Twenty-something Catholic in 21st-century Ireland

A 24-year-old in Ireland in the year 2019 has many freedoms, from freedom of expression and assembly to freedom of association and supposedly, religion. 

But if a young person like myself admits to any form of faith in the Catholic Church, we are suddenly faced with a barrage of questions:

'You’re not really Catholic, are you? 

'Do you not know what they used to do to children?' 

'How can you defend such a corrupt institution?' 

And so on, and so on. Legally speaking, I have the right to worship as I choose, but socially, it’s quite a different story. These days, if you’re young, Irish and Catholic, people will automatically assume that you’re narrow-minded, poorly educated and conformist, and will treat you accordingly. How do we even begin to open a conversation with people who are so hostile towards the faith? It is hard to react gracefully to such loaded, aggressive questions, never mind formulating answers to them! I’ve often found myself alone, attempting to debunk the myths people toss around so casually, or to stem a tide of anger rushing at me from a group of my peers who outnumber me five to one. In those moments, I find myself longing for the support of some like-minded friends.

Isolated and lost

Even apart from these interrogation sessions, the day-to-day aspects of practising the Catholic faith can be intensely isolating for a young person in Ireland. Friends, family and acquaintances alike greet simple things like saying the rosary or going to mass with such horror, you’d think I’d decided to chop off a limb or worse still, give up my phone. And going to mass doesn’t actually reduce the sense of the isolation. For one thing, I tend to decrease the average age of attendees by a solid 20 years. For another, I get gawped at for going into churches and knowing how to genuflect and say the responses to the ‘new’ mass – and that’s just by fellow Catholics! In these moments too, I feel the need for a group of people who genuinely share my beliefs, who accept that I like to attend mass regularly and who know the comfort I experience when just sitting in contemplation before the Tabernacle. 

I will admit, that for some time after the historical abuse allegations surfaced, I was lost. I felt ashamed for being a member of that church. It took me some time to regain trust in our Church. 

Pope Francis in Ireland

And then the Holy Father visited Ireland last August. I watched him speak on TV, partly because I was keeping my grandmother company and partly, if I’m being brutally honest, because I wanted to see what he was going to say regarding the abuse allegations. So, I watched, trying my best to really listen to his message without being cynical. 

As I heard His Holiness speak, I remembered a discussion that I'd had with my mother when he had been elected pope. I knew nothing of the man at the time. I was a mildly rebellious teenager who had no time for religion and the only reason I was interested in the papal election was that it was taking them so long to pick another half-dead old fogey to take the place of the last one. But putting my cynicism aside, when we were told the new pope’s chosen name on the day of his election, I said to my mother that ‘If this guy lives up to the name he’s taken, he will be the one to bring me back”. Little did teenage me know. 

Five years after that conversation, when I heard him speak at the Marian shrine in Knock, I came very close to an emotional outburst (cue the eye-roll, I know, but I do promise that this is not a conversion story). I just felt that I could relate to this man on another level, a higher level, a level at which very few people had inspired or challenged me in the past. And so, my journey of searching began. I started reading more books on theology, asking more questions and most significantly, I started going to mass again.

Going forward

Some time after all this, I was sitting in Lismullin Conference Centre at a retreat, pleading with God present in the Tabernacle to give me some form of divine inspiration to fill the void I was feeling in my life at the moment when I felt this sudden urge to write. I opened my laptop that night completely at a loss for what to say. I doubted that anyone would want to listen to me after I had spent years as a passive agnostic, knowing that God existed, but ignoring Him because He just wasn’t cool. God was hard work. Catholicism was very hard work. Having such different views from my peers was even harder work. Older Irish Catholics still have certain publications that reflect their interests and needs, but these just do not appeal to younger people. I felt the need to do something proactive to fill that void.

We young, Irish Catholics need something concrete and attainable, something that brings us together, knowing that despite all our human failings, we are ‘Beloved’, as God has told us. It is easy, in the era that we live, to feel helpless, as though we each stand at the edge of an abyss, screaming ‘Is there anybody out there? Anybody?’ 

Ultimately, No matter where we are in our faith we need to come together, accepting each other as people on different stages of a journey, so that we can create a united community in which to raise the next generation of Roman Catholics in Ireland. 

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Anna Twomey