When I think of my country and its relationship with Catholicism, I think of it, in what I hope is appropriate humility, as being about 25 years behind on the path I have travelled myself. In the middle 1970s, when I was 19 and 20, I began a period of vaguely oedipal struggling against the Church. I recall that my main focus was what I deemed “hypocrisy”: the way Church personnel said one thing and did another.
There were some unlucky priests upon whom I frowned for their love of female company or a good whiskey, and this became a useful mechanism in enabling what I later recognised as the carefully constructed alibi for my resolve to shake off the judgments of Catholicism and get on with exploring those exciting new freedoms I identified as being in conflict with the theology of my upbringing.
