The Girls Go to The Shrine of Knock

If you thought the religious aspects of a Catholic secondary school were just symbolic, you would be wrong. We had serious religion classes and were often herded over to the church for special services. We had one priest who was particularly popular as he was as handsome as he was charming (looking back now I would definitely classify him as a twink—a small, usually attractive gay man). At one point he was replaced by a rather large man with ruddy red cheeks and a very clear drinking problem. As we don’t generally say that someone is struggling with debilitating alcoholism, we just say “he likes a drink” and leave it at that. Anyway, he liked a drink, that was for sure. He would visit our classes occasionally and boom sycophantically about the love of Jesus and how we could all get better marks in our exams if we prayed hard enough.

I was not a huge fan of the religious fervour of some members of the school, but neither did I really mind. The thing about Catholicism is that apart from being rather strict and suffocating in some aspects, in others it’s quite interesting—if you’ve ever read the Old Testament you will know what I’m talking about. It’s also one of the religions that has a great deal of merch associated with it that you can purchase ad nauseam. A popular T-shirt when I was sixteen depicted the Virgin Mary with the quote “Mary is my home girl.” I was desperate to buy it despite Mary not really being my home girl; alas, my mam wouldn’t allow it and deemed the T-shirt “disrespectful.” My grandad also had a Virgin Mary statue in his house that had a funny red light attached to it; it sort of made Mary look like she was an attraction in the red light district. I had hoped to inherit it when he passed away but I think it got thrown away. To this day I’m still drawn to all forms of Catholic merch despite long since abandoning the actual belief system.

I was very excited, therefore, to learn that for our fourth-year retreat we would go to Knock. We left the school grounds very early on a crisp autumn morning. I loved the crunch of the leaves under my feet and the slightly sweet smell of rot that is so specific to autumn in Ireland; boarding the bus we were very giddy. In fact, we got in trouble before even leaving the school gates as we kept hysterically applauding everything the teacher in charge said and screaming “whooooo” every time she tried to speak. We thought this was the pinnacle of humour and there’s no stand-up that could have made us snort harder than we made ourselves crack up from our obnoxious behaviour. I was still deep in my shunned era, so I gingerly took my place beside a girl from a group I was hoping to get in with. She smiled vaguely and allowed me to put my bag down next to her—a shiver of relief went down my spine as I plopped myself into the seat. Success: I wouldn’t be a total reject that particular day.

This was the time of iPods and wired earphones. The bus was quiet and many of the girls were sleepily listening to The Kooks if you were cool, or a very specific subset of dance music wildly popular amongst our age in Ireland if you were even cooler. I watched the topography of our town quickly turn into countryside. When we were small, our granny used to tell us to count how many shades of green we could spot outside the window. I didn’t have a lot to say to Clara, the girl next to me. In the hellscape of teen friendships I had made a fatal error and texted some of the girls in the group if they wanted to hang out and watch a movie soon or “whatever.” The group were congregated together at that moment and joyfully let me know that they had received the messages as a group and thought the whole thing was hilarious. I didn’t mind too much; I was willing to endure a little humiliation if it meant I could have friends again and didn't have to spend all my free time with secondary school boyfriend A—a compulsive liar and music snob whose dislike for me was only matched by my own.

I sat with Clara in companionable silence while I fiddled with my Creative music player. My dad had an inexplicable yet burning hatred of Apple that endures to this day—he went through a Huawei phase that was incredibly irritating as he would lecture us on the features of his beloved Huawei phone ad nauseum; we were all secretly delighted when Huawei was found guilty of putting spyware in the British 5G networks and as a family remain steadfastly committed to bringing this up whenever possible. The Creative could fit maybe twenty songs and had to be restarted several times a day, but I was grateful for it at that moment.

