When I was a child in the 1960's the drunks at the back of Christmas midnight mass were the first overt signs I saw that the devotions to the Catholic religion and the rituals was an ala carte choice in the Ireland of that time. Grown men unable to stand still, belching and farting Guinness fumes over the people returning with God in their mouth past the end of the church as they returned around the back of the pews from the alter with the open tabernacle proved that even in our God's house the unforgiven sinners walked with the blessed, a stew mixed with the hypocrisy that swirled within and from the church. Had I been at Christmas midnight mass in Rathdrum some of those drunken men would most likely have been some of the men who buried the babies without ritual from the mother and baby homes, one of which I had survived.

There is a deep sense of loss when we discover our parents are living in a delusion and while the members of the more conventional Judeo Christian religions consider themselves immune to delusion they will often view Mormons or Jehovah Witnesses as delusional, while they themselves pray to statues and dismembered heads of deceased Saints and martyrs without any sense that they are deluded.