Three Hail Marys and Two Lady Gagas

I was brought up a good Catholic girl. This stemmed from my grandmother being a good Irish Catholic girl who sent my mother to a convent boarding school when she was four years old. My mother stayed there until she was 18, and, according to her, rarely went home in the holidays.

My Dad was not a Catholic; he was a member of the Church of England. Unlike us, he didn’t have to go to church on Sundays and Feast Days. He just went once at Christmas, and one Christmas he took me with him, as I had been pestering him for a long time to show me what a heathen, sorry – Church of England – mass, sorry – service – was like. As usual, I was very quiet and obedient, absorbing everything and joining in the hymns, etc. But later, my Dad told me that the vicar had been angry and had specifically told him he must never ever bring me again, which made me very worried and ashamed and embarrassed for a very long time, thinking that I must have done something wrong.

Now, I just think that my Dad was cross because by taking me, he had missed out on something that he always did at Christmas at his church service. Maybe he went out for a drink afterwards to a pub, or maybe he met a secret friend. Who knows?

For us to miss church on Sunday or a Feast Day was a sin. It might even have been a Cardinal Sin. That’s one of those really bad ones, and if you get enough of those on your report card you might never get to Heaven. Church was at 10 o’clock on a Sunday morning and if you were sick you had to go in the evening. I had to go from the age of four (my mother made me suffer the way she had been made to) but my younger brother and sister didn’t have to go until they were much older. The whole service was in Latin until I was about nine, and since I wasn’t fluent in Latin as a child, the individual words didn’t mean that much to me. You did get the general gist of it though.

Just to make sure I was getting the gist of it, my mother implemented a number of other additional measures. The first was a talk with young Father Ignatius. I’m pretty sure that was his name. Not his real name of course, but his stage name for the Catholic Church. Anyway Father Ignatius was invited to our house for a talk with me and a cup of tea. I can’t remember what we talked about, and my mother was present all the time, but I do remember that both he and my mother seemed a bit annoyed with me not understanding something. It didn’t matter, because I was absolutely, head-over-heels in love with Father Ignatius at the age of nine, and I wanted to marry him. That was impossible, of course, and not just because I was only nine. A short while later Father Ignatius moved to another parish and we got another, older, sterner and for me uninteresting priest who might have been Father Ignatius’ boss.

My mother provided children’s literature to make understanding religion easier and in a language I could understand. The Catholic Church provided illustrated children’s paperback books with stories of Christ and Satan. In these books, Christ looked like a kindly martyr and Satan looked like a cross between a stand-up dragon and the Joker from Batman. I remember he was a particularly weird shade of brown. Both he and Christ had a lot of superpowers. The Virgin Mary was in it too, and all her clothes were a nice shade of blue.

The next thing my mother did was to send me to private religious instruction in preparation for the Three C’s (Confession, Confirmation and Communion). She had already tried Sunday School and Convent School when I had been even littler, but the Sunday School was pretty useless and involved a bus ride, which also cost money, and in the Convent School they had administered corporal punishment with a ruler if you didn’t know the answer to something. So my mother quickly moved me to the local primary school after that (also getting rid of another bus ride).

I could walk to private religious instruction without a bus ride, albeit it was a very long walk. It was a one-to-one lesson with Mrs. Irvine, a stalwart member of our Catholic Church. Mrs. Irvine explained the Catechism to me, which I had to learn by heart. And she explained the mystery of the Holy Trinity. I will never forget Mrs. Irvine’s explanation of the Holy Trinity. When I asked her how three beings could also act as one being, Mrs. Irvine looked round the room and her eyes settled on a plug in the wall. The Holy Trinity, she told me, was like an electric plug. That’s a British plug, of course, with three prongs. You needed all three prongs for the plug to work, but it worked as one plug. That is in fact the best explanation of the Holy Trinity I have heard to date!

When I was ten, I got the Three C’s. First of all, I had to go to Confession. I had learned my Catechism for that (Who made me? God made me!) and had received a lot of coaching about what to say at confession. I worried for a long time beforehand about what sins I could confess. I couldn’t think of any really good ones, so I had to make some up. I was, unfortunately for the Catholic Church, a really good little girl. I always did absolutely everything I was told and helped out in the house a lot, particularly with my brother and sister. So there wasn’t really much material to work with. When you confess your sins, you should also remember that you are there to confess your own sins, not the sins of others. So for example, you can’t say, “I hit back at my brother in self-defense because he was whacking the hell out of me”, you have to just say, “I hit my brother”, which makes it sound pretty bad. So I whipped up some extra sin points with stuff like that and threw in a few things I hadn’t done at all to make it sound plausible.

I was really surprised when I got off with only two Our Fathers and 3 Hail Marys. That was less penance than I had every night before I went to sleep when I said my Rosary! I came out of the confessional and cried and cried. Not because of the penance, but because I was so ashamed and felt so terribly guilty and wicked. I couldn’t stop crying for a long time actually. And needless to say, I never ever went to confession again.

After this, I had Communion and Confirmation. I think they happened on the same day. I had a little white veil and a nice white dress, with white gloves. Miss Cox, my class teacher, who was also Catholic came to the ceremony and gave me a little gold cross and chain. My Dad took a black and white photo of me which he developed himself. I received the Holy Sacrament (the wafer which is the Body of Christ) and after that I got it every Sunday. You weren’t allowed to eat any breakfast if you were going to get the Holy Sacrament, and I can tell you it was no breakfast replacement. My mother wasn’t allowed to receive the Holy Sacrament for many years. I’m not sure if it was a self-imposed penance or if Father Ignatius or someone else had banned her from getting it. But it was because she went on the Pill. After my little sister was accidentally conceived, my parents decided that the house was full and my mother went on the Pill. It wasn’t until I was about 18 that she came off it and was allowed to have communion again.

Clearly, continuing to have sex was more important than receiving the Holy Sacrament. Such are the confusing ways of the Catholic Church. Today, I have developed my own interpretation of religion, which involves no churches. I have not managed to completely remove Catholicism from my Weltanschauung. I don’t think that’s possible. But I have tried to tone it down a little. And it works fine for me.