As an adult I feel hot with embarrassment now to admit that growing up in rural Limerick going to Mass on Sunday morning was one of the highlights of my week.

You got to show off your best outfit to your friends, chat to neighbours about life on their farms and, once I’d made the Holy Communion I pounced on the offering, jealously guarding the right to carry the host up the aisle.

Lent was a particularly important time, chattering with school friends over the achingly hard decision to give up crisps or chocolate, and picking up your Trócaire box from the back of the church.

I was brought up to believe that God was a kind of secret best friend you talked to through prayer

I went to a small school in Limerick where the priest regularly popped his head in for religion class on Thursday morning and we belted out hymns, prayers and stories from Alive-o books. I loved God and God loved me. I was brought up to believe that God was a kind of secret best friend you talked to through prayer, not just a man sitting on a cloud.

I had questions about life, existence and the matter of the origin of babies, but it was all very simple until I grew up.

I was shocked to see the ignorance of tourists ambling by as I instinctively genuflected before church alters

Years later, as a philosophy undergraduate one of the first essays I ever tackled was on the existence of God and it obliterated a lot of the lingering Catholic loyalty I’d been raised with.

Yet on a trip to Rome last year, I was shocked to see the ignorance of tourists ambling by as I instinctively genuflected before church alters.

But as a lapsed Catholic, what right did I have to be high-minded or judgemental about the niceties of genuflection?

I am from a population where 78% of people identify as Catholic but how many of us have been to Mass in the last week or even year?

It made me ask of my own faith “Quo vadis?” – “Where are you going?” The phrase asked by the risen Jesus when St Peter was fleeing crucifixion in Rome.

It is also the title of former president, Mary McAleese’s 2012 book in 2012 where she pointedly asks the Church for answers on their future direction.

I am from a population where 78% of people identify as Catholic but how many of us have been to Mass in the last week or even year?

As Archbishop Diarmuid Martin states that parents – not schools – must drive religious education, will the vision of the local priest popping in during weekly religion class become a distant memory?

I don’t think I’ll ever regain the fierce loyalty I felt towards the Catholic Church in my youth but I still respect some of the principles

Take on top of this shrinking congregations, an aging priesthood and some resentment in the population towards the church and you reach a very old question. Quo vadis?

I don’t think I’ll ever regain the fierce loyalty I felt towards the Catholic Church in my youth but I still respect some of the principles and that is why this year I’ll be taking on the traditional Lenten fast, including no meat on Fridays, giving up crisps and chocolate for six weeks, turning off the mobile after 9pm and attending a religious service of a different faith each week and sharing the experience with Irish Country Living.

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