Those little white dresses still leave me cold

UPFRONT:MY EIGHT-YEAR-OLD niece calls for a chat. Usually, she just e-mails using shouty capital letters: "ROISIN, DO YOU WANT TO DO SOMETHING WITH ME THIS SATTERDAY? I WOULD LIKE TO DO SOMETHING WITH YOU!!! LOVE HB. XXXXX".

But this time she calls me on the mobile. It’s important. “Why?” she asks with the gravitas usually reserved for deciding which film we are going see next, “do I have to make my Communion?”

I'm a bit thrown by this so I buy some time by talking about the real life feasibility of running a Hotel for Dogs, which is the next movie on our list.

I think back to eight years ago when I stood in a church in Northern Ireland and she screamed the place down and I mimed the words that turned me into her Fairy Godmother. Since then I’ve been straight with her about my own spirituality whenever she has asked. “No, I’m not a Catholic,” I’ve told her. “No, I wouldn’t get married in a church.” Or “No, that’s right, the twins will not be getting baptised.”

Today she wants to know why she has to put on a frilly white dress, walk down the aisle of a church and eat crispy bread that she will be asked to believe has been transformed into the body of Jesus Christ. It is, I tell her, a good question.

The spiritual quandary has been sparked by a good friend in her class who belongs to a different religion. “She doesn’t have to make her Communion or make a confession, so why do I?” wonders HB.

I take a deep breath and do what I think is the right thing. I tell her how she was baptised into that religion as a baby. How her parents chose to send her to a Catholic school. I explain that what happens in a Catholic school is you make your Communion and your Confirmation and then when you are older you can decide whether that religion is really the one for you.

This freedom to choose later on seems to satisfy her. “So I could decide to be a Buddhist when I am older?” she asks. “Yes, or you could stay a Catholic or become any other religion or no religion,” I tell her.

With that theological matter out of the way we decide for definite on Hotel For Dogsand she makes me promise not to fall asleep and snore in the cinema the way I did during the interminable Secret of Moonacre. "I can't promise anything," I say.

I must have mellowed, I think, putting down the phone. I seem to have moved on from my ranty, anti-organised-religion stance to a place where I can see how the Catholic indoctrination most of us are subjected to in this country from birth – the Confession, the Communion, the Confirmation, the rules and regulations governing sex and marriage – might just be harmless rites-of-passage.

Maybe I will baptise the twins. Sure what harm can it do? Not going down that road would be like denying them part of their culture. And the multi-denominational school is a bit further away than I’d like, making it a much more inconvenient choice. Time for a rethink, I think. Or maybe it’s just the pregnancy hormones.

It’s my mother who, a few days later, tells me about the story of the nine-year-old pregnant girl who was allegedly raped by her stepfather. She says: “There’s a nine-year-old-girl in Brazil who became pregnant after being raped. Her mother took her for an abortion and now a Catholic archbishop there has excommunicated the mother and the doctors who performed the abortion.”

I read how the little girl was four months pregnant and carrying twins. I read about how in Brazil abortion is illlegal, except in cases of rape or when there is a threat to the mother’s life. The girl weighed 36 kg. Doctors decided that carrying twins to term would be a threat to her life. They said her uterus did not have the capacity to contain one child, let alone two.

All of this was irrelevant to Archbishop José Cardoso Sobrinho who insisted “God’s law is above any human law . . . this human law has no value.” He told reporters that while the mother and doctors involved would be excommunicated the stepfather would not be kicked out of the church because even though he had committed a “heinous crime . . . the abortion was more serious.” The child herself would not be excommunicated because of her age, he said.

In Rome, a senior Vatican Cardinal, Giovanni Battista Re, head of the Catholic Church’s Congregation for Bishops, came out in support of the Brazilian archbishop. “Life must always be protected, the attack on the Brazilian church is unjustified,” he said.

I wonder what Archbishop Diarmuid Martin, the man being held up as the great white progressive hope of the Catholic Church in Ireland, would have to say about all of this. But then what can he say? The Brazilian archbishop and the man in the Vatican are only pointing out what is true according to canon law. Excommunication is automatic for those who participate in abortion. This is the word of the Catholic church.

And as appalled as I am about the girl’s plight, I can’t help feeling a little bit sorry for the Brazilian archbishop who as a committed member of the Catholic Church is only following orders. As he told Time magazine, the Vatican “rejects” believers who pick and choose their issues.

Rome, he said, “is not going to open the door to anyone just to get more members . . . we know that people have other ideas, but if they do, then they are not Catholics. We want people who adhere to God’s laws.”

Other ideas. Ideas about Communion parties with bouncy castles and church weddings with all the trimmings, as well as mad ideas about having sex before marriage and contraception on demand. Ideas, say, about caring for and protecting nine-year-old girls who fall pregnant with twins after being raped, for years allegedly, by their stepfather.

I hope HB, who turns nine years old herself next November, doesn’t ask me again why she has to make her Communion. Because, despite what I told her, the truth is I don’t know why and I never will.