The father, the son and the ghostly hole - Rory McGrath

'I remember thinking when I was about 14, "I hope God doesn't find out I'm an atheist".'

This is Rory's story of being brought up a Catholic, going to Catholic school, being an altar boy; of the parents, priests, the nuns who taught him, the life and characters at his local Church. Until, that is, as a teenager in crisis, he abandons his faith and enters the god-forsaken world and the glamour of its evil ways with a spring in his step.

But almost immediately he realises he has in the process also freed himself from certainty, comfort and hope. So his apostasy is a long and winding road which includes the coincidence of marrying a (lapsed) Catholic and getting married in a Catholic church so his children could attend the best school in the area. Its about how being raised a Catholic always colours your view of life and death and how it fuels the guilt you feel in every nook and cranny of that life, and how it provoked for him an [unsuccessful] search for God in other things; sex, drugs, drink, love, family, football and the Periodic Table.


May contain traces of jokes.