one another. To which one could only add: we thought we had heard everything, but they used people’s innocence as a weapon against them too.

Pope Francis asked for forgiveness for the ‘sins’ committed by members of the clergy, and he seemed sincere. But it was understandable that many survivors of abuse felt that he had not gone nearly far enough.

Talk about shame and penance and forgiveness and prayer is sadly empty and evasive. These might provide ‘healing’ for the individuals responsible. But they do nothing for the victims, and to imply that they do is deeply insulting.

This was a moment when Pope Francis could have stated categorically that all of the relevant files on sex abuse, and on the Mother and Baby homes, would be handed over to the authorities; that the Roman Catholic Church would co-operate fully in any investigations by the State; and that the Church would without equivocation pay its full share, in restitution for the appalling damage to people.

That would indeed have made the trip worthwhile.

On Sunday afternoon a crowd of 5,000 – some estimates had it as double that – gathered at the Garden of Remembrance in the centre of Dublin. There, Hozier, Mary Coughlan, Mary Black, Liam Ó Maonlaí and numerous other artists evoked the pain and the suffering and the yearning for justice, which countless thousands of Irish people have known far too intimately. The organiser Colm O’Gorman, of Amnesty International, himself a victim of rape at the hands of a priest, made a chilling speech that had many in the audience in tears.

He recalled the visit of Pope John Paul II to Ireland in 1979, and the famous moment at the ‘youth’ Mass in Galway, when the Pope said “Young people of Ireland, I love you.”

“I remember that moment,” Colm O’Gorman recalled, “because I believed him. It’s not very often young people are told they are loved just for who they are. It was a profound moment. My heart nearly burst when he said it.”

But, of course, like the attitude to sex espoused by two of the leading clerics of the time who were with the Pope on the stage that day, Bishop Eamon Casey and Fr. Michael Cleary, it was a monstrous illusion.

“When I think about it now,” Colm O’Gorman went on, “I think about the fact that about a year and half later I was raped for the first time by a Roman Catholic priest. A priest that had been ordained four months before John Paul came to Ireland, despite the fact his church knew he was a child sexual abuser. A priest who remained in ministry for 16 years after that visit, despite complaints going to every bishop and diocese where he was and to that very same Pope and his ambassador here in Ireland.” He addressed the deceased Pope directly, all the better to make the point personal.

“You did not love us,” he said. “We have discovered over the last twenty years the depths of how you did not love us... The extraordinary thing about that discovery is that we’ve learned something else. We’ve learned, as a people, that we failed by looking to others to tell us how we could love each other. If we want to understand how to love each other and care for each other at moments of joy, tragedy, triumph or crisis, we don’t need to look to a bishop, priest, cardinal or pope. We need to look to ourselves and our humanity.”

I still have nothing against Pope Francis. I am sure he means well. But we have to be clear: when you are the head of an organisation which has decided that it is above the laws of the land in Ireland and elsewhere; which has set about the systematic facilitation of sexual abuse of children by thousands of its trusted lieutenants; and which has subsequently engaged in a massive, ongoing, sinister, cover-up operation, designed to frustrate any investigation into the activities of those within its rank who are guilty, with no motivation other than to limit the damage, and more importantly to minimise the cost, to the institution, then ‘meaning well’ is very, very far from being good enough.

The time has come for decisive action which says: we fully accept responsibility for the crimes committed by members of the clergy and will pay recompense in full. No less will be enough.