Well it was nothing really, just the fact of being born of my mother and encouraged by my father. My mother was Catholicism personified, of North Manchester Irish stock, she came from Corpus Christi parish, off Oldham Road. Prior to the 1914-18 war every other house in that district was Irish and Catholic. My father was a Protestant farmer’s son from Denton, who on courting my mother and enamoured of her Irish Catholic charms became a convert to the Catholic faith and became a better Catholic than most, judged on the standards of those far off days.
From my earliest days I was surrounded by candles, rosaries, prayers and hymns. There wasn’t a mass or a church, especially in North Manchester we did not go to. A benediction here, a stations of the cross there, a high mass somewhere else. We travelled miles to go to ordinations, visitations and consecrations. I have kissed more bishop’s rings than was wise for me.
When you woke up in the morning there were prayers, during the day there were all sorts of reminders of our Catholic way of life, prayers at meals, prayers before bed and for my parents a complete social life organised by the parish of St Robert’s in Longsight and managed most strictly and severely by that giant of a man, Fr Vincent O’Shaughnessy, an Irishman of no mean stature, who was later promoted to Dean and then Canon in recognition of his sterling work in the area. He it was who taught my father Catholicism, baptised him into the faith, married my parents in 1941, baptised me in 1946, gave me instruction in confession and held the host to my lips in 1952 for my first communion. He it was who welcomed me onto the altar in 1953 and managed my religious life until I served at his funeral in 1961.
We did not have to think we were Catholics, we knew we were. Our lives were deftly managed so much so that we never knowingly spoke to a person of another religion. I was bound up in tradition, ceremony and performance. We were completely brainwashed or immersed into the whole idea of the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church, where we the people strove to be good, where the priests were supermen and the bishops, emperors of all.
I served on the altar which involved early morning mass, Sunday mass, Benediction in the afternoon, Stations of the Cross during Lent, mesmeric recitations of the rosary during all seasons and attendance at church 24/7 during the feasts of Christmas and Easter. I sometimes think that up to the age of 16, I had spent more time on my knees than in any other position but I certainly knew I was one of the lucky ones. I was destined for heaven and the rest for hell, however there was no resting on our laurels, there was always one more hurdle to climb.
Everything was going well, I was going to St Bede’s College, the epitomy of Catholic splendour, there was even talk of me becoming a priest. That must have been why I was put into the Classics stream at 12 years of age, I had the makings, O’Shaughnessy must have been whispering to Monsignor Duggan, the Rector of Bede’s. You can see we did not have to think, everything was laid out for us by this seemingly grand design. Just put one step in front of the other was the unspoken command.
Then something happened, like a light being switched on, girls appeared on the scene albeit Catholic girls. I was doing things with girls and they were doing things with me that seemed to go against the grain of everything our priests and teachers had taught us and I was enjoying it. Only I suppose because they were good Catholic girls and we had confession to fall back on, to wipe our slate clean and start again on what was clearly looking like a downward path. Heaven knows what would have happened if these very enthusiastic Catholic girls had been Protestant.
Along with girls came drink and as always taken in excess and soon I had stopped all the nonsense of ceremony, prayer and ritual. I rebelled against the excessive physical abuse at school which for some hardly discernible reason was to keep us on the straight and narrow. We started to think or at least I did for the first time in my life and I decided the regime was unjust, the authorities rebelled and threw me back onto the streets.
I was on the road, more or less a long distance kiddie, travelling the country, seeking work all over the place and good work, well paid work with plenty of shillings in my pocket to spend on the two aforementioned evils. Catholicism had lost me albeit temporarily. That life is not really what I wanted and then I met Helen, a good Catholic girl, what else and just like my father I stopped my gallop and like him turned to the Church because of our love for a woman.
I’ll just stop here, a thought as just entered my head. If it was not for women the Catholic Church would have died out long ago. It has been women and only women who have kept the light burning. I wonder whether it is jealousy because the hierarchy revile women, they are second and third class citizens and yet they are the ones who keep everyone and everything in place.
Helen, who is an intelligent sort, obviously saw something in me, God knows what, as I was as rough as they come having been honed in the school of hard knocks that was the construction industry for eight years. I was almost uncivilised but she saw that flickering flame and kept close and eventually close enough to marry me. Obviously she saw a talent there to be nurtured. Well without a doubt there was and it took a long time for her to make a man of me but she eventually succeeded.
She brought me back on board and we lived the whole of our married lives within the body of the Church. I was reattreacted to a lot of the demands but was never able to get over the hurdle of confession. By then in my eyes and with my experience the priest had been relegated from superman to one of the crowd and what was the point in confessing to him, you might just as well blurt it out to the first person you met in the street. With the lack of confession and because of the scruples I had been taught at school, I found I was not able to take communion, so immediately I was demoted into a sacramentless Catholic and no matter how good I was I could never be as good as those who lined the altar rails every Sunday and then I started to study those who did line the rails and realised they were bigger sinners than me with their sanctimonious old guff and their better than thou philosophy. It did not put me off and in my born again state I did the best I thought I could, helping my neighbour whenever I could, whatever religion he was and working hard to bring up our six children in the best way we could in this Holy Catholic Faith. Loving the music, song, ceremonial colour and above all the fuss they made of you when you were dead.
After my toils were over I retired to Ireland enjoying the masses in the futuristic church of St Joseph’s and watching with a smirk the same people crowding the front benches as I used to see in Manchester, different people obviously but exactly the same modus operandi. With time on my hands I started to think and I took up blogging as a means of improving my writing and at more or less the same time the Murphy Report on Clerical Abuse in the Archdiocese of Dublin was issued. Like 99% of Catholics, I had let critical thought wash over me and promptly forgot what it was but now I was pulling my thoughts into printed words and these thoughts became a lot less abstract. I started to analyse what I was thinking and my thoughts on clerical abuse of children gave structure to my now new disbeliefs in the Church. I realised I had been kidded all my life by these so called religious and whether it is 1%, 10% or 20% of the priests who are abusers, these buggers knew it went on and kept it covered up. This cover up, this fraudulent version of the truth and the hierarchy denials was the destruction of everything I held dear. My church moved from St Joseph’s on the Carrick Road to my head in Wooden Bridge and there it will stay forever repelling all Holy Catholic pleas.
The production of my blog took over my life, I had a tool to fight this crime and I started to fight against this con trick that is the Catholic Church which is just a machine constructed by a few to make money. Yes some parts are good but we all have to be honest and outlaw evil. The Church did not do this and therefore the whole of its operation is blackened by this canker. As they told us at school, the end does not justify the means.
I now despise the Church and the men who run it, I have now lost all belief in everything. Funnily enough Helen pulled away from the Church at the same time as I did and under no coercion from me. She has kept her belief in God whereas I have not. What made up her mind was the wealth of evidence that was pouring into our house about the sexual abuse of young boys at St Bede’s College. She wanted no more to do with these priests. I was just mad at myself for accepting all this claptrap for all those years. The catalyst for me was the cover up, Helen thinks it was my blog. Either way I am in a better place now, away from those people that once tried to make me a Catholic.