Sean leaves the Catholic Church

Sean’s departure from the Catholic Church takes shape as a slow separation between inherited religious practice and personal conviction, not as a single declaration of unbelief. He continues to value the Church’s ceremonies and remains grateful for the sacred world of his childhood, but eventually refuses a nightly observance that has become, for him, both empty performance and an instrument of family control. The change tests his relationship with Francis (Frank) McGahern and carries consequences beyond the home, where religious orthodoxy helped determine who could teach in a small parish.

A Faith Practised in Daily Life

Religion had ordered the ordinary rhythm of Sean’s childhood. Prayers began each morning; at noon, the Angelus bell stopped work and conversation in fields, houses, schools, shops, and the street; the day ended with the Rosary. Heaven, hell, purgatory, and limbo were discussed as realities nearer than distant countries such as America or Australia. His mother, Susan McGahern, described heaven with the loving concreteness she brought to naming wild flowers, imagining the family together there for eternity.

Religious practice also extended beyond formal doctrine. During whooping cough, Sean was passed three times beneath a donkey, mule, or jennet in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. He remembered the frost on the ground and the stars above as he was carried back and forth, and the intense happiness of being restored to his mother and walking with her to school again. At home, family prayer joined the material details of an evening: gathered sticks fed the fire, a small lamp glowed before the Sacred Heart, the kettle boiled, and the family knelt to say the Rosary. Such episodes made religion a bodily and domestic experience, bound up with care, fear, and consolation as well as belief.

The Church as Beauty and Authority

Church ceremonies remained a source of pleasure to Sean, even after his belief began to weaken. In an impoverished period, they introduced him to indoor beauty, ornament, sacrament, and mystery. He remembered the plain cardboard boxes that carried red, white, and yellow tulips to the altar when flowers were scarce. The Stations of the Cross in Lent belonged to a dim church where rain and wind struck the windows and a few altar boys moved between the stations with a cross and candles. Corpus Christi transformed the village: rhododendron branches, banners, and streamers decorated the roads; flowered altars were set up at local stopping places; and a large procession carried the Host beneath a gold canopy.

For a time, the Church also represented an authority beyond Francis’s domestic rule. Sean followed the Christian story through the year’s feasts, from Christmas and Ash Wednesday through Lent to Easter, Pentecost, Ascension Day, and All Souls’ Day. Those ceremonies gave shape to the calendar and, in his understanding, offered a moral authority his father could not simply overrule while remaining publicly within the Church. Religious observance therefore held two meanings that would later pull apart: it could open a world of beauty and shared human equality, but it could also be imposed as a household obligation.

An Imperceptible Withdrawal

Sean later described his separation as so gradual that he could not tell whether he had left the Church or the Church had left him. He still liked the ceremonies and attended Mass or stayed away according to circumstance and inclination. As a schoolteacher, he continued to teach catechism and lead children in the required prayers with the same ease he had once brought to them as a believer. His conduct did not amount to a wholesale repudiation of his religious upbringing. He retained affection and gratitude for it, regarding it as the sacred weather of his early life and too deep a part of himself simply to turn against.

Work, reading, and reflection nonetheless led him to distinguish morality from religion. Morality, as he came to understand it, concerned relationships with other people and with other living creatures; religion concerned a person’s relationship with the whole surrounding environment. He also came to see the story of Jesus as one sacred story among others, each seeking to make the inexplicable bearable. His changed understanding did not erase the ceremonies’ emotional force, but it loosened their claim on his conscience.

The clearest outward sign of that change came during visits home, when Sean stopped kneeling for the nightly Rosary. He did not make a public announcement. Instead, he tried to withdraw discreetly, going outside or to his room when the family knelt. The act was small in its physical form, but it refused a practice that had once closed every day and now seemed to him both an empty charade and an instrument of domination. His father was furious, particularly because he feared the example Sean was setting for the younger children.

The Family Quarrel and Its Consequences

The disagreement continued through correspondence. Francis wrote from Grevisk on Trinity Sunday, rejecting Sean’s letter as unworthy and deploring his religion, or lack of it. He insisted on filial cooperation so that Sean would not make the other members of the family unhappy, while also presenting himself as a loving father who would welcome his son in sickness or health. The letter joined tenderness to command: its welcome did not cancel the demand that Sean’s beliefs conform to his father’s.

The conflict eventually subsided when Francis faced the prospect of not seeing Sean. He then abandoned the insistence that every member of the family share his own unswerving religious beliefs. That retreat did not end the quarrels surrounding religion. Francis instead used Sean’s lack of belief in his ongoing conflict with Agnes McShera, appealing to her for sympathy while undermining her, until she became increasingly hostile. Sean’s withdrawal thus moved from a private difference in practice into the father’s wider struggle for control within the household.

It also restricted Sean’s possible work in the countryside. News of farms for sale and vacancies at nearby schools ceased to be relevant to him in his father’s eyes: because Sean did not believe, Francis concluded that he could not take such positions. In small parishes, a teacher was expected to be one of the pillars of the Church, and Francis understood that local expectation immediately. The departure was therefore not a clean break with the religious world that had formed Sean. It left him with enduring affection for its ceremonies, but placed his personal independence in tension with family authority and the professional demands of a church-centred community.