You might certainly expect some interesting revelations but nobody would believe you were getting the full picture.

For a full understanding of the party’s vision, its policies and their rationale, you would need to hear from the party’s approved spokespersons as well.

At the very least, they should be invited to respond or better still debate with the self-appointed mouthpieces. Would anyone argue the contrary?

Yet that is pretty much the situation in which the Catholic Church in Ireland finds itself right now.

There is a cohort of tagged ‘ leading theologians’ and quaintly dubbed, ‘silenced’ clerics who pop up unopposed across media outlets to opine at leisure to an approving host.

Such media magnets are probably the best-known Catholics or ex-Catholics in the country and their views of the Church and what it teaches or should teach are the catechesis of default for the growing number of Ireland’s cultural Catholics.

This, it must be remembered, is a very large cohort indeed — about 78% of the population according to the census of 2016.

Separation of Church and State should mean in the first instance that each institution respects the legitimate parameters of the other.

This is compromised when politicians, facilitated by public broadcasting, criticise the Church — as Leo Varadkar did recently when he defended Minister Josepha Madigan against Dublin’s Archbishop Diarmuid Martin, and offered his own personal view that women should not be excluded from priestly ministry.

“I took the opportunity to highlight the inequalities I see in the Church in respect of women.” Speaking on @rtenews today in relation to #Archbishop Diarmuid Martin’s comments today pic.twitter.com/RqLkaMTS2b

— Josepha Madigan ⚖️✨ (@josephamadigan) June 26, 2018

According to modern social norms, the exclusion of women from any role open to men is a breach of justice; where gender discrimination occurs, it is always indefensible and necessarily misogynistic.

For very many Catholics and that includes those, of both sexes, who are most fully engaged with their faith and the Church, it is a lot more complex than that.

It is about preserving and promoting a created natural and moral order even at the cost of being ‘a sign of contradiction’ to the world, but that is not the point here as such.

The point is that it is none of the business of Leo Varadkar or any other politician in his public role to venture into territory that is decidedly outside the remit of politics if he does really subscribe to the principle of separation of sacred and secular, State and Church.

His interventions are inappropriate and offensive and displease far more people than he might be inclined to believe.

But then how would he know when the media projects such a distorted picture of ‘who is Church?’ in today’s Ireland?

It is almost as if a re-formed Church that is more congenial and useful to the social and political order is being mainstreamed to marginalise the actual Church and its actual members. This, in fact, is not unique to Ireland.

In other countries, where Christian and Catholic churches are considered ideologically subversive but nonetheless too powerful to quell entirely, there have been such strategies.

In China, an official Catholic Church exists side by side with an ‘underground’ Church.

Something like this happened in Nazi Germany when cells of ‘ confessing’ Christians detached from mainstream Protestantism because they would not pledge to remain silent and apolitical in the face of the horror and terror that was sweeping the country.

What is not so well-known is that behind the current controversy around Russian hacking of democratic party emails, some of the sensitive and inappropriately leaked content, apparently penned by Hillary Clinton’s campaign chief, John Podesta, concerned a strategy to create a ‘bottom-up’ movement within Catholicism towards a more socially progressive and amenable Church.

Churches and secular representative groups have a right in a democracy to speak out, to lobby, even to mobilise civic opposition. That is the vital inner working of democracy.

Public representatives. who often owe their own positions to extra-parliamentary activism. can quickly forget ‘the low degrees by which they did ascend’ the ladders of power, like Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar.

Separation of powers is not to be confused with denying interest groups, secular and sacred alike, reasonable opportunity to contribute to public debate.

And defining reasonable can be, as we have seen, a whole area of contention in itself.

The recent referendum on the 8th Amendment showed an opinion divide of roughly 2:1 among the electorate who voted. Media coverage did not reflect that spread of opinion or come even close.

The same could be said even more emphatically of the marriage referendum of 2015. Was this fair to the under-represented side? Did it damage the quality of the debate?

Whatever way you look at it, there can be no denying that largely, one-sided, advocacy journalism impacts on how people think and decide.

This, in turn, impacts the polling day figures.

But there is a new disruptor in mediasphere. The rapidly expanding global phenomenon of social media.

A recent report from the Department of the Taoiseach says ‘social media can distort public debate’. Pity he can’t see that mainstream media can do exactly the same — indeed, has done the same.

People with power will always target what they can’t control.

Social media offers a more equal playing field to rival opinions, especially minority ones who struggle to get a fair hearing in the established outlets.

Indeed, it is of course also true to say that social media is a vast wasteland of still uncharted opportunity for every kind of distortion, manipulation, exploitation and abuse.

Yes, it needs to be controlled and held to account.

But we would be foolish to think that the motives of those who want to rein in the digital beast, are pure and disinterested.

It took election skewing in Britain and the US to alert them to the potential for economic, social and moral mayhem inherent in the ever more sophisticated technology of social media.