unknown country called the future.

These words were spoken by the former chief rabbi of Britain, Jonathan Sacks, during a recent debate in the House of Lords in Westminster.

He was speaking against the background of a fast-changing, often deeply confusing world, where human values are in a state of flux, and where young people must cope with a multitude of competing narratives.

There was a time not so long ago when there was one dominant narrative — and that was provided by the Christian Churches.

In Ireland, it came predominantly from the Catholic Church. In today’s world, which has come to seem increasingly post-Christian and where there is often indifference, if not hostility, to organised religion, we too readily forget the enormous and enduring influence of religion, especially in the West.

In his book The Age of Revolution, EJ Hobsbawm of Cambridge University reiterates religion’s central role: “For most of history and over most of the world the terms in which all but a handful of educated and emancipated men thought about the world were those of traditional religion, so much so that there are parts of the world in which the word ‘Christian’ is simply a synonym for ‘man’.”

Today it may well be, particularly in parts of Europe, that a growing number of men and women are living their lives without reference to or dependence on the God hypothesis, but this shouldn’t lead us to underplay or underestimate, let alone ignore, the crucial role played by religion down the centuries as the fountainhead of morality and in forming political culture.

“It should not be difficult, even in this post-Christian age, for the average citizen who takes notice of world events to appreciate that religious belief, or adherence or loyalty to a particular culture that has been shaped by religion, plays a key role in political events,” stresses Professor John A Moses of the University of Queensland.

Look no further than Northern Ireland to find examples of two competing cultures formed by religion, and the key and bloody repercussions the conflict between these cultures had on political events on this island since 1968.

All of this was the background against which the BBC’s foreign correspondent, Lise Doucet, was speaking at a seminar in London when she said: “If you don’t understand religion, including the abuse of religion, you don’t understand what is happening in our world.”

That the culture of the Irish Republic, especially political culture, has been shaped by religion is incontestable.

That role has been dealt with, inter alia, in a very detailed and scholarly fashion by Tom Inglis of UCD in his book Moral Monopoly, which traces the development of the Catholic Church’s monopoly over Irish morality, and by Louise Fuller of NUI Maynooth in her book, Irish Catholicism since 1950.

In the heyday of the Catholic Church’s power, writes Inglis, particularly during the 50 years after the foundation of the State, “its influence expanded beyond the religious field into the field of politics, economics, education, health, social welfare, the media and many other fields. The power of the Church meant that it structured not just the religious life of the Irish people, but their social, political and economic life as well”.

Louise Fuller highlights the role of education, over which the Church exercised considerable control, in transmitting the Catholic cultural heritage.

In this process the part played by the school system was crucial.

Today, in the light of the changes that have occurred in Ireland, we have witnessed a debate of sorts about Church-run schools.

Ireland at one time may have been very close to being a one-faith (Christian, albeit with different strands) society, but that assuredly is no longer the case in the 21st century.

As the last census has shown, the number of people now registering in the “no religion” category has increased by more than 70% between 2011 and 2016, and now number 481,388 — 10.1% of the population.

Perhaps more significantly, as the Archbishop of Dublin Diarmuid Martin has noted, those in the “no religion” category are “highest in the age group 23-39, the group with children entering school life”.

That age group, he said, “accounts for 28% of the general population, but 45% of those with no religion fall into this age bracket”.

Yet there remained, he said, “a stubborn reluctance within the Church” to allow the current situation to change.

The “Irish religious establishment is fixated on questions of ownership and management, and too little on the purpose of the Catholic school and the outcomes of Catholic education in terms of faith formation”.

In a speech in October, another senior churchman, Archbishop Eamon Martin of Armagh, seemed more upbeat about faith formation in Catholic schools.

He told a conference in Dublin that religion in a Catholic school was “not an added extra to be fitted in during break time or twilight hours or during registration. Everything that happens in the school community is rooted in the Gospel values”.

This, of course, is patently untrue, if we look at the results as manifested in the society around us and the prevailing culture, if we look, in other words, as the “outcomes” of Catholic education.

Listening to a report recently on RTÉ’s Morning Ireland about the controversy over tracker mortgages,

– yet another banking scandal – I thought once again about the various elites in Irish society and the system that has produced them. Most of them, anyway.

In the corporate sector, in boardrooms, in the world of commerce, of high finance, banking, in insurance, real estate, in law, in the civil service, and also, of course, in politics — the people at the top are invariably the products of the network of private, fee-paying schools (many of which are associated with religious orders) that collectively make up our own Ivy League.

They are the people, in other words, who run Ireland Inc. And they haven’t done a particularly good job, not at any rate when it comes to instilling Christian values and giving effect in practice to those values.

Just consider the madness of the Celtic Tiger years, marked by greed and avarice, and the litany of corruption revealed by various tribunals of inquiry.

The people who are the products of Church-run schools are the movers-and-shakers of Ireland in 2017, the people who are the main architects of the prevailing culture in which there is a Thatcherite preoccupation with deregulation, and a Reaganite emphasis on profit.

You’ll search in vain (almost) for anything resembling a system of Christian ethics. It makes you wonder about the influence of our elite schools, and the values being transmitted therein. It reminds me of a comment on television about priestly formation from a contrite professor of moral theology when confronted with the shocking extent of the clerical child sex abuse scandal: “We didn’t do a very good job, did we?”

That, at least, was an honest response. These days we are used to seeing polls and surveys pointing to the increasing abandonment of religion here. The hollowing out of Catholicism hasn’t (yet) reached anything like the stage it is at in other parts of Europe.

But for all our preoccupation with religion in the past (and still today, though to a declining degree) we are entitled — nay, obliged — to ask: why has it been so readily compartmentalised when it comes to morality in the marketplace or the boardroom?

Where is the evidence in these places of a flourishing Christian morality? Answer: there is precious little. As for the banks, I have long been of the view that they should be nationalised. The role they now play in civic society is such that they should not remain in private ownership.

What we are left with is a disturbing and troubling conviction that the “moral equivalent of a satellite navigation kit”, of which former chief rabbi Sacks spoke, is not being furnished by our Church-run schools — if the evidence of a society in which injustice and inequality are widespread and tolerated is anything to go by, evidence of which the homelessness crisis is but a facet (though a deeply distressing one).