Catholicism held my family in its sway for decades – but it hid from me a vital truth

Georgina Lawton

In the wake of the Pope’s recent visit to Lisbon, where I live, I’ve been thinking a lot about my relationship with Catholicism – largely because I don’t really identify as one any more, after years of being brought up in the faith.

My disillusionment with the church developed over time, like a creeping mould. With news of each sexual abuse scandal and coverup, I found it harder to align myself with its values. But my central reasons for quitting religion are closer to home.

After my father was diagnosed with cancer in 2014, I prayed harder than ever. But my prayers remained unanswered, and he died in 2015, aged 55. I was raised in a white household, with two white parents and my younger brother, who is also white. But there was no reason given for my appearance – and I am not white. After my dad’s death, I confirmed via DNA tests that my mother had an affair with a black man (who I still know nothing of), and that my father and I are not related in the biological sense. The news that my whole life had been something of a lie broke me into pieces.

I’ve written about the impact of this in columns and in my book, Raceless, but more recently I have been interrogating how religion played a part in the racial silence that hung over my world for so long. People joke about Catholic guilt, but Irish Catholic guilt is an altogether more serious affliction. My mother was raised on a farm in County Clare, where dinner and leisure time were granted only after mass and chores were completed. Adultery was a cardinal sin. And because no one challenged her about raising a black child (my father included), she chose never to face up to what was right in front of her.

But to blame my ambivalence about religion entirely on my mum’s choices would be too easy. The point at which I lost total and utter faith in the Catholic church was a more direct encounter: the day I visited a priest while we were grieving, and he revealed himself to be a cold egomaniac. My mother, my brother and I visited him to discuss my father’s funeral. First he told us that our hymn choices (including All Things Bright and Beautiful, to reflect my Dad’s love of gardening and being outside) were “childish” and “unsuitable” for a funeral. Our requests for certain readings were also shut down. The priest seemed to be on a power trip. I remember how we sat silent and in shock that, in our time of need, he was proving to be nothing like the pillar of support we needed.

I had decided that I would write my father’s eulogy – but the priest had other ideas. “You’ll break down and hold up the service. You won’t be able to do it,” he said. I was taken aback, but stood my ground. No one would read my father’s eulogy but me – we had been very close.

I still remember the priest’s words: “Funerals drag on. No one wants to hear a long eulogy. It’s boring,” he said. My jaw dropped. He then said he wanted it to be three minutes long, and that he wanted to see it first. At this, I balked. “Forget it, Father,” I said, and we walked out. I have rarely been inside a church since. My connection to Catholicism had begun to sever.

I tried to quit the Catholic church, but the Catholic church wouldn't quit me. Now what?

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Witnessing the priest’s unbridled arrogance and superiority that day, I felt I had an insight into how so many others were able to get away with more heinous acts. When you deem a man a “liturgical icon” of Jesus Christ, as Catholics do, and provide him with food and housing and protection from the recourse of the law, self-importance and abuse of power often follows.

As a child I was taught that I was born with original sin, and that I should audit my private conduct at all times, repenting in confession at mass. At my Irish Catholic mother’s behest, I attended Sunday school at my local parish in order to receive my confirmation, and volunteered to read the Bible before the local congregation. I attended a Catholic comprehensive school once run by nuns (although they had departed by the time I started), and learned that repeating the Church’s stances – parrot-like – on abortion, sex, gay marriage and euthanasia would earn me top marks in my exams. But, looking back, I find so much of what I learned to be hypocritical. When I also consider the impact that silence and shame had on my female friends and their sex lives, I am a little angry, too.

Although I visited the Vatican with my mother a few years ago, I am no longer a practising Catholic. I wouldn’t send any hypothetical future kids to a Catholic school while attitudes to women’s bodies are still so antiquated and harmful. I’m grateful for the community and connection that came from my schooling, but you can get that at secular schools, too. For now my Catholicism is on pause.