Hopeful that Ireland will Pursue the Democratic Path to Marriage Equality

On Friday, Irish voters will go to the polls to decide (I presume among other things) whether to extend the liberty to enter in civil marriage to same-sex couples.  (See "Gay marriage vote marks a quiet revolution in Ireland," Reuters (19 May 2015), at: http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/05/19/ireland-gaymarriage-history-idUSL5N0Y93MD20150519).  If it succeeds in doing so, it will be the first country to enact same-sex marriage liberties by democratic referendum.  In this regard, I am hopeful that Irish voters will approve this referendum by a two-to-one margin, as currently predicted.  Likewise, I think there is a clear lesson here about how to pursue a humanistic, progressive agenda, with respect to the removal of sectarian moralistic prohibitions on sexuality and relationships, in full conformity with maintenance of the sovereign right of citizens to determine issues of such relevance in self-government as the definition of marriage.  That is to say, I continue to wish that we had gone about the extension of marriage by democratic means in the U.S. rather than pursuing these ends by means of adjudication and juridical fiat. 
           Having said this, this change in Ireland's direction with regard to officially sanctioned morality seems to portend important consequences for the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland.  If two to three decades ago the Irish government operated in full conformity with a wide range of Catholic moral teaching, then today, as a result of certain internal matters and criminal abuses by Catholic ecclesiastical officials, the Church has largely alienated a broad spectrum of the Irish polity.  To some degree, such developments are a good thing, to the extent that a weakening of the Catholic Church catapults Irish social policies into the Twenty-first century.  On the other hand, I have to confess a degree of ignorance on the particular inbeddedness of the Church within the particular institutions of everyday life in Ireland.  My own impressions are shaped, on the one hand, by the lingering influence of the Catholic Church as a major administrator of charitable donations supporting numerous humanitarian social agendas in Massachusetts, and, on the other hand, by my understanding of the historical collapse of Roman Catholic dominance in the adminstration of social policy in Québec, a pattern starting with the election of the Liberal Lesage government in the 1950s.  At present, Catholicism remains significantly in a state of retreat in Québec.  In Western Massachusetts, the onset of the clergy sexual abuse scandals in the 1990s, coupled with a fiscal restructuring of the dioceses of Massachusetts, with the closure or merger of a vast array of old, ethnically-demarcated parish communities, seems to portend a major retraction of the influence of Roman Catholicism and, perhaps, a major decline in the number of Massachusetts residents who identify themselves as Catholics.  Insofar as I enjoy a jaded history with Roman Catholicism, I would express a certain degree of sadness that the Church is having such a difficult time accomodating itself to the changing attitudes of the faithful in so many areas where it had held out for so long against the forces of modernity/modernism.  In these terms, the sort of decline in the influence of Catholicism in Ireland indicated by the impending success of marriage equality may hold broader negative social implications for Ireland that the larger polity will have to address (i.e. assuming that the Church is still broadly invested in a range of social/charitable undertaking, serving diverse needs).  Conversely, it is suggestive of the necessity of larger, humanistic changes in moral teachings by the Roman Catholic Church as a whole, the sorts of changes that might be starting under the leadership of Francis I.  We can all be hopeful!