My teenage revelation that a Catholic upbringing wasn’t going to work out for me as a functioning gay adult was quick, painless and probably best for both of us. The clash between the two cultures looked too extreme, even if my knowledge of homosexuality back then was confined to two Frankie Goes To Hollywood videos. A hovering weekly reminder I was going to hell for being who I was turned out to be the deciding factor. As I told a boyfriend later, in the middle of a brutal break-up, “only a madman would want to be part of something that doesn’t want him.”
One Sunday I went to church as usual. The next I didn’t. I was 14. I felt a little sad for my mum, but not sad enough to carry on craving the attention of something that rejected me. That was almost forty years ago, yet the fragrance of Catholicism still lingers, long after an early apostatic gesture. I still cross myself when passing a Roman Catholic church. Lighting a candle at St Patrick’s, Soho Square is the only reason I keep pound coins in my pocket. A secular Christmas card makes me squirm. Midnight mass is the one theatrical event of the year I rarely miss.
On Friday, still clinging to the last glass bead of my mental rosary, I will trot dutifully over to Hackney Picturehouse for the first available screening of Conclave, the Ralph Fiennes, John Lithgow and Stanley Tucci drama of papal selection. Apparently, it’s amazing. To an engineered Catholic, this is hardly the point. Something about the red and gold, the sceptre and mitre, the solemnity of the actors’ poses all over the promo posters feels too evocative to ignore. Fiennes’ stern, kindly concern is just too familiar. The further Catholicism retreats from actual engagement, the more entrenched it feels. Let’s not even get into guilt.
I once interviewed the ferociously funny film director John Waters’ favourite actress, Mink Stole. She slipped early into conversation that she was one of ten children. My impulse reaction was a one-word question. “Catholic?” But of course. Ms Stole went on to expound a theory. While having long since abandoned the faith, she felt “culturally catholic.” I found myself nodding despite never having heard the expression before.
She liked the pomp and ceremony, the robes, the architecture, the incense. I added that a couple of the basic tenets of the faith (loving your neighbour as yourself, the meek inheriting the earth) had formed accidental foundations for life. We agreed that if it wasn’t for the young indoctrination of complete bodily repression, unless entered into under a stifling set of sex rules made up mostly by celibate alcoholics, Catholicism might have got us for the long haul. That seemed sad, too, on a more existential level, for the Vatican itself.
Worship is as potent as ever. It just disappeared from the church
The older I get, the more I see the entrails of lost faith systems deposited in the unlikeliest corners. The guards protecting Catholicism are not confined to a film released this weekend dolling up religion for Hollywood. The anonymity of the confessional booth still looks very much like therapy. A forgiving voice behind a screen, listening to everything you messed up at that fortnight. Cancel culture is a messily distributed portion control for earthly damnation. In a godless Britain, ardent football fans, evangelical YouTubers, pop stars with propulsive fanbases all appear flecked by that same unswerving devotion to a chosen idol I first witnessed as an infant. In twenty years time, the Ralph Fiennes of his day won’t be playing a pope in waiting. They’ll be playing Taylor Swift.
If God fell out of favour on account of Catholicism’s inextricable misunderstandings of the modern age, the need to believe in something, anything that felt like a higher and more blessed power squeezed itself into alternate portals. Worship is as potent as ever. It just disappeared from the church. Faith itself is still an incredible, enviable thing, one of the reasons I still bless myself, despite it all, for a Catholic education. To have once glimpsed it all from the inside. Who, in the end can argue with the simple bartering exchange of eternal salvation for trying to do your best? For now, being culturally Catholic will have to suffice.
Paul Flynn is a London Standard columnist
