IRELAND
Irish Independent
By Gerard O’Regan
Saturday January 26 2013
THIS past Christmas Eve, as befits some people who come under the banner of that cringe-inducing phrase ‘a la carte Catholics’, I attended a Gospel Mass in St Francis Xavier’s Church in Dublin’s Gardiner Street.
I had never been there before. But a friend spoke fervently about its gospel choir. “We always go there at Christmas. For some reason the church can be very atmospheric and spiritual at that time of year. But you have to arrive early so as to get a seat. It’s normally packed on Christmas Eve,” he warned.
And so, we arrived in plenty of time, and got a spot near the choir in one of the front pews, when the building was still quite empty. Then slowly and steadily came the soft footfall of people arriving out of the December night. Sure enough, almost without warning, the church was indeed “packed”.
As I looked around at this varied mix of humanity – the young, the old, the married, the single, the healthy, the infirm, the happy, the depressed, the believers and the non-believers – I could not but contemplate the embrace 2,000 years of Roman Catholicism has had on the very soul of Ireland.
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