But Eamon Martin, the Archbishop of Armagh, is doing his best.
In his New Year message to the Church, he tried to distance the Church from any association with combative anti-immigration sentiment.
But it is his observations to the Irish edition of the Sunday Times which are more striking than his studious moderation.
He addressed one of the most explosive issues in Church–State relations, namely the bid by left-of-centre political parties to expropriate the property of religious orders to pay compensation to the victims of historic abuse scandals, which encompass a broad range of grievances.
Norma Foley, the current coalition government’s Minister for Children, has written to the Attorney General to seek legal avenues to compel religious orders to contribute to redress schemes.
The Archbishop warned that “we need to be careful about political opportunism” and said that “I would hope that we are not back in Penal times where the churches will be unjustly targeted with regard to assets”.
Almost all of these assets are intended for charitable purposes and were given to the orders for those purposes.
One of the scandals relates to mother and baby homes (largely Church-run institutions, predominantly for single mothers who were cast out by their families).
But the Church ran most of these homes at the behest of the state; they were subject to state inspections and funded – and mostly underfunded – by local authorities.
Archbishop Martin made the point that the state too had a share of responsibility for their running: “we need to be careful that the responsibility for whatever happened is justly apportioned. That includes the state, state actors and state agencies who were maybe in mother and baby homes overseeing those homes”.
They were, and many of those inspectors found that the sisters who ran the homes did the best job they could under difficult circumstances. That was true of reports into the home in Tuam, now being investigated for allegedly burying infants in a septic tank.
A recent report commissioned by the government found that five out of eight religious orders have not contributed to the mother-and-baby compensation schemes. The deputy prime minister, Fine Gael’s Simon Harris, has said that the government has a number of means of compelling the orders to contribute.
The leader of the Labour Party, Ivana Bacik, has proposed a bill to require orders to pay into redress schemes.
Yet, as Archbishop Martin points out, “the Churches are essentially charities; their assets are used for particular purposes.”
This is precisely the problem, and for the Church as a whole this is, historically, familiar territory; it has been here before, many times. Some of the religious orders in Ireland are well endowed because they acquired land by donation and purchase at a time when it was cheap; their holdings are now very valuable when sold.
To expropriate the assets of the orders not only runs contrary to the intentions of donors but also undermines the purposes for which they were established, chiefly health and education.
The Sisters of Charity divested themselves of St Vincent’s Hospital in Dublin in 2017 and transferred it to the state, but this elicited only hostility; the hospital was subsequently stripped of its religious artefacts and reminders of its origins.
As with so many Irish institutions, it was owned and run by a Catholic order, in this case founded by Mary Aikenhead, who opened the first hospital there in 1834 to care for the sick poor. The hospital now makes clear that it has no religious ethos.
That runs contrary to the historical reality.
Most schools and hospitals in Ireland are historically foundations established or run by the churches – some Protestant, but most Catholic.
Indeed, it could be said that the new Irish state subcontracted health, education, and social services largely to the Catholic Church. For the most part – though with obvious and scandalous exceptions – the Church fulfilled that responsibility well.
Nationally, there is no audit of the credit and debit sides of the Church’s execution of the tasks with which the state endowed it.
For the state, religious orders had the considerable benefit that their members were cheaper than their secular equivalents.
And if such an audit were honestly undertaken, it would show the extent of the Church’s contribution to the social infrastructure of the Irish state, for which it is now being taken to task.
As Archbishop Martin pointed out, the religious orders – with virtually no new intake and supporting elderly communities – or dioceses may now face financial hardship if they cannot meet the demands for redress.
“I would be disappointed,” said the Archbishop, “if the state simply scapegoated religious orders or the Church.”
But that is precisely what the Church has come to expect.
On one count, however, Archbishop Martin is keen to go with the political current, in making land available for housing given the current shortage of homes.
“Church properties belong either to local parishes or local dioceses and these are places where surplus land is available,” he says.
And here Eamon Martin should reconsider.
All over Ireland, previously unspoilt areas of countryside are being built over in a surge of development to meet an increased population, at the expense of natural habitat and the beauty of the local environment.
The land belonging to religious orders and the Church could be oases of undeveloped nature in increasingly despoiled spaces.
It could be the final gift of the Church to a country which is now so markedly detached from its own past.