I stopped going to Mass 22 years ago. Every Sunday since I’ve felt grateful to be free of the obligation

The Mass passes uneventfully enough. My siblings and I are in Enniskillen with our dad, for the 35^th anniversary of my mother’s death, and begin our day by attending a service my brother has had dedicated in her memory.

Since it’s Saturday morning, the more ornate flourishes of the Sunday offering are eschewed; no homily, choir or piano, but one lone singer, who sings at two points of the service. I’m intrigued to see the priest scrolling his phone during the readings, which briefly seems blasphemous, before I realise that any number of entirely Mass-appropriate things could well be on his screen, in place of the paperwork that priests of former ages carried with them to the pulpit.

The fact is, it’s been so long since I’ve been to Mass that I can’t really tell one way or the other. As I watch him poke his screen with an index finger, I wonder whether I’ve even been present for a service since the advent of smartphones. Some weddings, definitely. Almost certainly a Sunday service or two, when back in Derry with my dad pre-Covid. But other than that, no, nothing at all.

We were a churchgoing family, to put it mildly. With weekly Mass, school services, choir appointments, weddings and funerals, it’s likely I was racking up about 70 or 80 Masses a year. This marked me as little better than a heathen compared to some of my siblings who, as altar boys or choristers, were pulling in five Masses a week.

When I moved to Dublin for college on Friday, October 8th, 2004, the Sunday that followed was the first I can ever remember not going. The previous Sunday, I’d given the readings in my parish church in Long Tower, Derry, as my family had done every few weeks since I was a boy. I did not care for this activity at any point but, looking back, it’s likely that I can ascribe my comfort with public speaking to the gradual callousing of my nerves that it provided. So... thanks, I guess?

My turn against the Catholic Church was not loud or florid, so much as the inevitable endpoint of simply not agreeing with Catholic doctrine on some issues, and holding a great deal of anger toward the church on others. Ironically, it was my subsummation within Catholic dogma which hastened this separation, as I saw no logical way to continue as a Catholic if I didn’t subscribe to the whole thing. Even a glancing familiarity with Catholicism reveals you don’t get to pick and choose the dogma you agree with, by definition. There was once a huge movement toward creating a subset of Catholics who “agree with Catholicism except this bit or that bit”, and it became wildly popular with the public. It was called the Reformation, and those people are called Protestants.

Even then, among said dissenters, some form of belief in a literal God was still considered fairly mandatory – discounting Anglicans, it remains so to this day – but because I had long since lost any such faith, my choice was a swift and easy one. To say I’ve never regretted this would be an understatement. It would be more truthful to say that there has rarely been a Sunday that’s passed in the intervening 22 years that I haven’t, at some point, been thankful to be free of the obligation. But today I am here for my mother, and my father, to whom this means and meant a great deal, so there’s nowhere on Earth I’d rather be.

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Standing in the pews, I am assailed by the peculiar feeling a person can only experience when confronted by something very familiar, but after so long a time that it’s become entirely strange. My hands recall the movements, my knees their commands, my throat even remembers the words. Most of them, anyway. It seems like there have been some slight rewrites around the margins, leaving me stranded at certain points, as I awkwardly mumble outdated cant, its rhythms sticking out, square-pegged, from the wider chorus. Would Catholic doctrine allow God to hear these words still, I wonder, or is it a little like trying to shop with old money?

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My mother’s oldest friend Patricia embraces me at the service’s end, and guesses by my lightly baffled face that I haven’t been in a while. “Did you know it’s not in Latin any more?” she asks, laughing.

“I’m just glad I didn’t burst into flames,” I say, blessing myself before I’ve even realised I’ve done it.