Catholicism is having a moment: A new generation finds solace in the Confession box and sense of community

I’m supposed to meet my friend Sophie for Sunday lunch. I text her and the ticks don’t go blue. “Sorry,” she finally replies, “I was at Mass. 4pm?” This is late for Sunday lunch, which I don’t mention, and Sophie’s attendance at Sunday Mass is a new development, which I don’t mention either. She’s recently gone through a break-up, and now she has returned to Catholicism. I don’t think it’s a coincidence.

It’s not a reaction that’s specific to my friend, this urge to turn to the church after a bad break-up. A few days before our postponed get-together, I see a meme on Twitter that reads: “Bro hurt me so bad I became Catholic”. A recent post on Quora – a forum-based website where users can anonymously ask for advice – reads: “Can you pray your ex back?”

On the Catholic-specific area of Reddit, with nearly 150,000 active members, young people ask if anyone has joined or returned to the faith “because of a bad relationship”. On YouTube, vloggers give out advice on “how to heal from a bad break-up (as a Catholic)” and “the do’s and don’ts of breaking up” presented by Catholic matchmakers.

One man, a lapsed Catholic that Sophie and I both know, gets drunk at parties and asks women when they last confessed their sins to a priest

In the online world, these kinds of references and posts are less surprising than you might think. Catholicism has, for the past few years, enjoyed a resurgence of cultural cachet on the internet. Online, it has become a shorthand for a certain kind of feminine “aesthetic”, usually communicated through films such as The Virgin Suicides and the “heavenly bodies”-themed 2018 Met Gala, not to mention memes of Joan of Arc looking pious and beautiful.

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I asked some friends, who are in their mid-20s to early-30s, about their connection to the church. Most of them are what the Catholic Church would call “lapsed Catholics” – the classification most of us fall into when we stop attending Mass regularly, while still feeling nostalgic or conflicted about the trappings of the faith.

They tell me vague stories about lighting candles and even perhaps going to Confession. The church offers a kind of free therapy, they say, particularly after a bad relationship experience. “Cultural Catholicism”, as it’s sometimes known, seems particularly common among the Irish diaspora; these are the types of people who, like myself, might wear a St Christopher medal, but would struggle to remember how to say a rosary.

For these kinds of people, priests and deacons and nuns aren’t exactly role-models, or figures of awe or fear. Most of us would be more likely to turn to friends, or the BetterHelp app, for advice and comfort rather than a person of the cloth.

But what about when your friends are tired of listening, and the waiting lists for therapy are too long? Is there something appealing in knowing you can tell someone behind a screen your worst thoughts, knowing you won’t be judged for them in the same way you might be in a WhatsApp groupchat? And is it even more appealing if you’re confessing simply for the thrill of Confession rather than believing you’re going to be absolved?

One man, a lapsed Catholic that Sophie and I both know, gets drunk at parties and asks women when they last confessed their sins to a priest. After they tell him, he reveals that he does it usually after cheating on his girlfriend. A quick fix, maybe. But for women who have been cheated on, invoking religion is also far from out of the question.

“If you’ve been religious or a Christian at any point, there is a tendency, when you’re really sad, to turn to God and pray to them,” one friend says. “Obviously God doesn’t answer those prayers. But that’s just because, we’ve got to believe, he’s got a bigger plan.”

“Once when I was about 24 and going through another big phase of unrequited love, I went to St Valentine’s shrine in Dublin,” says Sophie, now 29 and living in London. “I sent a prayer to God to, you know, make this guy see sense, or send him to me. Obviously, God did not answer.”

“I like the icons you can pray to,” she adds, “St Bridget, the Virgin Mary, the Little Flower. I think the rhythms of it all, the repetition, the candles, it’s all just helpful, healing. It’s almost like a self-soothing thing. Because when you go through a break-up, you are basically grief-stricken.”

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If it sounds glib to reduce religion to an antidote for the pain of lost love, then it’s perhaps more palatable to think of it as a conduit for community and connection, and understandable that this need would become more acute at a time in your life when you lose your main source of both.

As a fairweather lapsed Catholic now living in London, I’ve often returned to church during periods of great stress, or after break-ups, or, most often, when I’m feeling homesick. There’s something about the trappings of Catholicism, the things Sophie talks about, the candles and the incense and the familiarity of the words, that make you feel closer to home and to good memories. That’s the case particularly when you’re alone and the majority of your short-term memory is filled up with terrible ones.

“The main concern is just being in touch with one another,” says Rina Bird, founder of Young Catholic Network UK (YouCan), a charitable organisation set up to bring Catholics aged 18-35 together to form a kind of community based on retreats, pilgrimages, social meet-ups and its own WhatsApp group, where they recite the Angelus together twice a day.

“They’re not going to tell me everything,” Bird says. “They have their own private reasons. They’re finding their faith, and then trying to find a community of people who think the same.”

For young Irish women in particular, the Catholic Church has been a paragon of oppression as much as a place of sanctuary

Bird, an adult convert, set up YouCan in late 2019 when she became aware of a “dwindling number of our young Catholics”. “We have a lot of men who have drifted away from the faith in maybe their late teens,” she says. “They might make their Confirmation at 14 and then fall away. And then they’re away for some years. And then they come back, sometimes at university where there’s a good chaplaincy.”

It is a take that is echoed by Rose Lyddon, who first embraced religion when she started at university. A medieval historian who writes on Catholic theology, Lyddon wasn’t raised in a religious family. She initially became Anglican at university before finding Catholicism.

