Catholicism & Me

My on-again off-again relationship with Religion

A lot of being a kid is being dragged against your will to various locations. You're dragged to piano practice, you’re dragged to family friends’ Christmas parties, you’re dragged to your Great Aunt Miriam’s house where everything is covered in plastic and it smells… weird. But the worst part of these involuntary outings is that you, the child, are forced to pretend like you’re happy to be there. Right before your parents shove you over the threshold of Great Aunt Miriam’s house, they tell you to “Be nice and behave” or else there will be “No American Idol tonight.” 

But Catholic Mass was different. The beauty of it was you didn’t have to pretend you were having a good time. That’s not what Mass was about. Everyone in the church, from the altar boys to the organ player, wore faces so grim it looked like they should be put on suicide watch.  

During one particularly tedious Mass, a 7-year-old Keara leaned over to her father and whispered, “I don’t want to be here.”

Without missing a beat, my father pointed to the wooden statue of mid-crucifixion Jesus and asked, “Do you think he wants to be here?” 

And so I came to hold a begrudging respect for Catholicism and its Church. Little did I know, this was merely the beginning of my lifelong, on-again off-again, relationship with the world’s most dominant sect of Christianity. 

Growing up, I never considered “being catholic” a large part of my identity. It was a part of my life, sure, but it was off to the side. It was never my center. I attended public school five days a week and Catholic School once a week: Sunday morning’s from 10:30 am till 12:00 pm. Besides the required holidays, my family attended mass sporadically, based solely on whether or not my father thought it had been “too long since we went to church.” 

My father, a practicing catholic, and my mother, a devout atheist, are linked by their distaste for the institution of the Catholic Church and their willingness to criticize it. For my father, Kevin Sullivan, no nit is too small to pick when it comes to the Catholic Church. I witnessed this, firsthand, the last time I attended Mass with my father. The moment the Priest ended his Christmas sermon, my father turned to me and stated, “Six minutes, 44 seconds. He could get it under six.” I looked down and in his lap sat his iPhone, stopwatch app open. Yes, he had timed the sermon. 

It’s not just local priests with poor rhetorical speaking skills that should fear Kevin Sullivan. He’ll go after the big brass just as well! My father believes both in God and in the incompetence of American bishops, who he recently called, “A total embarrassment.” He is, however, a fan of Pope Francis and his “message of mercy, protecting the environment, and being open and welcoming to the Gay community.” Just this past week, my dad sent me an email in which he asserted, “A true Irish Catholic should be fighting the Bishops every step of the way and helping Francis.”

My father’s aversion towards Catholic authority makes sense considering his religious upbringing. My Gramere was an Irish immigrant from Omagh, Northern Ireland where she grew up as one of ten children. She was a strict, no-nonsense, Irish Catholic woman. Little Kevin Sullivan had to say his prayers every morning, oftentimes in front of his classmates who picked him up on their way to school. My grandparents then sent my dad to an all-boys Catholic boarding school in Rome, Italy. If you received detention there, you were utilized as child labor and spent your weekend building the school’s newest stone wall. 

By comparison, I think I received a much more well rounded Catholic education. My parents forced me to attend weekly Catholic school yet encouraged me to question and even outright challenge the Church’s teachings. As expected, I inherited my father’s Irish pension for rebellion and became the devil’s advocate of my Catholic school class. I would ask questions such as, “Why can’t women be priests?” or “Why are all of the apostles men?” and watch with a smug smile as the parent volunteer-teachers grasped clumsily at a politically-correct answer. 

But despite my frequent class disruptions, I was still on board with Catholicism as a whole. I believed in God, I believed in Jesus Christ, I believed in Heaven and Hell. I believed in all these things in the most literal sense. And I liked believing in them. 

To my atheist mother’s credit, she never rained on our catholic parade - she let us believe in the things we were taught. It was only when I hit the big double digits (Turning ten years old) that I started asking about her religious views. One thing to know about my mother is that when asked a direct question, she can be a very direct woman. 

I have a flashbulb memory of me laying next to my mom in her bed, which I preferred since it had a puffy duvet. I don’t know how it came up, but I asked her if she believed in Heaven. She offered a one word reply, “No.” 

“Why not?” I asked. 

“I think Heaven is a place people made up because they’re too scared to die,” she replied. 

“But then what do you think happens to us after we die?” 

“Nothing.” 

“Are you scared to die?” 

“No,” she laughed, “It happens to everyone. It’s natural.” 

I’m not sure what rattled me more - the fact that my mother appeared completely unafraid of eternal oblivion or the fact that her reasoning behind not believing in Heaven actually made sense to me. I began questioning the faith, which is a big no-no in Catholicism. The more I thought about it, the more I started to swing in my mother’s direction. 

By the time I was thirteen years old, I had disavowed religion as a whole - a right of passage for anyone raised catholic. I no longer found satisfaction in challenging the Church’s teachings; instead, I found a rather righteous anger. When you keep asking the same questions and keep getting the same nonsensical answers, you become extremely frustrated. And I was tired of being angry. And I didn’t believe in God anymore. And I didn’t believe in Heaven or Hell. And I didn’t want to be Catholic. 

