When you are a patient in the Mater Hospital, there
is no overt sign that it is a Roman Catholic institution. There was a time when it would have been peppered with rather bad religious art, but better standards of taste prevail nowadays.
That is as it should be, because it is a State-funded institution, funded by the taxpayer.
You are far more aware of the Catholic ethos in the Blackrock Clinic, which is a private hospital, not a State-funded institution, and therefore has a right to parade its religious bias.
The anomaly lies in the fact that both hospitals have an identical ethos, like the vast majority of all in this country.
That makes them somewhat alarming if, like me, you have a deep fear of the Catholic ethos in medical care, and believe that life and welfare may be, and sometimes are, compromised by what the Catholic Church teaches.
If you bother to check the mission statement of either (or any hospital) you will certainly learn that your treatment is promised to be to the best medical standards and proficiency ... . "within our Catholic ethos".
For the majority of patients who are admitted to the Mater Hospital, or to any public or private hospital in the State, that is likely to be broadly acceptable. Very few people imagine that the Catholic ethos sets out to be brutal and inhumane.
After all, it considers itself to be "Gospel-based", and Catholic interpretation of the Bible teaches that Christ on Earth was both gentle and humane.
A member of the board of the Mater Hospital, Fr Kevin Doran, resigned last week because the hospital has issued a statement that it will comply with the law of the land, and will terminate a pregnancy that threatens the life of a woman, even if the threat to that life is of suicide.
That is what is provided for in the legislation on the Protection of Life During Pregnancy Act. Fr Doran told the Irish Catholic that his subsequent resignation is "about bearing witness to Gospel values, alongside providing excellent care".
My italics; Fr Doran seems to see the two as separate issues, not necessarily synonymous with each other.
That is where alarm bells ring for people concerned about any kind of religious ethos being dominant in any hospital. Because, according to what seems to be the Catholic position, excellent medical care must be subservient to Church teaching.
Even the Catholic Archbishop of Dublin Dr Diarmuid Martin, who has proven himself to be a most humane man, has said he wants the Mater Hospital to "clarify" its statement. He believes, he says, that the hospital has always been "scrupulous" in trying to defend both the life of the mother and the unborn child.
He is a member of the board of the hospital's parent company, and adds that the hospital has a great tradition of caring for very difficult pregnancies, and "doing it well within the ethos of the hospital over many years".
So what is there to clarify in a statement that the hospital will obey laws that have been put to the people and found to be necessary (actually, some would say they are still inadequate) in order to protect women who are medically under threat?
Caring for difficult pregnancies and "defending the life of the mother and the unborn child", one hopes, is the least that can be said for any modern first world hospital.
But what the Catholic Church obstinately refuses to accept is that thanks to the advances of science, we have reached a stage where the medical profession can find itself called upon, effectively, to play god in religious terms; in secular terms, to make difficult ethical decisions.
There was a time when such choices were not so clear-cut, because both mother and child usually died in difficult pregnancies. Religious teaching could get away with talking of the "equal right of the mother and the unborn child."
Indeed, in more primitive times, there was no pretence of "equal rights".
It was accepted that a choice would be made: in a situation of property and inherited rights, for instance, the mother would be sacrificed; in other societies, the unborn child would be sacrificed to save the mother. With the advances in science, such terrible choices are fewer, but they exist, and they still require a choice.
To deny that is to impose 17th-Century theological thinking on a society which now knows that the world is not flat.
Terminating a pregnancy means choosing the life of the mother over that of the foetus she is carrying.
The Catholic Church teaches that this is always, in all cases, deeply morally wrong and inexcusable.
Doctors know that there are times when it is necessary, unless the mother has specified that she is willing to die in order to save the life of the child, as was the case of St Gianna Moller, who died in 1962, and was canonised by Pope John Paul for making that choice.
It is also why Fr Kevin Doran has done the honourable and ethical thing: he is sworn by virtue of his ordination vows to uphold church teachings. . . unto death if necessary.
But there is another aspect of ethics in the matter: many would say he has no right, personally or corporately, to impose his religious values in a hospital structure funded by the taxpayer.
Followed to that logical conclusion, no Catholic religious has any ethical right to sit on the board of a State institution funded by the taxpayer, as is the Mater Hospital. Their moral position is in direct conflict with the legal rights of the taxpayers who fund the hospital, as indeed is the overall ethos of the hospital as structured by the religious who own, but do not fund it.
Yet Sister Eugene Nolan, senior nurse tutor at the Mater, a member of the Board and also a nun, stated unequivocally last Wednesday, as a response to the hospital's statement that it would comply with the law: "The Mater won't be performing abortions."
That statement will inevitably stay in the minds of potential patients, just as all such statements will remain in the mind of every woman of child-bearing years in the country.
It is up to the Church to undertake the religious and eternal welfare of its flock during pregnancy and otherwise, by ensuring that it provides care that is consonant with Church rules.
That may well come at a huge financial cost to the Church, but it is the only honourable course.
And the State must move to ensure that control of the hospital system is unequivocally secular in its ethos: without religious dominance from any Church or other religious pressure group. If a woman wants to put her life at risk by committing herself to a Catholic ethos during pregnancy, that is her right.
But it cannot morally be imposed upon her.
And as a result, the Protection of Life During Pregnancy Act has done little to re-assure women: there is still provision for individual hospital staff to opt out of legal procedures, allowing for the possibility that in an emergency, religion rather than the law will prevail.