Losing our religion: Can Francis offer new hope and energy to Church?

Almost 40 years since the last papal visit to Ireland, Francis arrives to a country that has changed utterly. What place for the Catholic Church now, asks TP O’Mahony.

One of the things that can be said with a degree of certainty about the visit of Pope Francis to this country this weekend is that it will not slow, never mind halt, what Cork-born Professor Brendan O’Leary, from the University of Pennsylvania, has called “the de-Catholicising of Ireland”. That process began back in the 1960s and has progressed inexorably since then.