Catholic Church

The Catholic Church is a defining presence in Stella’s life, portrayed less as an abstract authority than as a set of practices through which she seeks meaning, serves others, and understands herself. The novel holds that personal faith beside the institution’s failures and restrictions: Stella finds moral and emotional sustenance in Catholicism even as its structures disappoint her, particularly in their treatment of women.

Faith as a daily practice

Stella’s faith is sustained through repeated acts rather than reserved for public ceremony. At the hotel, Gerry sees her kneeling beside the bed in her white nightdress, praying. Her nightly routine moves through the people she loves, from her parents and siblings to the wider family, before turning to prayers of thanks for her life and survival. She also prays for refugees and people fleeing war. The sequence gives private devotion a practical reach: it begins in intimate care and extends toward people she does not know. Yet the narrative also presents prayer as routine spiritual tidying, something that orders the day before sleep and after waking, not a claim that prayer alone can repair the world.

For Stella, Catholicism supplies the ethical vocabulary behind her kindness, generosity, justice, humility, and capacity to absorb and give love. She traces these qualities to a religious inheritance taught from childhood by her parents, teachers, and other people she loved and trusted. She understands the Church’s ideal of a shared place at Mass as an equalising one: people of different races, abilities, occupations, and social standing meet as equals in God’s sight. This conviction makes her attachment personal and humane, not merely doctrinal. She wants a faith that prays, offers beautiful ritual, attends to others’ needs, and helps in the countless small acts of ordinary life.

Ritual, service, and belonging

The Church’s rituals give Stella’s convictions a visible form. At Christmas Mass, she serves as a Eucharistic minister alongside Sister Francis. After exchanging the sign of peace, Stella leaves Gerry in the pew and goes to the altar, where the priest gives communion to the two women. She then distributes hosts from a gold chalice to the people approaching. From his seat, Gerry sees her stoop toward each person and recognizes a side of her he does not fully know. When she returns, kneels, and covers her face with her hands, he hears her take a shuddering breath. The service brings together her public religious role and private emotion, though Gerry can only guess at what has moved her.

In Amsterdam, Stella’s visit to the Begijnhof turns religious belonging into a question about how to live. She tells Gerry that she is tired of their way of life and wants to answer important questions about living well. The word devout, inherited from her childhood, expresses her desire for a life grounded in prayer and charity. She describes the goal as a more valuable life, both spiritual and useful, and asks how a person might make even a small contribution to improving the world. The search is not simply for a place to reside; she hopes to find a community in which faith can become a shared form of life.

Kathleen Walsh’s account complicates that hope. Her own religion remains important to her, and she says that being taught by nuns in Waterford helped shape her; she also values having a chapel nearby. But she explains that spiritual practice is now a personal decision rather than something enforced by the community. The sisterhood is real as a network of women, while its former religious character has largely disappeared. Residence is also constrained by practical eligibility: applicants must be women prepared to live alone, between thirty and sixty-five, and able to afford it. The waiting list may be five years or longer. Stella concludes that she is too old. When Astrid Hoogendorp confirms the rules, describing the matter as a real-estate transaction rather than a spiritual one, the community she hoped might unite religious purpose with everyday life proves inaccessible to her.

Institutional ideals and exclusions

Stella’s disappointment does not erase her faith, but it sharpens the distinction between Catholicism as a source of ethical life and the Church as an institution. She wants a rational, loving, Christ-centred Church that would eventually include women. She recognizes the institution’s record of sexual abuse and concealment by senior clergy, and she rejects its capacity to control women’s lives through sexual scrutiny. Her criticism comes from within a continuing attachment: the Church matters enough for its failures to wound her, and she still hopes for a religious life attentive to justice and care.

That tension is embodied in her encounter with the Begijnhof’s rules. The women’s community offers independent and useful lives, but it no longer provides the religious order Stella imagined, and its age limit closes the door to her. The distinction between a place shaped by a religious past and a functioning religious vocation becomes painful precisely because she is seeking a life, not just the appearance of one. She wants to direct her time toward spiritual and useful work, yet the available structure cannot accommodate her at this stage of life. Her exclusion is therefore both personal and institutional: the community is real, but the form of religious belonging she seeks is not available to her.

Faith and marital conflict

The Catholic Church also marks a fault line between Stella and Gerry. He doubts religious belief and can treat it as an argument about truth; she insists that her religion is the practice of her religion. Mass, she explains, is the most precious thing in her life and a storyboard for getting through it. Her objection is not that Gerry must share her belief, but that he must not dismiss or mock the practice that gives her life structure and meaning. Their disagreement is therefore about respect as well as theology: his debate can feel to her like a refusal to recognize what her faith makes possible.

The novel does not resolve that difference by converting either spouse. Instead, religious language becomes part of their negotiation about whether their life together can change. After Stella finds that an all-female religious collective is no longer an option, she tells Gerry that if he keeps his word about giving up drinking, they may not need to sell their home. He answers, “All shall be well,” and repeats the phrase when she asks him to say it again. The words do not remove the crisis or guarantee a new life; they give the couple a shared, provisional form of hope. In this way, the Church’s importance in the novel lies not only in formal doctrine or ceremony, but in the practices and language through which Stella seeks to live faithfully, and through which she asks Gerry to take her convictions seriously.