Mary Kenny, author and journalist, recounts how becoming a mother led her to return to the Church, having been deeply critical of it for many years.
Becoming a mother was the making of the Catholic in me. A rebellious critic of the Catholic Church previously, I suddenly had this very strong urge to return to the faith: you might say it gushed in with mother’s milk.
This was a spontaneous feeling, but it was also, I think, a rational one: I suddenly knew that the notion that children can grow up in a vacuum – where they can choose their own values in a context of perfect neutrality – is nonsense, because the culture all around us, from television adverts to the ubiquity of the public house, is already loaded with propaganda. You are already enculturated by the age of three. There was also an historical element: I wanted to transmit some of the deposit of Christian history to my child and children. We don’t reinvent the wheel; we build on what we inherit.
I am not uncritical of the Catholic Church, but I am aware, both from my penny catechism and from my experience of life, that all human institutions are flawed. And because of the doctrine of original sin – which I have found to be an essential aspect of understanding human nature – they always will be. Nevertheless, I also feel a basic loyalty to Church and I believe that, in presiding over the moral and religious lives of over a billion people, it has to show authority to some degree. You can’t have leadership without authority. I have seen that in my life as a journalist: the best editors are those who lead with authority; the weakest ones are those who have no authority. But authority must also earn respect.
There is a distinction for many people, between the faith and the Church. They don’t always care for the Church and its bishops and priests, and they don’t always observe the rules of the Church, but they go on practising their faith. This is particularly true in Ireland, and most particularly true the further west you go in Ireland – it is the devotional life that counts, not the various arguments over the role of the Church in society.
I like the intellectual side of Catholicism: that you can find real moral philosophy within it, which can be difficult to understand – but what is difficult is also stimulating. I don’t like the dumbing-down tendencies, which seek to make everything facile and comfortable. I also remember with affection, the nun at school whom, when a particular philosophical question got just too knotty (“If God made me, who made God?”), would answer with a beatific smile: “Ah, you see, girls, that’s a Mystery!” There are indeed some insoluble problems, and many mysteries.
