By John Fitzgerald
(Part two)
Last week I recounted how Fr. Bob (not his real name) led morality patrols around Callan and district in search of courting couples he believed to be in need of salvation.
Another big issue in those days was the vexed question of what exactly was a sin. While many sins were clearly defined as such, others were shrouded in doubt and obfuscation.
This dilemma caused a lot of anxiety among Callan folk, as it did in every other parish in Catholic Ireland. People stayed up all night wondering if they had committed a sin. You had to be careful whom you asked. Jokers and smart-alecks were never in short supply when your conscience bothered you.
They might lead you astray by persuading you that a certain course of action or behaviour, or certain thought projections, were sinful when they knew quite well that these carried no penalty and were not mentioned anywhere in the Ten Commandments, the Seven Deadly Sins, or in any part of Catholic Canon Law.
“Pub theologians” deceived many well-meaning people in Callan into living out their entire lives avoiding perfectly normal and wholesome activities in the belief that the church’s blanket ban on sin encompassed their behaviour.
Yet, as with all traditions that pose a difficulty to one section of the population, the strict observance of Catholicism went down well with a sizable percentage of Irish people, and Callan was no exception to this rule.
The late Tess Roche of Kilbride, when I spoke to her in 2003, looked back with nostalgia at the celebration of the Latin Mass. Though you couldn’t understand a word of what the priest was saying, and he had his back turned to parishioners most of the time, there was a certain beauty in the ritual and in the centuries-old liturgy that evoked the wisdom and mystery of a world removed from our own.
People said their own prayers, the ones they had learned before they could talk, as the priest communed with God in a language spoken by pontiffs of the past and ancient Roman emperors. A few parishioners had missals to read from: these carried English translations of the Mass.
Confession, The Rosary, the Stations, Holy Family gatherings, and the urgency of repenting for one’s sins were central to the lives of Callan and Windgap people when Tess was a young girl. She knew the sins off by heart- there were hundreds of them- and could, like most schoolgirls in her day, tell the crucial difference between venial and mortal sins:
If you died in a state of Mortal Sin, The lad down below with the horns and the gleaming red eyes would be waiting for you. There was no appeal to a higher court if you “snuffed it” before reaching a confession box or saying an Act of Contrition.
But if you had committed a venial sin, roughly the equivalent of a misdemeanour in Civil Law, you had to “do time” in Purgatory- the length of one’s sentence depending on how repentant you were… on how much sanctifying grace you had earned through good deeds to offset your bad deeds; on your friends and relatives who could pray for you, and, controversially, on how much “indulgence money” was paid into church funds to persuade God to shorten your sentence.
Tess had a clear knowledge of both the red and green catechisms. She recalled that Bishop Butler wrote the red one, which was highly regarded for its clarity and uncompromising version of what God actually meant in the Gospels and throughout his Old Testament “Eye for an Eye” appearances. You knew where you stood with the red catechism: Dr. Butler took no prisoners.
Another feature of attending mass in the old days that Tess found intriguing was the practise of reading out the names of parishioners who had contributed money at the stations, and mentioning the actual amounts they had donated!
Michael Kehoe of Ahenure was the first on the list, because his address happened to begin with the first letter of the alphabet.
The Mission arrived in town every four years. It lasted two weeks- one week for the women of the parish, and another for the men. This “refresher course” in Christianity involved endless sermonising about the nature of good and evil…but mostly evil.
