Confessions of a cradle Catholic

by Eamon Duffy

I have tried, but there seems something fundamentally dishonest in a Catholic of my background and generation pretending to offer a detached, universally applicable account of the power or attraction of the Church. I did not choose to be a Catholic: for me Catholicism is something bred in the bone, as fundamental a part of my identify as my name or (especially) my nationality. I was born in 1947 in the Irish east coast town of Dundalk, a strongly nationalist community just south of the border. During the Troubles of the 1970s it would earn the nick-name 'Dodge City' because it was the heart of IRA 'bandit country'; my own family were ardent nationalists. They were also (though somewhat less ardently) Catholics: ours was an observant but not a particularly pious household.

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