THERE are days when I read about the Catholic Church and feel a strange mix of familiarity and disbelief.
This week it was the news from North Carolina that did it.
A bishop, we are told, has decided that altar rails and kneelers are to be removed from churches in his diocese, in the interests of “unity”.
The faithful may kneel if they insist, but they must not be helped to do so. Standing, apparently, is the correct posture now.
I read this twice, thinking, eh? Surely I must have misunderstood. I re-read. I hadn’t got it wrong.
As if the Catholic Church didn’t have enough issues to deal with, yet this bishop is worried about altar rails.
Meanwhile, the world is not in a settled place. War in the Holy Land. The seemingly endless conflict grinding on in Ukraine.
Europe, as one politician memorably put it, is discovering that its “holiday from history” is over. Closer to home, people are anxious about everything from housing to healthcare.
And somewhere in the middle of all this, a serious amount of time and ecclesiastical energy is being devoted to whether someone receiving Communion is allowed to kneel comfortably.
Are they serious?
I am not a daily Mass-goer. I am culturally Catholic, andI still feel the tug of spirituality at certain moments.
One thing I do know, instinctively, is that Communion is not just another item on the order of service. For many people, it is the most intimate moment of the week.
To police the posture of that moment seems beyond ridicule.
Growing up, kneeling was simply what you did.
You knelt for prayers, knelt for Communion, knelt when you were in trouble.
Standing was what you did at bus stops and funerals.
Nobody explained this. It was muscle memory, handed down with the rosary beads and the quiet instruction to “behave yourself now, you bold girl”.
Perhaps that is what makes this all feel so strange. The Church has always insisted that it deals in eternal matters, in mysteries that outlast fashion and taste.
And yet here it is, getting itself tied in knots over furniture and foot positions.
The justification, as far as I can tell, is unity. Kneeling, we are told, is no more reverent than standing. A uniform posture will bring people together.
What also struck me was the human detail that crept through the reports. Elderly women kneeling anyway, then needing help to stand.
Priests privately despairing. Parishioners bewildered. This is not abstract theology. This is people’s bodies, habits, comfort, dignity.
There is something oddly modern about all this — the managerial instinct to smooth out difference, to standardise experience, to remove anything that looks old-fashioned or awkward.
And it sits uneasily with an institution that is supposed to make room for mystery, contradiction and, above all, mercy.
I found myself thinking of the Church I grew up with, for all its many faults. It had a remarkable capacity to worry about the wrong things while the world burned around it.
It worried about hair length, skirt length, dancing, the Latin Mass, the English Mass — and often missed the bigger call to compassion and care.
On the other hand, just across the border in Northern Ireland, the Catholic Church was a bulwark during the Troubles. Thinking about that makes this nonsense about kneeling utterly laughable.
People come to church now carrying more than they used to. Fewer of them come, for one thing, and those who do are often bruised by life, and sometimes by the Church itself.
They are not there for choreography. They are there for a moment of stillness, of meaning.
If they choose to kneel for that moment — carefully, painfully, devoutly — it is hard to see how that threatens anyone.
The Catholic Church faces enormous questions, not least the horrific deeds of some clergy and others in the past.
It also has to speak to a fractured world and attempt to give some moral lead. Compared to those challenges, kneelers feel very small indeed.
History is knocking loudly at the door.
One might think it deserves more attention than worrying about the furniture.
See More: Catholic Church, Ireland
