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We Must Take Responsibility For What We Believe

With the return of the Eucharistic Congress to Dublin, it seems timely to look afresh at the nature of religious faith – and to stop pretending to be what we are not.

Niall Stokes, 15 Jun 2012

It was a matter of faith, drummed into people from their childhood, that it was wrong ever to question the authority of the Church. It wasn’t just that the Pope was infallible, which of course he was. It was that the role of the ordinary members of the Church was to accept the word of God, to bow to the authority of his representatives on Earth and to accept their teachings as the ultimate reference point, moral guide and compass, irrespective of how wrong-headed that might seem at any given time. They knew better. It was as simple as that.

The notion that any other religion might have any validity or even merit respect was anathema. When you are in exclusive possession of the truth, this is how the world is stacked. The others are wrong. They are there preferably to be converted or otherwise to be swamped or subjugated. We were on the one road to God knew where. To imagine differently would land you in grave difficulties. Very few people were prepared to take the risk.

All of this was effectively written in stone and we made what we could of it personally. As a kid, I read the lives of the saints, attended sodalities, did whatever was necessary to fetch me a scapular, which earned ‘indulgences’ for the wearer to obviate the need to go to purgatory when he or she died. At home, we went through a period of saying the rosary every night. Someone from the Society of Don Bosco came around to Synge St. Christian Brothers school, where I was a student, and, inspired by the story of Dominic Savio, the teenage saint and protégé of Bosco, I joined up. I went through a phase of rising early in the morning to go to 8 o’clock mass in Rathfarnham Church. When they came recruiting towards the end of sixth class in primary, I thought about joining the Christian Brothers. One poor unfortunate did. I often wonder what happened to him.

When I hit puberty I shot up, going from under five foot to more or less six in a relatively short time. Parallel things were happening in my head at more-or-less the same rate. I began to change psychologically, emotionally and sexually. I felt different about myself; I started to feel differently about the world. Without knowing what was behind it, I questioned everything that was going on around me. It felt natural.



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