Unconfirmed Reports

My family are Catholic, though not excessively so. My ancestors came from England and Ireland (as well as the odd straggler from Sweden or Portugal), and were perhaps, in the mongrel-crucible of the Terra Australis, brought together in one way or another by their minority faith. My grandfather told me once that the Catholic/Protestant divide was quite a chasm “back in those days”, with schoolyard groups forming around the twin taunts of “Cat-lick” and “Proddy-dog”.

From as far back as I can remember, until the age of about 13, us kids had to go to church every Sunday with our parents. We hated this, as we found an hour of sitting, standing and kneeling while being talked at by a priest about the most boring thing imaginable. There were a few hymns in which I enjoyed the music – though the words were always pious, flaccid crap. The other compensating moment was the Eucharist, to which I looked forward with great impatience, because at least in this part you got a papery communion wafer to eat, and a sip of sweet wine. Younger people, like myself, would each hold out our cupped hands when we got to the priest, so that he could deposit the wafer there and say, momentously, “the body of Christ”. But many of the older parishioners followed a different convention, sticking out their tongues so that the priest could place the wafer there directly. I don’t know how the priest managed not to laugh at all these oldies, slowly, expectantly sticking out their tongues at him.

There was a time, far back in my earliest childhood, when I believed that God was real. But even as a child I started to doubt this, and soon decided that I didn’t believe in Him after all. I felt slightly worried about this, because I knew that just in case He did exist, I might be in trouble. And it seemed like all the good, respectable people at church believed in Him. But the boringness of mass made Christianity’s claims of metaphysical grandeur seem implausible: even to my child’s mind it seemed inconsistent that the centre of universal power should be accessed by a mob of geriatrics dosing though an hour of ritualised orations in a cold musty church on a Sunday morning. Besides, my parents never mentioned God at home except for when they cursed, “for God’s sake”; so there wasn’t much day-to-day evidence of His Lordliness being afoot.

When I was about 13 my parents announced unexpectedly that I didn’t have to go to weekly mass any more. I immediately stopped going, except for at Christmas and Easter, which remained compulsory and were, unfortunately, extra-long masses. Christmas mass was at the same time fun, in a way, because it was a midnight service. So despite the monotonous mumbo-jumbo, two of the most exciting things in child-world were at hand: staying up late, and impending Christmas presents.

At the Christmas mass in my last year of regular church-going, there was a final nail in the coffin of my piety. While waiting outside the church, a little before midnight, as the adults did their ritualised pre-church smalltalk, a group of rowdy yobs walked by. We kids just stared at them, not used to seeing people so drunk and merry. One of them noticed us staring, and called out to us, pointing at the pub down the road, “This is our church!”

I thought this very funny, and looked forward to the day when I too could choose to be with the raucous, laughing people in the pub – instead of the cold, boring church.

But I will stop now, before I start sounding like Saint Augustine.