Jaw-dropping comments by Denis Brennan, Catholic Bishop of Ferns, added greatly to (some of) the nation's anxiety this week.He suggested that his local parishioners should open their purses to help his church out with its alleged current financial embarrassment.
The sting in the tail was his definition of what makes and unmakes a good Christian.
It was a case of the béal bocht occupying the high moral ground.
Most bishops had the sense to cut back on moral pronouncements since the Ryan and Murphy reports, realising their damaged authority means this isn't the moment to tell people what's right and wrong.
But money has its own imperatives, especially when it comes to the institutional Catholic Church.
"That 'I did not cause the problem' is not the response of the Christian," Bishop Brennan said.
"That I would like to help in the work of justice, healing, reconciliation, a safer environment for children, proper financial stewardship and overall good economic health is the response of the Christian."
This slogan manipulates a Christian attitude to a kind of Miss World aspiration, where contestants line up, look humble and swear their top priority is world peace. Of course it is, but will saying so make it happen?
The parallel universe called 'the real world' may have wondered what planet Bishop Brennan occupies.
Live register figures are hovering over the 400,000 mark but the core issue was the reason why the bishop wanted lay people to cough up cash.
The money was required to help pay mortgages taken out on the bishop's palace -- that having been done, reportedly, to pay some claims due to survivors of clerical child abuse in the diocese.
The question of why Catholics in Ferns should effectively pay a double levy for abuses to their own community didn't arise.
Direct and indirect government taxes have already bailed out religious orders to the likely final amount of more than €1bn after Bertie Ahern and Michael Woods' decision.
Ferns people contributed to this.
The Ferns diocese also received some €5.8m from a national Catholic diocesan fund because it is the smallest diocese with one of the highest proven rates of child abuse.
The rate may reflect the people of Ferns' own courage in insisting abuse cases be disclosed.
Bishop Brennan called the Ferns abuses a tragedy -- but these were crimes; legally and ethically.
They persisted because successive bishops didn't act and because priests were effectively enabled by keeping their sacramental powers, which let them keep abusing with an odds-on chance of not being reported.
If the Church had acted sooner, there'd be less to pay.
Bishop Brennan was one of the first bishops to speak out after they met Pope Benedict XVI. You have to wonder whether his call reflects the Pope's policy for Ireland.
Behind the bishop's statement looms the spectre of the Vatican's wealth.
Nowhere and at no time has it paid a cent of compensation to survivors in the many countries where clerical abuses happened.
Would the Vatican let Ferns go bankrupt to safeguard its own assets?
Or other Irish dioceses?
The way it's organised helps the Vatican retain its assets no matter what happens elsewhere -- Canada, the US, Germany or any of the other First World countries whose citizens have the confidence to challenge criminal behaviour.
This medieval-style governance is often used to evade collective responsibility if a single diocese or national hierarchy is in difficulty.
Look at it differently and you might argue that the governance system is one of the biggest obstacles to improving child protection within the Catholic Church.
There are proven difficulties in communicating abuses between Rome and local dioceses; proven difficulties in enabling survivors to speak directly to Rome; proven difficulties in state authorities pursuing clerical abusers across local and international diocesan boundaries, never mind making Rome's diplomatic channels accountable to national laws.
The bishop's statement is centuries away from the pay-for-indulgences practices that made the Catholic Church so very rich. But the emotional tone of his remarks plays some of the same tunes.
Then, the more indulgences you bought for yourself or your departed loved ones, the closer you got to heaven. That was everyone's preferred destination.
The same song encouraged new middle classes in 19th century Ireland to donate money and land to build churches.
Odds are if you unpicked the financial history of any church or presbytery in Ireland, you would find the purses of thousands of lay people for whom giving money to the Church was a way of being good.
Bishop Brennan sounds like he's playing the goodness cards without taking responsibility for the cover-ups that let abuse continue for so long. For example, he feels competent enough to define what a Christian is, even though the Ferns example, and indeed the Church's attitude to paying compensation, is hard to place in any New Testament story about Jesus Christ.
He uses his assumed moral authority to tell lay people what's best for them, which happily coincides with what's best for his financial affairs.
Then he blames the situation on 'mismanagement, poor understanding and a lack of resolve', as though bad book-keeping is a bigger mote in the eye than clerical child abuse.
Thought: maybe the rest of the country is on another planet.
After all, this State is practically bankrupt while the Vatican books are showing deliciously healthy profits.
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