When I was still in school, I managed to escape the parental home (with permission) and visit a friend who had already started college. It was a Saturday night, and we did, or attempted to do, the things young fellas that age get up to.
But the following morning, he looked at me a bit sheepishly and asked: do you want to go to Mass?
The question didn’t have that much to do with religion or belief. More habit: he was well aware that when still living with your parents in a small town, not going to Mass wasn’t an option. It wasn’t that my parents were particularly strict for the time. It was just that everyone went to Mass. You didn’t think about it. To be suddenly presented with a choice in the matter, to not do something I had been doing every Sunday of my life – the prospect of it felt distinctly weird.
We didn’t go to Mass.
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And the weird thing was, it didn’t leave me feeling weird at all. All it illuminated was that I had been mindlessly going to church every Sunday because that’s what was expected of me. I also knew that when I returned home, I would keep going: because an hour a week of my time wasn’t worth rowing with my parents about. Because they would find my sudden burst of heathenism distressing. They’d want to know what brought it about or who was influencing me. It might escalate into alerting my school or bringing in emergency priests to give me a spiritual once-over.
I’m making it sound like teenage Me was rational and pragmatic. I wasn’t. I was mouthy and frothed over with ill-thought-out opinions. I gave my parents plenty of reasons to worry. It was just that on the subject of Mass-going – and belief in general – I wasn’t that pushed. It was like being born into a family, and living in a town, where everyone was mad into golf and talked about it incessantly. But I didn’t really like golf. I didn’t want to say it out loud because it would hurt my family’s feelings. And if I said it to anyone else, they’d try to convince me how great golf is: and I’d have to listen to more talking about golf.
It never felt to me like I rebelled against being a Catholic: it was more a realisation that I had never been one. Despite all the indoctrination, it had never taken. If it was possible to slice open my brain to ascertain how I categorise things, golf and Catholicism would be in the same section. Except golf has more consistent rules.
The Magdalene laundries, the child-abuse horrors, the crass hypocrisies: these, of course, added to the decline of the Catholic Church in this country. Yet it was a process that was happening anyway. Money, modernity and education had already been bringing many people to the view that they didn’t need an organised religion; that they never had. If any theistic belief remained, it was a personal theology. The one force bishops couldn’t overcome was indifference.
Yet, as you’ve probably been witnessing recently, thousands of parents are content to dress up their children and bring them to a church they probably haven’t been inside for years, if ever. They’ll sit through Mass and the First Communion rite and the next day be unable to recall one syllable that came out of the priest’s mouth.
[ Why does the Catholic Church continue to allow this annual charade?Opens in new window ]
This could be viewed as an intriguing social adaptation. Drained of its power through indifference, a religious rite has become secularised, with the willing – if unwitting – co-operation of the institution that invented it. It’s the parents who ultimately define the day’s meaning; not the institution.
Of course you could argue that all those parents are hypocrites. If you’re going to have your birthday party in the golf club, you really should be a golfer.
