Dublin

I attended Catholic school for the first several years of my life–until I was fifteen. I didn’t live in a preachy household; I don’t remember ever feeling suffocated by faith. Rather, our Catholicism was a given, like the fact that there were four kids and we went to Long Island every summer and we weren’t allowed to watch cartoons.

When we first got the Disney channel on cable, I watched Lizzie McGuire (you know, when Hilary Duff was still a cute little blonde girl), and I distinctly remember wondering why the majority of the characters weren’t Catholic: growing up as a Catholic in New York, you assume that everyone is either Catholic or Jewish.

I understand, now, that this is not the case, but there’s definitely something comforting about coming to a place that’s so traditionally Catholic–it feels like coming home. France is completely laique today–the separation of Church and State is so well ingrained that in this previously Catholic country abortion and gay marriage are legal. My father asks after the religious well-being of my adoptive country every once in awhile–“The frogs aren’t really Catholic anymore, are they?”–and I always have to respond in the negative: the only people I ever see at mass on the rare occasion that I decide to go are my grandmother’s age, and even these women are few and far between.

Three years ago, when I backpacked through Europe with Scotty and my friend Katie, I tried and failed to go to mass: partway through, I realized that the church I had stumbled into was actually Anglican, and though the Catholic part of me wanted to vault over the pews and run away before I was smote down by the Lord himself, I folded my hands and listened politely and surprised myself by enjoying it–it is, after all, the same stories, the same songs, the same ideas. This time around, though, I was going to do it right: on our way to the Guinness factory, we passed a church that I extensively examined, proclaimed to be Catholic, and took a picture of so that I would remember where it was in the morning. The next day, with King Kong for company, I went to mass for the first time in… I’m not even sure how long.

In lower school, mass was a requirement, something like math class or gym that I had to do even if I didn’t want to. In high school, it went from something that was completely absent from my life to something I look forward to once I found friends through the Catholic Student Fellowship. In college, my mass habit fell slowly to the wayside, when I realized that getting up early on Sunday was much more difficult after a Saturday night bender, when I saw the lack of people my own age at my parish, when I realized how alone going to mass made me, when before it had always made me feel like a part of a community.

I don’t know what I believe, and I don’t think this blog is really the appropriate forum to discuss it. What I do know is that mass–from the opening prayer to the Nicene creed to communion–is a part of my childhood and my life, and even if all I get out of it is an hour’s worth of thinking time accompanied by the rhythmic chanting of an Irish-accented priest, it’s something that, every once in awhile, I like to remember.

And if I can do it in Ireland, where the Catholic church is within spitting distance of the Guinness Storehouse, where you can learn to pour your own perfect pint… well… that’s even better.