I Know a Lot about Wicked Priests, but I'Ll Still Be Going to Mass This Christmas, by Eileen Fairweathe, Mail on Sunday, December 20, 2009

I Know a Lot about Wicked Priests, but I'Ll Still Be Going to Mass This Christmas

By Eileen Fairweathe
Mail on Sunday
December 20, 2009

http://www.mailonsunday.co.uk/debate/article-1237193/I-know-lot-wicked-priests-Ill-going-Mass-Christmas.html

United Kingdom -- It's embarrassing to admit that I will go to Mass at Christmas, because I

am clearly a bad Catholic. I am short-tempered, impatient, often the opposite of serene, and the number of Vatican rules I break doesn't bear admitting. But, hey, if I didn't go to Mass I'd probably be far worse.

I am a 'cradle Catholic' – it is the religion into which I was born.

As a young woman in the radical Seventies, I angrily rejected it as reactionary and anti-female, and for years refused to darken a church door. But not for nothing is it said: 'Once a Catholic, always a Catholic.'

Cradle Catholic: Eileen Fairweather on her Confirmation day with her sponsor

About a decade ago, like so many church dissidents before me, I came back. A radical friend was horrified. How could I, as an investigative reporter who had exposed numerous paedophile scandals, return to a church which seemingly specialised in them?

Yet, aside from a couple of years of Godless teenaged angst, I had never really lost my sense of a higher power, or of gratitude to the loving nuns who taught me. However unfashionable, I don't have a single horror story about them or the many priests I have known.

And so on Christmas morning I will, with a collection of other unlikely Catholics at my inner-city church, sing my heart out. For within the church I find a kind of magic – what Christians call grace – and enormous strength and love.

During the years that I was 'lapsed', as Catholics put it, I missed the church at Christmas and Easter. I suffered what Salman Rushdie called the 'God-shaped hole' of the former religious believer. In my heart I pined for lost certainties, whatever my political differences with the Vatican.

Who can read Jesus's Sermon on the Mount and not be moved? Forget what may seem vengeful or reactionary in the Bible, and concentrate on Jesus's words. He befriended prostitutes and lepers, offering hope and healing to all.

I was educated at London state schools by bright nuns and committed Catholic lay teachers who firmly implanted in me the rhythms and inspiring messages of the church's great festivals.

The commercialism of a Godless Christmas and Easter, reduced to conspicuous consumption and shorn of their epic tales of redemption, felt empty. I could never bring myself to use the word 'Xmas'. Christ, the nuns always reminded us, was the feast's whole point.

For years I used to sneak into my local church to pray when no one was there. While reporting child abuse horror stories I worked with an inspiring Christian police officer and confided my religious doubts. He gave me good, simple advice: 'Take them to God. Just pray, "Lord, help me with my unbelief."'

I surprised myself by even going to Confession for the first time in years. The priest put things in a nutshell when he gently asked: 'Is your main argument with God or the Vatican?'

'Oh, the Vatican,' I blurted out.

'Ah well, then,' the priest chuckled, 'I'm sure God the Almighty has far more problems with the Vatican than you. Welcome back!'

So that was it – it seemed that I didn't have to sign up to the whole shebang to rejoin after all.

I found a church very different from the one I had left decades before. The paedophile scandals had shamed and humbled it. But Christians are meant to embrace humility, one priest told me. If the church's manifest failures renewed it, then he minded less

about being insulted in the street by strangers who assumed that dog collar meant pervert.

I also found less tub-thumping emphasis on sin, and more on the love and wisdom of Christ's message. The congregation also felt more inclusive. It included openly gay Catholics, divorcees and people who were cohabiting. They did not want to do without God or a church community because, for various reasons, they couldn't live by all the church's ideals.

Many were inspiring. They worked selflessly with asylum seekers, the homeless and the dying. They lived out Christ's message of love.

One explained: 'I value the Church even when I disagree with it. It holds the line.'

My investigative work means that I, more than most, know that the church's cover-ups of errant members are, although shameful, typical.

I would shop a paedophile priest to the police as soon as look at him. But the church was no worse than most other organisations that deal with children. It should, of course, have been far better. But the failings of God's alleged servants does not make me doubt God Himself.

To this day, faith schools achieve near miraculous results, even in impoverished inner cities. Hence the number of parents who pretend faith to get their child into what may be their only decent local state school.

Jesus taught that 'wherever two or more are gathered together in my name, there will I be also'. Even bemused atheists tell me they pick up from churches the echo of years of shared prayer and reverence. And that, ultimately, is why I will be at church on Christmas Day, to give a prodigal daughter's thanks.