AS THE clock moved towards 4.45pm last Sunday afternoon week, on RTE television, the cardinal was about to give his Apostolic Blessing at the opening of the Eucharistic Congress in the RDS. And methought I heard a voice.
Methought I heard a strange voice, not that of the cardinal or his various helpers on the great altar, but a voice from some other dimension, an ethereal voice that at once filled me with wonder and yet struck a great fearfulness into my heart.
For at first, methought it was a voice from within, a voice which was emanating from my own being, a voice that was mine, and yet was not mine.
It was a sort of whispering, urgent in its nature and commanding in its tone. What thoughts assailed me! What torments! What phantasms! Aye, it was only when with trembling hands I took it upon myself to view these television images once more, that the truth began to dawn.
Now, as the Sky Plus facility did its diabolical work, methought it was not mine own voice that I had heard, but the voice of a woman.
Aye, it was the voice, not just of a woman, but of an RTE woman, speaking in some secret communication to her colleagues who were "producing" this "show", instructing them that the Apostolic Blessing was now about to be terminated.
"One-15," she could be heard to say. "One-15."
And lo! The cardinal donned his largest hat, and as his assistants gathered closely around him, and he began to read from the Good Book that was held in front of him by a woman not of RTE, a woman all dressed in white, methought I heard another voice!
Again it was whispering with great urgency.
This time the voice seemed to be coming from some person unseen in the television picture, instructing the cardinal thus: "Go straight into the blessing!". And as the cardinal leaned forward, the better to hear this voice, again it said to him: "Straight to the blessing"!
"Dominus Vobiscum...," the Cardinal began, his assistants now aware that in the one minute and 15 seconds left to him, he could probably not get the Blessing done for the TV audience.
And indeed the voices of the RTE presenters Dermod McCarthy and Mary Kennedy could now be heard, not whispering but speaking openly.
No more could the voice of the cardinal be heard in this most solemn moment, just the voices of the television people talking over him, telling the viewers that it was time to say goodbye, that the show was over. Because another one was about to begin.
That would be the Group C match in the European Championship between Italy and Spain.
Freed at last from the torments I had experienced, and no longer talking to myself like some feverish character in an Edgar Allan Poe story, I reflected on what I had seen.
Essentially a cardinal, a potentate of the Church of Rome at the climax of this ceremony which is of such significance to that church, was given the hook, effectively told to "wrap it up" by some TV director because the folks wanted to see the match -- no, they wanted to see the build-up to the match, the analysis by the RTE panel of Giles, Brady and Dunphy, and then the match itself.
They would not be denied a moment of their football, or the wisdom of its concelebrants.
Certainly that recent six-part series in the Irish Times about Catholicism in Ireland today made an important contribution, but if you wanted to save yourself some time, that one minute and 15 seconds on RTE last Sunday would tell you plenty.
These days, a cardinal intoning "Dominus Vobiscum" can be faded out, like a record that has run on too long.
But when a TV professional says "one-15", that is an order.
Nor is there any doubt as to where we are looking these days for some sort of transcendental experience. For any vaguely normal person, Euro 2012 is indeed a glimpse of paradise, at once magnificent and tantalising.
We know that this is how men should live, that heaven is a place where there is a major football tournament in progress at all times. And yet we also know that this tournament will pass, like all the other ones did, and that in a few weeks' time, life will resume again, devoid of meaning.
In some countries they can get past this by actually winning the tournament, which keeps them in a state of supernatural elevation for maybe another four weeks. Obviously that is not for us. But we are in a better place now than we used to be.
And the echoes of the old faith are mere curiosities. For example Group C, with Ireland, Croatia, Spain, and Italy, might be called the Group of Catholicism.
With maybe a bit of fascism in there too from way back, but what the hell?
Our thoughts are now on higher things.
And television itself can be deeply moralistic.
When Paddy in Poznan roared something about putting your mortgage on Ireland, ITV's Adrian Chiles felt obliged to mutter something about gambling on this scale not being a very good idea.
On Sky, where they are moralistic in ways that Archbishop McQuaid himself might admire, they will never show a merry scene of lads drinking lager in the morning without warning primly of the sore heads that will surely follow.
For us there is this consolation: at least we won the Eucharistic Congress.