Pat, you seem to be implying, as so many liberals do, that the Catholic church needs to adapt it's teachings to what it's "members" actually believe. Fair enough. Well, let's see where that will lead us in the case of good old "catholic" Ireland. These are the results of a Catholic Bishops survey in 2010 of the emerald isle and it's somewhat pagan set of beliefs:

- Only 57.6% believed in a personal God while the others variously believed in a God who was a "spirit" or "life force" or didn't know what to think. Just in case you don't know yourself, Catholics believe in a personal God.

- 49.8% didn't believe in hell and nearly 25% didn't believe in sin

- Nearly 30% believed in re-incarnation

- Nearly 30% didn't believe in life after death

These are the statistics of a seriously sick church. A people who've fallen away from God and the Christian faith. Your words might have more credibility if you presented the true picture of the belief of "catholics" in Ireland rather than dress things up as though we have all these "devout" "catholics" praying their rosaries over there. We don't. It's a church in a state of collapse. Archbishop Diamond Martin admits that on Sunday only 18% of "catholics" go to mass in the Dublin diocese.

The only thing your referendum shows is that Ireland has now officially joined the ranks of the lapsed Catholic countries.

St Patrick & the saints of Ireland pray for the restoration of the faith in Ireland

Here's a factual reality check:

http://thinkprogress.org/lgbt/2015/05/27/3662968/thousands-catholics-voted-marriage-equality-ireland/

http://www.cruxnow.com/faith/2015/05/27/forget-the-numbers-the-big-story-is-that-religion-has-lost-social-influence/

If Archbishop Martin’s insight is that “The Church has a huge task in front of it to find the language to be able to talk to and to get its message across to young people, not just on this issue, but in general,” then the enormity of the task facing the Church is illustrated in Cardinal Burke’s denunciation of “an antinomianism which is inherent in the hermeneutic of discontinuity.” Put kindly, this is esoteric language; more realistically, it is gobbledegook. Church cardinals imprison themselves behind such language barriers as much as they do behind the high art and architecture of the Vatican. Both create a distorted sense of tradition and “continuity” that must be maintained at all costs. Cardinals should try camping out more in the real world to understand the evolution of human values and community. “Continuity” that defies evidence and the enlargement of human sensibility is much more damaging to human dignity than the immediate shock of “discontinuity” and is in any case futile.

What Pat fails to mention is that despite the YES call by our former president and almost all parliamentarians, so-called celebrities (including rogue priest celebrities?), biased media sources, trade unions, international companies and massive US funding, the YES vote declined significantly in each successive opinion poll. In other words our Irish bishops intervention did play some part in bolstering the NO campaign.