I thought I’d long since left it all behind but lately I’m starting to wonder, when do you stop being a Catholic?
Can you, in fact, ever stop once you have been born and raised in the faith?
I ask because I was recently visiting a beautiful cathedral in a city abroad. It was a very short break but I can’t resist a beautiful church.
That in itself is not a signifier of some left over faith.
I think of a church the way I would a library or a walk through a lovely forest. They are spaces that take you out of the noise and the ceaseless moving.
Whenever I’m in central London, for instance, there’s a church between Oxford St and Tottenham Court Road, St Patrick’s, that I’ll often sit in for a while and shut the city out.
I was planning to do just that in the cathedral abroad and looking forward to admiring some of the splendour of the building.
At first when I went in I didn’t realise there was actually a mass taking place.
Now, hands up, normally I avoid mass. I’ve long had a problem with the Church and its history and its politics.
The Ryan Report here in Ireland was I think the final cut off point for me.
For the purposes of writing a few columns I read the Ryan Report in great detail and by the end I never wanted to set foot in a church again.
Add in the Magdalene Laundries, the Cloyne Report, the Murphy Report and the Catholic part of me felt nothing but shame.
I genuinely believed, after reading the horror and the cover up of the horror committed against children in those reports, that any kind of other organisation would simply be wound up and banned.
Yet here I was inside the door of the cathedral and as I blessed myself from the font I noticed there was actually a mass going on and not wanting to stay began to leave.
As I turned I had to step aside as a group of fellow tourists entered. Only then did I realise that there were groups of tourists all around the church taking photographs and videoing and using selfie-sticks.
Now I thought my Irish Catholic upbringing had left me with just a simple fondness for church buildings and everything else to do with the religion of my upbringing I had walked away from.
But on seeing people filming and taking photographs whilst there was a mass going on I was quite appalled.
I didn’t know what to think. If nothing else, isn’t such behaviour simply, very bad manners?
I almost wanted to stop someone and say, you do know there is a mass going on here, don’t you?
I wanted to point out that these people were at worship and that this wasn’t merely a performance put on for tourists but something intrinsically important to them.
So I walked out feeling aggrieved on behalf of the faithful, the Catholics at prayer.
Not far from where I live there is an old mass rock where people gathered to say open air mass during a time when Catholics were being persecuted.
Like an old church or a library or a forest path it is a special place to walk to and to stop by and sit.
And I started to think to myself, I’m a self-declared renegade from the Church. I have turned my back on it and am appalled by it.
Then I’m at the mass rock, in an old church, getting offended at disrespect for the mass.
Have I really left? And I’m back where I started, asking myself, when do you stop being a Catholic? Do you ever really stop?
Is it possible to really walk away from and leave behind that level of influence?
After all, growing up an Irish Catholic in Britain, religion isn’t simply something you do at the weekends. I wonder.
I wonder if you think you’re out but you’re not.
I wonder if all the time I’ve believed I wasn’t a Catholic anymore that I still really was.
I can’t ever, I admit, imagine a time when me and the Church are going to sit down happily together. As recently as 2015 I was voting in favour of love and same-sex marriage and the Church was wanting to deny that.
No, I can’t see us being close friends anytime soon.
But I did think we were strangers and always would be and now I’m not so sure.
