Another year, another child due to make his Communion or Confirmation

Misery loves company, allegedly. Hypocrisy too, it seems, if the replies I received recently when I asked parents about the upcoming Communion and Confirmation season are anything to go by.

When you’ve as many children as I have, there is always someone due to receive one or other sacrament. Each September, as children return to school with their individually labelled twistables, pencils, pens, rubbers and parers, only two things are certain — someone in the family will be due to make their Communion or Confirmation that year, and my children won’t have a crayon to their name by the end of the first week.

It is as certain as night becomes day, and night again and so on until finally all those pesky kids are reared and have to buy their own stationery.

Similar was the advice around weaning, staggering feeds, sleep training, as the confidence of having done it before was undermined by the latest best practice advice

And so, as the season beckons, another child is due to make his Confirmation. The thing about having done things so many times before is you can be lured into a false sense of security. The problem is the goalposts keep moving. When I was pregnant with my first child, my then GP said to me that it was grand to have a glass of wine. In fact, she added, she’d almost recommend it because pregnancy is stressful enough. By the time I was a few children in, that advice had completely changed, and even that one glass of wine was a definite no-no.

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Similar was the advice around weaning, staggering feeds, sleep training, as the confidence of having done it before was undermined by the latest best practice advice.

I remember clearly, the first time I had a child making her Communion. The parents were to attend a meeting where dates would be confirmed and an outline of preparations would be explained. It was late September and the Communion was a mere eight months away. “It’s ridiculous,” one mother exclaimed. “There won’t be a caterer left in South County Dublin.”

Bouncy castle Catholics, I think my sort is called. I prefer to go by a la carte Catholic — for one, bouncy castles are pretty hard to get at that time of the year too. I pick and choose the bits I accept and actively teach my children the bits we utterly reject. It’s the only way I can make my peace with it, and even at that, it’s a very troubled peace. But I didn’t want them to have nothing, so here we are.

I asked other parents their thoughts. With Communions and Confirmations almost forming part of our culture, I wondered how many people went through it because they felt they had to, rather than because they wanted to. The results were perhaps a little surprising. While there’s nothing scientific about social media polls, almost 70 per cent of parents who responded said they believed in God and wanted their children to make their Communion and Confirmation on that basis. But only 15 per cent said they accepted all the church’s teachings.

“Oh, I feel normal now. Thank you,” one mother replied as she watched the results unfold. She wasn’t the only one, I thought. But still, guiltily.

When you’re an old hand at Communions and Confirmations, you expect to know the drill. And so I presumed this year, things would take place as they usually do, with the exception of that time a pandemic got in the way. I wholly agree that the sacraments need to come out of schools. It’s not fair that any child should feel excluded or that any parent should feel they need to go through with something because everyone else is doing it.

I don’t know what the Confirmation will be like when the day comes around

I got a rude awakening all the same when that’s exactly what happened to this year’s Confirmation. We may have done it all before, so many times, but it’s different now.

“Sing along,” the priest gently encouraged the children during their recent Ceremony of Light. Only no child sang, because no child knew the words. And us parents, sitting in the pews, thinking how different it all seemed, got an insight into the huge amount of work our children’s wonderful teachers had done in the past, to prepare our children for these occasions.

I don’t know what the Confirmation will be like when the day comes around. I just know that I won’t be able to leave it to the school anymore to do most of the preparation for my other children. But am I ready to get more involved when I reject so many of the church’s positions?

For now, I am a hypocrite. But in this regard, it’s all I can be.