Woman in the Making: Panti's Memoir by Rory O'Neill Page A

faith seriously and thoughtfully. Her bedside table was always weighed down with reading matter, and among it there were books of prayers or papal musings or theological treatises. She read at mass, spring-cleaned the church and was a minister of the Eucharist. The parish priest called in for tea, we said the Angelus at six o’clock, and confessed, confirmed and communioned more than was strictly necessary, but my mother’s devoutness had never been overbearing. Sure as a kid I’d had no choice but to sit miserably through Sunday mass and go to confession in a creepy dark box with a musty-smelling old man and pretend to be sorry about things I pretended I’d done wrong, but I also had to brush my teeth and take a bath every Saturday, and so did every kid I knew. And when I was in my teens and I started to slack off going to mass there were some tense discussions and testing of boundaries, but I never felt I was being Bible-bashed.She wasn’t Carrie’s mum. I never felt my mother’s faith was
blind
faith. Her faith was considered and thoughtful and well read, and I assumed that when her faith, or at least the teachings of the Church, came into conflict with a real-world situation, like discovering your son was gay, my intelligent, reasonable mother would intelligently and reasonably discount those arcane teachings. She would simply make up her own mind.
    But, not for the first time, I had underestimated the power of religion, because it turned out that my mother was having real difficulty in reconciling her faith with her gay son. On the morning of the third day, while my father was out at work, my mother called her brother. Uncle Brendan was an Irish Catholic priest in heathen England, a very different breed of priest from an Irish Catholic priest in holy Catholic Ireland. Before the implosion of the Irish Catholic Church from a seemingly never-ending string of abuse scandals and corruption, Irish priests tended to act as if they owned the place – because they did. Their authority was unquestioned; arrogance and self-entitlement were woven into their DNA. However, Irish Catholic priests in England were different.
    Uncle Brendan was priest to a small, poor, sometimes discriminated-against minority community in a country of heathen Protestants, who viewed him with suspicion and sometimes derision. He didn’t stride about like he owned the place while hats were doffed and indulgencessought – he schlepped about in his little car, part social worker, part local businessman, keeping the parish afloat by running the Catholic club attached to his church as a pub, wedding venue, bingo hall, dance hall and working-men’s club. Uncle Brendan was a priest, and a realist. While a priest in Ireland could, until the nineties anyway, bleat on and toe the party line about contraception, divorce or homosexuality without looking ridiculous or laughably backward, because the state and its laws were aligned with this arcane world view, in England a Catholic priest had no such luxury. In Protestant England a Catholic priest had to make accommodation for condoms, the pill, divorces and queers because they were realities.
    I don’t know exactly what Uncle Brendan said to my mother when she called him but, whatever it was, it worked. It reassured her in some way, I guess (that I wasn’t going to Hell? That I wasn’t broken? That Mary Magdalene and I would have been great mates?), and when she put down the phone she was ready to talk.
    We sat on my parents’ bed and, like so many mothers before her, she cried. She cried for the loss of the future she’d imagined for me, she cried for what she thought would be a difficult path, she cried because she worried I’d grow old and lonely, like the gay people in books and movies, she cried (I guess) for the unknown, and she cried (I suppose) because she felt she didn’t really know this new gay me. She cried for the imagined sonshe felt she’d just lost. And she cried because she loved me.