And so, in my final year of Catholic School, I told my dad that I didn’t want to be confirmed. I didn’t want to go through with it just for the sake of “finishing the job,” as Joe Biden would say. 

My dad actually took the news pretty well. At the very least, I think he was impressed with how seriously I was taking religion. When I told him that I didn’t believe in God, he simply replied, “Everyone has their own spiritual journey” and swiveled his office chair around to continue watching Rudy. When my dad broke the news to Sister Roberta, the nun in charge of the school, she simply replied, “Well… maybe she’ll come around.” Even though I had adamantly sworn off the Church, the lifelong Catholics knew it wouldn’t be the end for me and this very sticky religion. 

The first chink in my atheist armor occurred when the Sullivan family bravely crossed the Atlantic to attend my dad’s 50th high school reunion in Rome. My dad’s old school chum, Arturo, had scheduled our tour of the eternal city down to the minute. For a group of sixty-five year old men, they sure could handle themselves on a walking tour. 

By day six of our Roman holiday, I had become pretty used to seeing beautiful, awe-inspiring things. But what I wasn’t used to was the feeling I got whenever we visited a church. I specifically remember St. Peter’s Basilica. Everywhere I turned was blue and gold and filled with light. I looked up at the ceiling and it looked like Heaven. I felt so small -  the good kind of small - the kind that makes you feel connected to all the other small humans, even the ones that came before you. I remember thinking that I wasn’t just beholding beauty, I was beholding goodness. 

I didn’t think the angels I saw on the ceiling that day were literally real, but the feeling I had when I looked at them was. And no amount of logical reasoning could make me deny that. Even still, I chalked my momentary brush with the divine as a logical side effect of viewing beautiful architecture. I was still an adamant atheist. 

But identifying as an atheist doesn’t necessarily preclude you from also identifying as Irish Catholic. When asked about my ethnicity, I would reply, “I’m Irish Catholic, but I don’t believe in God.” This may seem oxymoronic to some, but to those raised Catholic it will make perfect sense. 

When you’re raised within a specific ethnic-religious subgroup, it is nearly impossible to detach yourself from their culture. In my family, our Catholic identity was almost synonymous with our Irish-American identity - the two could not be separated. If you brought up Great Britain in front of my Gramere, who grew up Catholic in the Protestant controlled North, she would pull out her iconic catchphrase, “800 years of British Oppression over the Irish!” 

When my older sister’s long-term boyfriend broke up with her, my little sister remarked, “This is why you shouldn’t trust a Prod.” I agreed wholeheartedly. Religiously, I was an atheist. Culturally, I was still as Irish Catholic as ever. 

My atheism phase continued until the Easter of my freshman year of college. It was the first religious holiday I wouldn’t be spending with my family. At long last, I wouldn’t be forced to attend Easter Mass. Yahoo! I had finally wriggled my way out of Catholicism's iron grip! 

Or so I thought. 

As Easter neared, I started to feel extremely uneasy at the thought of not attending Mass. I don’t know how to explain it other than saying it just felt wrong - the kind of wrong you feel in the pit of your stomach. I mean, what else would I do with that Sunday? My dad was also sweetening the pot by offering a $50 Easter Brunch stipend to those of his children who attended Mass and sent picture proof in the family group chat. 

As I walked to the Church in my pink pastel dress, I told myself that I was only going to Mass for the money. After all, who among us would turn down a free brunch? 

I arrived at Mass fifteen minutes early and managed to secure myself a seat behind a large pole that obstructed about half of the altar. I couldn’t complain - pew seating on Easter is a dog eat dog competition. By the time the Mass started, the church had become standing room only. 

Though I wasn’t sitting in a grand cathedral or ancient chapel, that same sense of smallness washed over me again. I didn’t believe in the prayers I was reciting, but when I said the words in unison with the congregation I felt something beyond belief. Was it faith? I’m not sure if that’s the right word. I’m not sure the feeling actually has a word. 

There is a theory within the ecological community that the Redwood Trees are actually one, single organism. From the human perspective, each tree seems to be its own individual entity. But when you look beneath the soil, you see that the trees on the edge of the Redwood Forest are feeding nutrients to the trees in the center through their intricately connected root system. 

Sitting in church that day, I felt like a Redwood tree - like I was connected to something larger and more important than myself, something beautiful and fundamentally good. I realized that religion was more than just the question of whether or not God is literally real. That question actually doesn’t matter to me at all anymore. 

Since that day, I haven’t identified as atheist. Not because I believe in God, but because I believe in his message: that we aren’t here on earth for ourselves, we are here for each other. And that the way we love each other connects us and creates something more, something divine. 

In Corinthians 13:13, the passage that you may recognize from every wedding ever, it reads, “And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.” If I believe in one thing, it is this.