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I know how to behave in a church and I ticked the box for ‘Roman Catholic’ on the census. But I am not a Catholic

Rite & Reason: Going to church, attending Mass or engaging with the Catholic Church in any meaningful way has always felt, to me, like acting

My parents, like most of their peers, recoiled from the Church after the abuse scandal broke
My parents, like most of their peers, recoiled from the Church after the abuse scandal broke
Alex Connolly
Sun Nov 10 2024 - 00:30

On Sunday April 3rd, 2022, I was one of the 3.5 million Irish people who ticked a box marked “Roman Catholic” on an official census form. I don’t remember filling the form out. I probably didn’t think much of it. It was April: exam season was around the corner and I probably didn’t feel like doing the internal work needed to interrogate my religious beliefs. I did what I have been conditioned to do, growing up in Ireland. I ticked “Roman Catholic” and moved on with my life.

Almost 70 per cent of the people in Ireland claimed to be Catholic on their census forms back in 2022. This number seems impossible. How can more than two-thirds of the country claim to be Catholic when the Church in Ireland is battling dwindling attendances, a reduction in the number of dioceses and a crippling lack of vocations? The maths doesn’t add up.

The answer is simple: people like me are the problem. I am part of what I would call Ireland’s “culturally Catholic” generation. I was born at the end of the 1990s and grew up in a country that was completely distinct from the Ireland of the previous millennium.

Between the Celtic Tiger, the rise of neoliberalism, the advent of the internet and the unprecedented economic crisis of 2008, a huge amount changed in a few short years. While these cultural factors certainly influenced my childhood, I believe that my peers and I have been most shaped by the fact that we grew up in the wake of the Catholic Church abuse scandal.

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Whereas generations of people in Ireland had been connected by their shared faith, their shared commitment to the Church and their shared Christian values, I was raised in a state of semi-secular disconnect. My parents, like most of their peers, recoiled from the Church after the scandal broke. The tether that connected my family to the Catholic Church broke and nothing else took its place. As such, we never stopped “being” Catholic despite the fact we stopped attending church, praying, reading scripture or essentially acting like Christians in any meaningful way. This experience, unfortunately, is the rule rather than the exception among my peers.

This upbringing has left me in a strange state of limbo. I don’t feel like a Christian but I know how I am supposed to act in church; I know when to stand, when to kneel, what to say and how to dress. I’ve been conditioned to be comfortable in church but I’ve never been taught to take religion seriously.

Ireland’s primary schools, institutions that claim to be couched in the values of the Catholic Church, teach children how to “be” Christian in the broadest sense. My peers and I were taught how to create the appearance of faith and devotion without ever being encouraged to connect meaningfully with this faith.

Religion was part of the curriculum. You learned the stories, you practised the lines and you sang the songs. You did all this not out of devotion or passion but because it was part of your homework.

[ I’m a walking, talking example of how driving home the message of the Catholic Church in schools does not work ]

This has led to me developing a strange relationship with lived religion. Going to church, attending Mass or engaging with the Catholic Church in any meaningful way has always felt, to me, like acting. Since I was a kid, I have been taught how I should perform. Over years of dedicated practice, I committed my lines to memory. My choreography: excellent. Everyone knows that my sign of the cross was crisp and convincing. Attending Mass, for me, was like taking part in a local theatre production, one that takes place weekend after weekend.

During adolescence, I enjoyed the thrill of these feelings, this deceit. I was above the shackles of organised religion and by making the movements of faith convincingly, I was fooling those around me; Catholicism was silly, it was frivolous and mockable. Mass was boring and priests were worthy of ridicule (I was old enough to have learned about the horrors that had taken place in schools like the one I attended). The older I got, the more I performed and the more I performed, the more convincing my performances became.

I wish I could say that the more time I spent in Mass, the less cultural my Catholicism became or that my story includes a moment of transcendent revelation. It doesn’t. In fact, I’ve stopped attending Mass. I’ve stopped going to church altogether.

I spent this last year pursuing a Master’s degree in Theology, an experience which surrounded me with incredible people, Christians with rich faith and a deep connection to God. Their earnest and authentic faith was inspiring to see and convinced me of one thing: I am not a Catholic. And, if we’re being honest, most of the people who ticked the box marked “Roman Catholic” in 2022 aren’t either.

Alex Connolly is a recent graduate from Trinity College Dublin