In the republic’s great liberal project of the past 30 years, the broadcasting of the angelus on RTE became a totem for conservatives and those hostile to them, a line in the sand for the former, evidence of stubborn monoculturalism for the latter.

It became an easy target for the likes of David Trimble, the Ulster Unionist leader, whose characterisation of the republic as sectarian because it is the only country in Europe where the six o’clock news begins at one minute past six revealed more about his lack of understanding of the republic than it did about life here.

It also became the focus of the fudging to which RTE is partial, a Catholic, Marian ritual that has been sanitised as much as possible, so it no longer denotes a specific religious ritual but represents some vague ecumenical pause in the day.

Thus the religious images on the televised angelus went the way of RTE’s original logo, the St Bridget’s cross.

RTE’s softening of its angelus presentation is of a piece with its softening of other religious programming. Where once the fervent ideologues of Radharc made programmes almost militant in their bristling conviction, RTE’s religious programming now consists mostly of a warm, vaguely ecumenical, human-interest mushfest. It’s a disservice to all, yielding something with which neither Catholic nor non-Catholic can engage intellectually.

Yet, while RTE has been softening its religious programming output, it has been hardening its line on religious advertising; its rejection of an ad by the Irish Catholic magazine is the most recent example of its zeal in applying the Broadcasting Act.

The rejected ad included the following assertion: “These are hard times for the Catholic church, so hard that it’s easy to forget all the good that the church does.” The magazine maintained, as did John Bruton, the former taoiseach, who leapt to its defence, that the assertion is a statement of fact.

The phrase “all the good”, however, was the problem: RTE and the Broadcasting Commission were advised by lawyers that the ad contravened the Broadcasting Act, which allows the advertising of factual material relating to religion but forbids ads that are directed towards a religious end.

Bruton had a point when he criticised RTE for engaging in “a form of secular puritanism, which should have no place in a liberal society”. He, of course, had ample time when he was taoiseach to liberalise the 1960 Broadcasting Act, which regulates religious ads, or even to contribute to the debate on the 1999 amendment that allowed the broadcasting of factual religious ads.

Nevertheless, he had a point in relation to the relatively innocuous Irish Catholic ad, the rejection of which seems absurd given that, as Bruton put it, every second ad on RTE is for a narcotic such as alcohol.

If the time has come to permit such advertising, then the time has also come for RTE to address the liberal blurring that has rendered its coverage of religion ecumenical but undifferentiated and unchallenged, its fuzzy feel-good approach summed up by its treatment of the angelus, which has left agnostics and atheists, as always, out in the cold.