IT’S difficult to recall a time since the restoration of the hierarchy in 1878 when the Catholic Church in Scotland carried less influence in the nation’s discourses than at present. It seems cowed and reduced to the point of irrelevance. This will please those who have been implacable in their mission to exclude any vestige of Christianity from the public affairs of the country.

If they had the slightest inkling of the vast voluntary networks in social care the Christian churches put at the disposal of the state aggressive secularists might change their tune, but probably not. They seem obsessed with stripping the Christian churches of their right to be different in a country that thinks it values diversity and respects minorities.

In several ways though, the Catholic Church has been the author of its downfall. Its belated response to the sex abuse revelations has betrayed the trust of many adherents and others who remained well-disposed towards it. To be acquainted with the accounts of the survivors’ group White Flowers Alba is to take a dip in wells of human misery and suffering. It is also to be made aware of levels of depraved behaviour you wouldn’t have thought possible in an organisation committed to bringing the love of Christ into people’s lives.

Yet, many survivors of clerical abuse have found themselves demonised and excluded by influential figures in the church who refuse to take responsibility and who want to silence the victims. Something of this behaviour could also be witnessed following the revelations that the former Cardinal Keith O’Brien had been involved in inappropriate sexual relationships with priests under his pastoral care.

There was no awareness of the sheer hypocrisy of the Cardinal’s position which made nonsense of the church’s aggressive opposition to same-sex arrangements. This was a man who had previously described homosexual relationships as “grotesque”.

The appointment of Helen Liddell to head the church’s Independent Review Body, which intends to review safeguarding standards and carry out independent audits, is an encouraging development. This, though, will be worthless if it doesn’t provide the answers to these questions the church has thus has seemed unwilling to answer:

Why did this happen? Who knew? What is to be done as to compensating the survivors?

The unhealthy obsession of the Catholic Church in Scotland with same-sex relationships has continued unabated, fuelled in the main by a small and unrepresentative coterie of ecclesiastical civil servants. These have taken advantage of various crises of leadership in the church in recent years as well as the infirmity and fragility of its hierarchy to advance a divisively conservative agenda.

It would be interesting to discover how much agreement there would be among them and the present Scottish hierarchy with the views of the influential US primate, Cardinal Raymond Burke, who recently stated that gay relatives should be excluded from family gatherings where children were present. A curious silence has formed like a shroud around the body of the Catholic Church in Scotland recently. A few days ago there was a fairly bland, two-paragraph statement from Archbishop of Glasgow, Philip Tartaglia, asking the Department of Work and Pensions to think again about its proposal to shut job centres in the city.

Beyond that, the biggest statement from the Catholic church in Scotland was the announcement that it had developed an app for accessing the times of masses throughout the country.

For the past few years Scotland and the rest of the world have been caught up in a ferment of ideas and debate about the futures of countries and our civilisation. Scotland is still in the grip of a hugely important debate about its future constitutional arrangements while our relationship with Europe is now at the mercy of a cabinet of reactionary, little Englanders.

The rise of far-right demagogues all over Europe, given oxygen by the election as US president of Donald Trump, threatens previously accepted norms on how modern states protect the dignity of workers and labour.

The Arab Spring followed by the Syrian conflict have led to hundreds of thousands of our fellow human beings knocking on the doors of the West seeking food and shelter.

You don’t need to be a Christian to realise that the affluent West is undergoing a judgment of its claims to be civilised, compassionate and ethical: one that it is currently failing.

Nearer home, food banks are on the rise; austerity measures are increasing the marginalisation of already disadvantaged communities; the gap between rich and poor remains massive and unearned privilege is still stitched into the fabric of the nation.

Such inequality and manifest inhumanity should call forth a thunderous response from the Catholic Church rather than press releases about job centre closures and the times of masses.

When governments fail to act in the interests of the majority of their people or care adequately for their most vulnerable citizens, the Christian churches have a sacred duty to intervene and to challenge the lethal orthodoxies of consumerism and materialism and to challenge the dismal doctrine of neo-liberalism.

It was the acknowledgement of this sovereign responsibility that inspired the church in Latin-America to opt for the poor and embrace Liberation Theology.

Previously it had instead given sustenance to the rich and the powerful; its default position amongst the corrupt autocracies of that region for centuries.

Whether it likes it or not, the Catholic Church in Scotland, along with its sister Christian churches, including the Kirk, which is faring little better, is being invited to participate in a fresh theology of liberation.

In this its priests, bishops and ministers are being asked to stand side by side with the poor, the downtrodden, the marginalised, the unfairly accused and those with no one else to speak up for them. It must live among these people and become one with them.

Poor leadership, complacency and a sense of entitlement while clinging to a victim’s mentality have emptied Catholic churches all over Scotland quicker than you can say “transubstantiation”.

In Glasgow, old parishes will be shut down and merged with others, leaving several substantial properties potentially lying empty.

What the church chooses to do with them will give us some indication if it is willing to step back from the brink.

It could make a start by selling St Benet’s, the mansion it owns in Morningside and which is the abode at present of Archbishop Leo Cushley, head of the church in Scotland.