Like most of their friends and neighbours, my parents attended the Eucharistic Congress as children in Dublin, in 1932. I was born into a Roman Catholic family. I was baptised and brought up in the Catholic tradition. For a long time, growing up, I assumed that the religious teaching being handed down to me was the ineluctable, unbreakable truth. I had no reason to doubt it. It was what we were told and we trusted those who were telling us.

At every turn, in Ireland at the time, the assumption that the Catholic way was the only way was reinforced. There was widespread intolerance towards Jews. Protestants of whatever stripe were regarded as oddballs, representative to one degree or another of our old – and now disdained – colonial masters. The likes of Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses, if they surfaced here at all, were treated in a deeply hostile and discriminatory way.
Muslims barely registered, except as the historical enemy of Christians in the time of the crusades, campaigns which were presented as thoroughly righteous, just and admirable endeavours, embarked upon to vanquish heathens, and to spread the word of God and the authority of his representatives on Earth. Hindus were, well, they were bearded weirdos in Tin Tin books, presumably insignificant in their number and their impact on the world. And communists – they were the worst, busy going about the business of persecuting Christians. No-one seemed to remember that Christians had done their fair share of persecuting in their time. Atheists didn’t exist.
The 26 counties were almost entirely Roman Catholic. And those at the helm of the Catholic offensive here were determined to deepen their hold at every opportunity, ruling that mixed marriages involving a Catholic were only permissible if the other non-Catholic party agreed to convert. The aim, as far as possible, was to turn the Republic of Ireland into a completely Catholic society. Such an ambition would have been seen as entirely legitimate, not just by the hierarchy but by their allies in the machinery of State. This, after all, was a Catholic country.
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.
The creepy presence of a head brother in primary school who took a perverted sexual interest in the boys was one trigger to the mounting feeling of unease that had begun to gnaw away inside. This was compounded by the viciousness and brutality that went on every day in school. I was a decent student, good at winging things and adept at spoofing effectively and so I usually escaped trouble. Though not always. I was beaten and bullied but only on rare occasions. Lots of others weren’t so lucky and – with different Christian Brothers to the fore depending on the class and the year – I watched in quiet, escalating horror as classmates were routinely brutalised on a grand scale. It got to the point where I hated school, and dreaded the inevitable nausea I felt there, induced by the spectacle of the less fortunate and usually less privileged kids being battered.
What was all this violence about? Who had authorised it and why? And how did it relate to the religion that we had been told was the word of God and which these brutal and bullying men represented?
As I worked my way through secondary school, I started to read more widely, to listen to rock ’n’ roll music and to watch television programmes on the BBC and UTV. I became aware of the way in which the Roman Catholic church had fostered a climate of censorship here, as a control mechanism, deliberately designed not just to impose a version of sexuality on the lumpen masses, but also to deny people exposure to any kind of alternative literary and philosophical influences.
The more I looked around and reached out, the greater the conviction I felt that nothing I had been told could be relied on. I opened my eyes. I started to read about the history of ideas, about the genesis of diverse religious traditions in different parts of the world. And implicitly, and later explicitly, I started to ask: do I accept the unassailable authority of the Church? And, of equal or greater importance, do I believe that the son of God came down on earth in the nominal year zero, emerging as a result of a virgin birth in the small town of Bethlehem in the region of Palestine (why there?) and that he was vilified by Jews, betrayed by Judas, sentenced by the Roman governor Pilate and crucified and rose again before ascending into heaven – and in doing so redeemed mankind from the taint of original sin?
And whether I believe all of that or no, is it really necessary specifically to submit yourself to his authority and to that of the Church, to go to heaven? And if so, where does that leave all of the rest of the unredeemed, those who never even heard of Jesus of Nazareth, let alone were in a position to make a choice one way or the other to follow him or not?
One question leads to another and then to another. Do I believe that there is such a thing as heaven or hell – or eternal life? When the world ends, is every human being from every stage of the entire history of the species rounded up and told their fate as the good book says – some being plunged into the fires of eternal damnation and others elevated to an eternity of bliss? And if not, why is the story being told? If not, is there a point to any of the doctrines that had been imposed on us?
And, by the way, why were women treated so abysmally, as third-class citizens, within the Roman Catholic Church? And why did all of the religions of Abraham deny gays the right to express their sexuality? And why were these religions so obsessed with the depiction of sex as shameful, guilty and wrong, except when exercised within the narrowest of social confines of a monogamous marriage?
There comes a moment where you have to make a fundamental choice. You can hide from these questions and continue to support the status quo, as a Catholic, a Protestant, a Hindu or a Muslim, assuming that what was handed down to you was, is and always will be correct. Or you can ask the awkward questions, first of all of yourself – and then of others. What do I believe, precisely? Why do I believe it? What evidence is there to substantiate it? How does it stand up to a bit of tougher scrutiny? What are the implications of believing it, for me? And, then, for everyone else?
Christians believe that Christianity is the only true way – otherwise their faith is meaningless. Muslims do too. So do Hindus. If Christianity is the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth so help me God, where does that leave the millions of Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, Shintoists, Buddhists, Rastafarians, Taoists, Pantheists, Scientologists, Mormons, Moonies, devotees of Wicca, Australian aborigines before whitey arrived and Native Americans alike? Are they not damned to remain outside the ranks of the saved forever? And if they are not, what difference does it make whether we adhere to one religion or another? Either Jesus is the way, the truth and the light and the rest are wrong – or he is just another interesting historical figure who did us the undeniable favour of bringing the idea of forgiveness to the fore.
In a recent Irish Times poll, close to 90% of Irish people described themselves as Catholic. Only 26% of these accepted the doctrine of trans-substantiation. A relatively small number participate regularly in what Catholics call the sacraments. Very few go the Mass regularly. Most do not accept the teachings of the Vatican in relation to sexuality. Clearly, these people call themselves Catholic as a reflex response: you bang the knee and they tick the box.
People are, of course, entitled to believe what they like. I am not trying to argue against anything in particular here. But I am saying that we have a fundamental responsibility as human beings to give some real thought to the beliefs that we allow to shape our lives. We know that the world isn’t flat. We know that people have been on the earth for millions of years. We know that countless billions never heard of Jesus or Mohammed. We know that in different parts of the world, very different religious and philosophical belief systems have flourished. We know that science enables us to go beyond many if not all of these. We know that the Catholic Church was a friend of fascism and supported dictatorships to further its own ends. We know that terrible atrocities have been committed in the name of Islam. And so on.
Is it enough to say that I am what I am because that’s what my mother and father were? It cannot be. We owe it to ourselves and to everyone else, to take responsibility for what we believe, to stop relying on the platitudes of the authorities of whatever religion or belief system, to grapple with the evidence of conflicting claims, to reject what does not add up or make sense and, having thought about it all, to adhere only to what we can personally and unequivocally stand over as being right, and unassailably so.
And if, at the end of that process, we are left without the crutch of bogus certainties – is that not a far better place from which to start to build again something open, lasting, reliable and true?