Sin, confession, and religious authority

Sin, confession, and religious authority are presented as forces that shape childhood, public ritual, and private conscience in the Catholic community around Cushla Lavery. Religious practice appears in familiar forms—hymns, rosary beads, a missal, Communion—but Father Slattery turns instruction about sin into a means of imposing fear and sectarian suspicion. Against that authority, Cushla’s efforts to reassure Davy McGeown and her own desperate prayer suggest a faith that is intimate and conflicted rather than simply obedient.

Parish Authority and Its Reach

The school’s religious authority is inseparable from its setting: it stands on parish land shared with the church and parochial house. Father Slattery moves through the playground and corridors and enters classrooms without warning to deliver catechism. Cushla has already complained to Bradley that these visits unsettle the children, but Bradley’s response is that Slattery is the priest. The exchange makes institutional status an answer to concern, rather than a reason to scrutinize how that status is used.

Cushla’s distrust also has a personal history. When her father was in hospital and delirious with morphine, Father Slattery prayed with him and then persuaded him to write a cheque for a colour television. The episode connects religious presence with material self-interest at a moment when Cushla’s father was vulnerable. It helps explain why she does not regard clerical authority as automatically benevolent, even though she remains attentive to religious custom and its meaning for others.

Father Slattery’s lesson to Davy makes that authority explicitly sectarian. He tells the children a story of a girl harmed by a gang of men and marked with the initials of the Ulster Volunteer Force. When Davy asks whether the girl was seven, Father Slattery dismisses the question and redirects the story into a claim that Protestants hate Catholics. The child’s attention to the girl’s age gives way to an adult’s political conclusion: the story is not used to explore suffering or protect children, but to teach them whom to fear. Father Slattery then identifies Davy as a member of the McGeown family, bringing the lesson’s communal hostility directly to the boy.

Teaching Sin and Penance

In preparation for First Confession, Cushla tells the children that they are too young to have serious sins and suggests that they invent minor faults, such as quarrelling with siblings or forgetting prayers. Father Slattery instead teaches original sin through Adam and Eve, emphasizing remorse, guilt, and sorrow. He warns that he will show no leniency and makes the length of each child’s penance a public sign of the extent of their sinfulness. Confession is thus made legible to the school community through a visible measure of submission: how long a child remains kneeling.

His lessons draw on devotional objects and stories as well as doctrine. Father Slattery gives each child a picture of Padre Pio and recounts the saint’s wounds. When he bends to say something privately to Davy, Cushla rushes over, but Father Slattery is already walking away. The content of the aside is not disclosed. That silence matters: the scene establishes Cushla’s alarm and the priest’s access to a child without revealing what he said, leaving the exercise of authority visible while its private effect remains uncertain.

Religious authority also extends into music and ceremony. Father Slattery leads the children through Communion hymns: Suffer Little Children, which some parents understand as referring to children suffering through the Troubles; Lord of the Dance, the children’s favourite; and Faith of Our Fathers, his own favourite, with its references to torture and death. The songs bring childhood devotion, political violence, and clerical taste into the same preparation. Father Slattery’s later insistence on sin and punishment gives that musical setting a more troubling weight.

Davy’s Confession and Communion

At First Confession, Davy goes first and receives a penance that keeps him kneeling for an exceptionally long time as the other children come and go. Cushla considers appealing to Bradley, who is standing near the entrance, but remembers the revenge he had taken on the McGeown family after her earlier insolence and says nothing. Her silence is not agreement with the punishment; it reflects the risks she associates with challenging school authority on the family’s behalf.

Tommy McGeown eventually strides up the aisle and pulls his younger brother from his knees. He confronts Father Slattery and Bradley, saying that what they are doing is not right, then leaves with Davy. Cushla follows. Davy turns and runs back to her, worried that he has done something very bad. She tells him that he has not. This exchange directly counters the priest’s judgment with the reassurance the child needs, while Tommy’s intervention makes the family’s resistance visible. When Tommy draws Davy away again, Cushla retrieves the religious-shop bag from her car and gives it to him. Davy opens it slowly and shows its contents to Tommy as though the gifts must be approved. The objects intended as loving support have become entangled with the authority that has just frightened him.

The previous day, Cushla had chosen a navy-blue missal embossed with silver writing and plain silver rosary beads for Davy, along with a novena to St Joseph that her grandmother used to recite when someone was in trouble. The shop’s mass-produced holy water, saint books, and framed images give the purchase a commercial, everyday setting. Cushla has little faith, but sees the gifts through Michael Agnew’s eyes as religious souvenirs brought home from a weekend with a married man. Her discomfort does not cancel her care for Davy; instead, the same objects carry devotion, affection, and guilt at once.

At Communion, Father Slattery’s homily is notable for omitting references to extreme sectarian violence. The children receive the host without incident, performing the practiced gestures of the rite. The scene sets formal religious order against the fear and coercion that have marked Davy’s confession. Gerry Devlin appears in the gallery and gives Cushla a thumbs-up when the choir sings Bridge Over Troubled Water. The ceremony can therefore hold comfort and public performance alongside the earlier distress, without resolving the damage done by the penance.

Private Faith and Moral Uncertainty

Religious practice is not confined to the school or to Father Slattery’s authority. Cushla’s choice of a novena associated with her grandmother recalls a domestic, inherited form of faith: a prayer used when someone is in trouble. Later, amid anxiety about Tommy’s arrest and uncertainty over what has happened, Cushla silently bargains with God, promising to change her conduct and become a nun if the danger will pass. The prayer is urgent and transactional, but it also shows how readily she reaches for religious language when ordinary action cannot reassure her.

The novel therefore distinguishes the authority to pronounce guilt from the impulse to seek help. Father Slattery makes sin a lesson in fear and turns penance into a test whose severity a child must endure in public. Cushla, by contrast, uses religious objects to comfort Davy and prayer to voice her own helplessness. Her limited faith does not make religion irrelevant; it makes its competing uses more visible. In these scenes, confession can become an instrument of shame, while prayer and devotional gifts remain available as imperfect acts of care.