One of the major fixtures of Northern Catholic lives is happening at the moment in the Lower Falls in Belfast, unknown to many only a few miles away. Yet this is a phenomenon that draws on a history of shared trauma and strengthens a sense of community with each repetition, writes Fionnuala O Connor
A holy conveyor belt, Clonard Novena hums for nine consecutive days. The Redemptorist monastery church that has run it for more than 60 years puts the daily numbers passing through at 10,000.
There are 10 Masses a day, many packed to overflowing. Bunting in papal yellow and white and flags of Marian pale blue drape the surrounding streets.
Northern Protestants, both religious and less so, often point to their own bevy of separate churches as one explanation of unionist division and demoralisation, and openly envy the unifying effect of the church of Rome on the Catholic community. If they knew of it, and many do not, the Clonard Novena would be a perfect illustration. But now the curious can look and listen, without venturing into the Falls. This year, as awed priests keep repeating in their warm-ups before Masses start, the novena "is on the world wide web - we're competition for Big Brother". The crowd sweeps in and out without self-consciousness, and the result may reinforce some prejudices. It should also balance any impression that devotion must have been destroyed by the church's shameful response to priestly paedophilia worldwide.
Here, as elsewhere, many are alienated from the church as an institution. But small schoolchildren in uniform roll around playfully between Masses on the altar steps mid-morning; a young woman in lowcut top and jeans pushes a toddler in buggy past the altar, recognisable on the webcam early in the day and again in the evening. Well after midnight a cleaner swings past with a brush under one arm, making the sketchiest of genuflections while speaking cheerily over her shoulder to a woman in her 70s still sitting in the front pew.
The effect is the opposite of many formal Protestant services. It is also a new slant on a neighbourhood depicted for many years as a job lot, martyrs or murderers according to viewpoint: Gerry Adams's power-base. Sit in the congregation and observation blurs the stereotypes.
A smartly-dressed young woman sits next an old man in shabby cardigan, Filipino hospital staff still in uniform follow the hymns with difficulty. A couple in their 40s lean affectionately towards each other and joke in whispers. Young faces concentrate fiercely on a sermon from an elderly Galway priest, who tells them he spent most of his priesthood here during the Troubles, is glad to be back "now the helicopters and soldiers are gone", urges them to think beyond material things, to give money that might have been spent on this year's second holiday to the Third World, and adds: "...married couples, think about having another child." Clonard, the word alone used to denote the monastery, suggests many things to outsiders. People from the nearby Shankill sheltered from the Blitz with Clonard people in the monastery crypt, inspiring a long-lived "Mission for non-Catholics". Protestant clergy speak each year at the novena. Fr Alec Reid lived here for years, and Clonard hosted early meetings of what became the peace process.
The novena attendance famously comes from farther afield than the district, drawn by the difference from parish churches but also by the supposed efficacy of "intentions", written on slips provided, dropped into boxes round the church, a proportion of them read aloud from the altar.
They range from mundane to heart-breaking and are heard in silence, even among overflow crowds in the fading light beyond the church walls.
Church and adjacent monastery rise up now in the middle of fine new housing, where once they loomed over poor streets. The new streets are full of memorials. Yards away the revamped "peaceline" marks the course of terror and destruction nearly 40 years ago. Clonard dominates the skyline between Shankill and Falls. People who agree on little else accept that this was where the Troubles began in earnest in August 1969 and the Provisional IRA was born, with mobs burning houses, police unable or unwilling to stop them, guns coming out.
The official report by Lord Scarman found that "the Protestants began the fighting and were responsible for most of the destruction" in the belief that Catholics had made "an assault on them and the established order of the province". Clonard is a different place now, in another century, and media which would once have shied away from the novena are now intrigued. The warm-up priests had another novelty to announce this year: a BBC documentary. Anyone with anecdotes to tell should get in touch - but the congregation should try not to be distracted by BBC crew around the altar. The terrors of 1969 seemed a long way off.