Dominic, known since his teens as Dom, enjoys telling people that he’s Catholic, or a ‘left-footer’ as he sometimes modestly describes himself. He feels it a distinction that gives him a bit of mystique in the financial services circles in which he moves. Non-Catholics are often mildly interested in his education by monks, his views of the papacy and whether he goes along with all the ‘rules’. But while Dom has lots to say on the matter, the truth is that the devout Catholicism of his upbringing is receding into distant memory, kept alive by a kind of niggling unease on Sunday mornings when he must decide whether or not to go to church. And nowadays, what with work, the children, the weekends in the country, he mostly just doesn’t have time. And that little pang of guilt is generally nothing that a Bloody Mary and a barbecue won’t banish.
Dom is keen on the aesthetics of Catholicism, what he likes to refer to as the ‘bells and smells.’ His heart soars at a good old-fashioned singalong hymn and some gusting incense. He keeps a dilatory eye on Rome, enjoys watching for the white smoke when a papal election comes around and thinks that whatever you think of the Vatican it puts on a pretty good show; he great approved of Pope Benedict’s red shoes. He calls it going the ‘whole hog.’ Dom and his wife took the children to Sunday Mass at their local church for a few months in the hope that it would secure them places at the Catholic primary school. But in the end, after all that, they went private and were sheepishly relieved to get their Sunday mornings back. What’s more, as he told everyone, Dom didn’t feel his aesthetic needs were catered to by St Anthony’s: all those guitars and microphones and welcoming smiles from a collection of, frankly, odd bods. When Dom is moved to go to Mass, it will be solemn high mass at Brompton Oratory or Westminster Cathedral where you get the whole hog and a half. A good session at the Oratory, as he likes to say, sets him up for the week.
Often, after being buoyed up by a bit of whole-hoggish Mass, Dom makes a mental resolution to be more regular in his attendance. The dutiful, somewhat austere churchgoing of his parents seems cramping and distant now; he associates it with acres of teenage boredom he doesn’t want to inflict on his own children. When he was their age, his rebellion in not going to church had caused his late parents heartache but when he remembers them struggling to church every week, surrounded by a congregation who’d grown old with them, he feels a pang, something like longing.
On Dom’s bedside table, buried under his iPhone and his sleeping tablets is a little pile of books that he’d retrieved from his parents’ house after they’d died; a tattered old Everyman copy of The Imitation of Christ, a well-thumbed paperback of Mere Christianity and something by John Paul II. They’ve been on his bedside table for years, mostly used to stop his glass of water from leaving rings. He keeps meaning to take a look at them but life, sleep and Netflix inevitably intervenes – and now, the sight of them sitting there unopened fills him with a kind of fear.
His teenage children have had barely any real experience of Catholicism or indeed of any faith at all; they have never been part of the community of any church; the concept is entirely alien to them, something they think of, if they think of it, as a mild eccentricity associated with old age and the distant past. But his youngest surprised him the other day by saying she’d like to go to Mass, not the Oratory but St Anthony’s down the road, that in fact she would wake him up to make sure he got there on time. Dom was initially unnerved by this development – and even more so that despite his jokey asides and eyerolls, she didn’t seem to mind the odd bods and the guitars: in fact, she wants to go back.
Dom, back at home with a pre-lunch drink, wonders if the time has come to dust off his mother’s old Everymans and open at page one.
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