LAST SUNDAY I did something I had not done in a very, very long time, something that I once did with a regularity that might, if it weren’t such a shockingly bad pun, be described as religious. In short, I went to Sunday Mass. I was prompted both by curiosity about how or whether the Dublin 7 priests would bring up the Murphy report, and by a long-held disaffection with the institution that was its subject. And with the decision to return to a ritual I’d long left behind came childhood memories of Sundays past that had been buried under my adult agnosticism.
Even before I stepped into the stone church in Stoneybatter, the day had taken on a new – or reverted to an old – rhythm of Mass preparations and clock-watchings. Nibbling toast moments before Masstime brought a sinner’s thrill that I was thereby making myself ineligible for Communion, but even that shiver of daring was a reminder of how deeply ingrained in me were the rules of the Catholic church, no matter how many I’d broken.
On my short walk to the church through the Stoneybatter streets, I noticed for the first time the trickle of folk walking in the same direction, a gravitational pull that I had never taken in until I joined it. For a moment I felt the joy of being part of something again, a movement, a sharing, a collective impulse which is much of the appeal of worship. Entering the church gates was as recognisable a reflex to me as warming the pot before making tea. It was like coming home, but to a home where terrible evil had occurred, been facilitated and covered up.
Pushing through the heavy open doors felt like stepping into a former life. My senses throbbed in recognition: the squeak of the old wood swinging on its hinges, the shuffle and hollow, echoing footfall on the cold marble floor, the particular discomfort of a thin, straight-backed wooden pew, and the feel of it brushing against my posterior as I went to kneel on the stretch of red cushion provided, my elbows on the pew in front.
All around me were hatted old ladies, reminding me of my scarved grandmothers, and coughing gentlemen blessing themselves repeatedly in a flurry of fingers and hands and touched lips and chests. The stained glass trained light across a distant altar and I was a daydreaming six-year-old again, at once restless and lulled by the drone of adult murmurs, bored and eager for distraction.
The dingle of the bell announcing the priest’s arrival vibrated in my daydream, and I came back to the present, while my body worked from its physical memory standing, kneeling, sitting where appropriate, remembering everything I’d chosen to forget.
I had chosen thus because the church of my childhood and I had diverged on points of doctrine and faith long before the current slew of reports made public what this institution had worked so hard to keep private. Yet there is a sadness in me that the rituals of my childhood, my access to another time in my life, a huge part of my cultural heritage, that all of these are channelled through an institution that did such damage to the childhood of others. Other six- year-olds peeking through clasped hands at the backs of pious adults around them, restless, bored, utterly vulnerable.
Though the Catholic Church and I fell out soon afterwards, I went through a phase as a child, of fervent piety. Such was my embrace of religion that I even took to sleeping with our family’s small “Child of Prague” statue on a nightly basis, without understanding that it was the same Catholic culture that helped foster the fears that required such comfort. I also took to attending Mass with increasing fervour, and struggled nightly to fall asleep with my arms crossed to ensure safe passage to a heaven that I knew left unbaptised babies in limbo.
It was a phase. I grew out of it as it dawned on me that the church didn’t even see me as an equal member, disallowed as I was as a woman from entering the priesthood, never mind becoming Pope. I didn’t believe the men in charge when they said that contraception was wrong, that homosexuality was wrong, that sex outside marriage was wrong, that eating breakfast late was wrong: so I stopped listening.
Last week I returned to hear what they had to say about the recent, horrific revelations. So much remained unchanged – the service, the solemnity, the sounds and sights of the cultural heritage I now reject – except for an unexpected interruption by a woman who took to the altar as the sermon ended to denounce the church. Such an attack on its authority would never have been countenanced back when I was being confirmed by one of the bishops whose name now appears in the Murphy report. It was, tellingly, the first time I’d ever heard a woman preach from a Catholic altar.
“Life is changed,” read the banner hanging from the pulpit. Too right, I thought from my seat in the pew at the back, recalling the different world my six-year-old self had inhabited. Then I stood up and the rest of the text came into view: “Life is changed. Not ended.” Thankfully my life has changed since the days when the Child of Prague was my bedfellow, even if the Catholic Church has not. I walked out the heavy doors into the rest of my reclaimed Sunday, grateful for what I know now was a lucky childhood, but also for my grown-up freedom to decide which parts of it to leave behind.
fionamccann@irishtimes.com