Time to ring the changes on the Angelus bell so we are more inclusive of all Beliefs.

RTE'S broadcasting of the Angelus has long been the subject of controversy. The actual broadcast, twice a day, at noon and at six o'clock in the evening, is treated by our broadcasters as an act of worship for which everything else stops.

We are invited, in reverential tones quite different from those used at any other time, to "pause for the Angelus" and then, with a supposed nationwide acceptance of its legitimacy and what it means, the rather off-key triplet of peals from a recording of only God knows what church bells rings through the land.

It is more rigid in its timing than anything else broadcast by RTE. The news may be late, the taped interviews may be mixed up, we may have altered arbitrarily the time for the weather forecast and to have turned into a music hall comedy act where the forecaster is asked what he is going to give us today - as though the weather were at his disposal - but the Angelus brooks no such modification. It is relentless and unchanging.

It is a religious "act" by RTE to broadcast the Angelus. It is not a religious service but a religious declaration, quite evidently directed into the airwaves and onto our television screens for the purpose of identifying the station and the listeners or viewers as to their "faith".

It has little to do with the "truth" about the faith of the station. As Mary Kenny said, in a recent article about the Angelus, one would be more likely to encounter "a sticky form of Marxism" in the corridors of Montrose than Catholic triumphalism. But by broadcasting it, RTE conceals reality behind a numb and relentless act of sectarianism.

The station claims that it keeps its broadcasting of the Angelus "under review". It claims, as a balancing factor, the broadcasting of worship by other Christian denominations, adding that this is done "with greater frequency than their size would strictly merit."

If RTE means by this the size within the 26 counties, they may be right. However, as with the rest of us, there is the Belfast Agreement, and there are a million in the wider Irish population of this island to whom the Angelus is an exclusive "act", not applicable to them.

I use the word "act" for the Angelus because it is not worship in the sense in which services broadcast under the remit of public service belong. It is more central and far more implacable than that. And it is deliberately persuasive of a particular creed, making that creed central, and thereby pushing into second, third or other places, the other creeds.

This week RTE used, as its justification for refusing the Bernhard Langer advertisements, Section 65 of the Broadcasting Act, which precludes "persuasion" from matter broadcast by the Station, including advertisements. There is a distinct possibility, given the fact that the the Zion Trust campaign led by Bernhard Langer includes the distribution of a CD and literature, that the court hearing on Monday will lead to a judgment in favour of RTE.

Yet the Station itself continues relentlessly to use "persuasion" of a single religious point of view on a twice-daily basis, every day of the year. It does so, arguably in direct breach of the principal piece of legislation covering what it does. And the only way it can be conclusively challenged is in the courts, a circumstance unlikely at the present time.

RTE claims that it keeps the broadcasting of the Angelus under continuing review, and the points made about it are used as part of that process. Two more distinct attitudes than those of Mary Kenny and Robin Bury would be hard to find.

Mary Kenny's defence of the Angelus, in an article in the Saturday Weekend magazine at the beginning of September, was based on folk traditions and the emotive portrait of peasants standing barefoot in the fields "when it was forbidden to toll a Catholic chapel bell."

She went further: "It was recited by the monks in barren windswept fjords off the south and west coast at a time when it seemed Ireland had been forgotten by civilisation, and Christianity forgotten by the world."

Images of penal times, yet again, were raised in defence of the B Flat Bell, and Mass rocks, and almost everything else that could be thrown into the argument.

Then along came Robin Bury, whose earlier letter had provoked Mary Kenny's article. This time, in a well researched and lengthier response, he points out that the Angelus was essentially a product of the 19th century, and had become part of our folk culture well after the emancipation of the Roman Catholic Church in 1829. Before that, as Cardinal Wiseman made clear, it was unknown in Ireland.

So bang go the barefoot peasants, the folklore and tradition, the idea of the mellow church bells echoing across the countryside. The "poignant, meaningful and beautiful ritual" defended by Mary Kenny was a Roman Catholic Church introduction of the second half of the 19th century.

Moreover, Bury suggests, with quite good supporting evidence, that the strengthening of it as a practice, made increasingly more solid by regular broadcasting in the second half of the 20th century, is consistent with "Catholic triumphalism in a State where the few Protestants left had to batten down the hatches." And Robin Bury goes on: "They have been treated with 'barely repressed tolerance', in the words of FSL Lyons, the eminent historian, and ex-provost of Trinity College, Dublin. In 1984, the ex-Cabinet minister, Dr Noel Browne, a Catholic, wrote: 'The south of Ireland is a Catholic Nationalist State, a state where no Protestant need apply.', It is a State now, of course, that has been legally and constitutionally changed by recent acts and a referendum. Within the past decade we have altered the text of the defining Articles Two and Three in the Constitution and we have become part of the Belfast Agreement.

We have changed the ratio of Catholics to the members of other religions in the territory that is now meant to matter to us all - the 32 Counties - and we have specifically undertaken a new approach. At least, we say we have, and our politicians are attempting to honour their pledges on this.

Not so RTE. What should be a changed agenda for the Station is not reflected in the continued and relentless observance of a specifically Roman Catholic ritual, twice a day, every day, by the national broadcaster. The Station, as Robin Bury claims, is not honouring the Belfast Agreement and the Constitution either in the spirit or the letter of those fundamental documents.

David Trimble, at today's meeting of his party's council, has sterner issues to fight than this one of the Angelus, even though it represents just how little we have moved towards pluralism.

Yet there is something wooden and pitiless in the distance between ourselves and that Protestant and unionist tradition represented by the midday dirge in B Flat.

© 2003 Independent Newspapers Ltd.

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