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“I don’t think I would have ever gone into a Catholic church until my [then] boyfriend took me in. Initially I was scared of the oratory. It’s very imposing. I never went through a spiritual but not religious phase. I went straight to institutional religion.”

Lyddon was baptised in her college chapel, which she describes as welcoming even for those who aren’t religious, but want to find community. “The chaplain was so lovely. We’d have tea and cake days, and everyone would sit in the office and cry and chat. It was that sense of what I now know of as Christian hospitality and charity. It was very inclusive and welcoming.”

Being introduced to faith through a relationship that subsequently ends is a tricky space to navigate, though. “I’d only dated non-religious people before, and I think it is different once you have shared spiritual ground,” says Lyddon. “But at this point I have enough of my own relationship with faith.”

The modern world, we’re frequently told, is a phenomenally lonely place, even when viewed from outside of the context of romantic relationships. Gen Z in particular, is apparently in the grips of a “loneliness epidemic”, with almost three-quarters, according to one survey, reporting they feel or are alone “nearly every day”.

Meanwhile, church attendance is dwindling as we become more secular and individualistic. Attendance never bounced back from the hit it took during the pandemic, with many pews still empty years later. In England, where YouCan is based, one survey reports a decline of more than 72 per cent in attendance rates.

That’s not to say that secularisation is the reason why people are lonely, particularly when it comes to young people in Ireland and Britain. There are other important structural issues in these countries that contribute to a sense of disillusionment in our younger generations and put pressure on our collective mental health; the housing crisis, the lack of jobs and investment outside capital cities; the loss of years of our life to lockdowns, years that would have been spent socialising with each other.

Some have argued that dating app culture has not helped our loneliness epidemic, particularly from the perspective of romantic relationships; there’s an idea that it makes us think of one another as disposable, that there’s always more fish in the sea. Millennials and Zoomers approach their middle age with the idea that they might never own property or earn enough to start a family. They’re also conscious that the planet they exist on is getting hotter.

I think if there is a God, he has more to be thinking about than the worst men Hinge has to offer

It’s a bleak picture, and it’s obviously not bleak just because we don’t bother going to Mass any more.

But at the same time, it’s obvious that we’re looking for meaning in our lives, meaning outside of our jobs, and so perhaps it’s unsurprising that one of the things we’re trying on for size is organised religion.

It’s a complicated picture here too. For young Irish women in particular, the Catholic Church has been a paragon of oppression as much as a place of sanctuary. The campaign to repeal the Eighth Amendment and bring abortion rights to Ireland only took place in 2018. The gay marriage referendum took place just three years before that. The exposure of the church’s systemic, worldwide sexual abuse of children was also exposed within our lifetimes. Ireland’s legal and social conservatism can be attributed, in large part, to the Catholic Church’s outsize influence on our culture.

But it’s also understandable that some of us inevitably, albeit tentatively, make our way back towards it, to find a community, a human or spiritual connection, even if we remain uncomfortable with the church as an institution and a form of oppression.

You only need to take a look at recent young Irish fiction, particularly by women authors, to see that this kind of dichotomy – spirituality as a form of escape and connection, and the church itself as a source of pain or oppression – emerging in our country’s millennial psyche.

In Rachel Connolly’s debut novel Lazy City, published last year, protagonist Erin frequently prays to deal with the grief of losing her best friend. She oscillates between identifying as a Catholic, or “religious but not Catholic”.

“I know what’s wrong with the Catholic Church,” Erin tells us in the novel. “I don’t like most of the rules but I like the ceremony of it. And there is a feeling I used to get, sometimes, when I was young and religion seemed more real, as if there was something more. Something joining the things that happen together, or something more between us; I can’t explain it any better than that. Whether I’m religious or not, whatever I think about it, I grew up with that feeling so I can’t forget about it, and maybe that’s all religion is anyway: having that feeling or remembering the feeling of having it.”

Through grief, loss, love and difficulty, faith forms part of Erin’s life. Connolly is from a Catholic community, but, as she has said, she identifies as not being part of “a proper true Catholic” family, despite the fact that she, like many lapsed millennial Catholics, grew up around shrines and rosary beads.

“In the Catholic imagination, there is always this holier and more Catholic person sitting just to the left,” Connolly told Irish writer Mark O’Connell in an interview. “I thought, ‘A church is a place where [Erin] could go and sit and think in this quite natural way.”

For Erin, the church is a meditative arena, a place for introspection, a kind of spiritual therapy.

Catholicism, in various guises, exists in the work of Sally Rooney too. In her novel Normal People, Connell famously tells Marianne: “I’m not a religious person Marianne but I do sometimes think God made you for me.”

The characters of Rooney’s Beautiful World, Where Are You discuss religion at length, and whether or not it’s weird to go to Mass as an educated adult. In her book Conversations With Friends, lead character Frances muses that it’s “not that God existed in any material way but as a shared cultural practice so widespread that it came to seem materially real, like language or gender”.

This idea that God might not need to exist to be a shared practice that makes us feel less alone, is one that feels easy to understand and to relate to, no matter what we actually believe, and no matter what we think should be the extent of the church’s influence on society or community.

“Being able to go in and light candles for people you really care about or who you wish well, even if you don’t get along with them, is helpful,” says Sophie, when I ask her about this. “I’ve certainly lit a lot of candles for my ex. It’s a reflective space. That reflective space of the church can help you.”

I think if there is a God, he has more to be thinking about than the worst men Hinge has to offer. I choose not to tell her this.