Beyond Consolation, by journalist John Waters, is the kind of book you could give to anyone from an atheist to a bishop. In it Waters explores some key issues in contemporary Irish culture.

The reflections are part of his wary step by step return to the Catholic Church. He may have crossed the Rubicon and be heading towards Rome, but he still has a long way to go.

There are two sides to the story he tells: his vigorous, hard-hitting analysis of the present situation in Ireland and his fumbling search for an alternative vision of life.

He ruthlessly exposes the emptiness of life without God, beginning from the despair of Nuala O’Faoláin as she faced death.

Thanks to a culture that refuses to take the religious question seriously, O’Faolain was unable in her radio interview with Marian Finucane to honestly reflect on her situation.

“It was as if, even now,” wrote Waters, “she was more concerned with seeming to be consistent in the eyes of the culture than in looking at what she herself might have been feeling deeper down.”

It was a sign of a bigger issue. “The cultures of present-day societies appear to construct themselves or be constructed so as to avoid contemplation of the great questions. This is certainly the case with Irish society.”

The author also dissected an interview Finucane did with Nobel prize-winning poet and unbeliever Séamus Heaney.

Heaney suggested that his loss of faith was due to his ‘literary education’. “Everything in 20th-century literature, everything really in 19th-century literature, or from the Enlightenment on, is a challenge to orthodoxy,” he said.

But because he did not have the resources to handle the challenge, it seems, he thought that no one else had them either. There was a subtle arrogance at work here.

Or, as Waters put it, “Heaney was not expressing any theological or philosophical position, he was simply blathering.”

Freedom has become a major, if extremely confused, concern for modern society. But an even more central issue is hope:

“Ultimately, all we can create for ourselves are false hopes, which sustain us for an instant and then dissolve, leaving us grasping for the next.”

If Beyond Consolation ended here it would at least let today’s self-satisfied Irish agnostics and atheists see how naive and intellectually threadbare their unbelief is. And it would let the rest of us see how pathetically little they have to offer.

But the author goes much further. His principal concern is to re-introduce to society the great hope offered by the Catholic faith, a hope based on the resurrection of Jesus.

Pope Benedict, especially in his letter on hope, Spe Salvi, has been a big factor in his thinking. Hope is a theme Benedict returns to again and again.

This takes Waters beyond all the issues linked with the Catholic Church in Ireland today, her role in education and health care, inadequate leadership, even the major scandals.

He is scathing in places about the Church’s failures over various issues, perhaps not always fairly.

But his deepest anger is due to the failure to communicate the meaning of Christ’s resurrection: “that the central message of Christianity is about hope beyond human imagining” (p 205).

This hope is something that unbelievers and, even more, the greater number of lapsed Catholics, need to face up to.

Christ, present in his Church despite all sin, is the only true centre of our lives. It is foolish to let any person or thing blind us to that very demanding reality.