It has become common in recent years to declare the end of Catholic Ireland. By now, it’s a familiar story: the clerical abuse scandals which made headlines in the 1990s so undermined the institution that it has been on a slow slide into irrelevance since, with Friday’s vote to repeal the country’s ban on abortion the latest — and in some ways, most significant — in a string of losses that have included the decriminalization of homosexuality and divorce and the legalization of same-sex marriage.

The importance of Friday’s vote as a blow to the institutional Catholic Church should not be understated. At times, it seemed as much a referendum on the church’s historic treatment of women as it was about abortion itself. Stories dating back decades of women who had been at the receiving end of the church’s intolerance have not lost their power to rouse public anger.

But if it’s clear that the institution of the church no longer commands the moral authority or the loyalty in Ireland that it once did, the end of Catholic Ireland, too, is an overstatement. Ireland remains defined by its relationship with Catholicism, because it has yet to develop another way to be. What isn’t yet clear is what the social and political consequences of this new relationship with the church are.

DUBLIN — Ireland voted decisively to repeal one of the world’s more restrictive abortion bans, sweeping aside generations of conservative patriarchy and dealing the latest in a series of stinging rebukes to the Roman Catholic Church.

The surprising landslide, reflected in the results announced on Saturday, cemented the nation’s liberal shift at a time when right-wing populism is on the rise in Europe and the Trump administration is imposing curbs on abortion rights in the United States. In the past three years alone, Ireland has installed a gay man as prime minister and has voted in another referendum to allow same-sex marriage.

But this was a particularly wrenching issue for Irish voters, even for supporters of the measure. And it was not clear until the end that the momentum toward socially liberal policies would be powerful enough to sweep away deeply ingrained opposition to abortion.

VATICAN CITY (Reuters) - Pope Francis warned Italian bishops this week to vet carefully applicants to the priesthood and reject anyone they suspected might be homosexual, local media reported on Thursday.