We arrived in Knock around 11:00 and the rain had started. The clouds were a moody purple and the wind snaked a chilly stream into our fleece-lined school jackets. We started our tour by walking a kilometer or so to the gift shop. I was sort of drifting in the group at that point, having lost Clara’s attention in favour of her real friends. The gift shop was as tacky and jam-packed with tat as I was hoping it would be. I longingly let my fingers graze over a gilded Virgin Mary with a sequinned base and a light-up halo. Alas, my mam had only given me a fiver to spend on lunch. I did not possess the 300 euro for the Virgin Mary. I don’t know if there’s a correlation between girls who absolutely love the Virgin Mary and later come out as gay or if it was just a me thing, but god did I like her a lot. I wasn’t into sexy Jesus as some of the girls referred to him; we didn’t have the more historically accurate Middle Eastern-looking Jesus you see more often now, we had (as did the gift shop) a blue-eyed, chiselled blonde babe that closely resembled Chris Hemsworth.

Having thoroughly scoured the gift shop for bargains and awash in keychains and tote bags, we were guided by our teachers to the visitors centre, an imposing brown building that vaguely resembled a giant log cabin. Here, we were split into two groups and promptly abandoned by the teachers, handed over to two very enthusiastic youth pastors with bright, colourful fleeces and manic smiles.

The first half of the day passed without particular note, mostly consisting of predictable lectures on letting Jesus into our hearts. I had trouble staying awake thanks in part to the sticky warmth of the log cabin; they had cranked the radiators all the way up to combat the gloomy chill outside. We broke for lunch around 13:00 and wolfed down some burgers and chips, complete with a couple of loose strands of human hair.

Things really got going after lunch as we were given a survey of practices that would take us further from God. One of the questions was “do you masturbate?”; I think in terms of a squadron of teenage girls that question was a bit like asking “does the pope wear a pointy hat?” I was quite shocked by the question, that they would dare ask us something so personal. This was Ireland, 2004 after all; while we all knew most things about each other, matters of a serious nature were to be discussed strictly in euphemisms (e.g., she suffers with her nerves = she has a serious mental illness). I elected not to hand my survey back in and threw it in the bin; at this point the pastor had copped on to my low levels of enthusiasm for her interest in our masturbatory habits and was throwing me and a few other girls the odd dirty look.

I think the pastor may have sensed she was losing us as a group, so she really started to up the ante when we resumed. Her eyes had started to gain a bit of a manic tint as she asked us to lie down on the floor and close our eyes. I could feel the congealed burger sitting in my chest as I lay on the hard floor of the cabin. She had flicked through our surveys during lunch and was disappointed to learn that we were indeed massive, massive sinners. Since we were going to hell, she wanted us to visualize it. She simulated whipping and sizzling noises to imitate our burning flesh. It would have been hilarious if it wasn’t so violating. After that she switched gears towards a sort of evangelical track and gave us a fanatical lecture about angels and demons and the temptations of masturbation. For her grand finale she told us she had a special visitor for us, who turned out to be a priest. We were supposed to enter a side room one by one and confess our sins to him. Some of the girls had started sipping the Kool-Aid at this point and were crying and wailing along with the youth pastor; the other half of us remained impassive and vaguely awkward, queuing up reluctantly for confession.

My heart was pounding as I stepped into a small and somehow even warmer room than the pseudo-hell we had occupied for the past six hours. Taking a seat opposite a wizened old man in the casual black priest's uniform, he put a comforting hand on my knee (I think he genuinely meant well) and I defiantly told him I had no sins to confess to. He asked me if I drank (me, knowing full well I had put away four cans of premium cider only the previous weekend) and I answered the only way I felt appropriate: “no, I would never.” There was a long moment of silence before he cracked into a wide grin and asked, “you drink tea, don’t you?!” He could barely get the question out, laughing and wheezing as he was. We chatted for a few more minutes before I left, dying to know what the wailing girls had discussed with him.

The bus picked us up at six and the teachers miraculously appeared before the bus just as we were leaving, completely unaware of the wild journey their students had taken. Upon reuniting with Clara I was disappointed to learn the other group had been held in rapt attention by a former addict who regaled them with tales of his wayward youth as a cocaine user. Their youth pastor had also worked as a social worker in New York and shared equally interesting anecdotes about her experiences. They had totally skipped over the hell visualisations and forced confession. To say I was pissed was an understatement.

The teachers passed around a copy book for us to give our feedback on the experience. I took great pleasure in writing out in profound detail the nature of the survey, the visualisations and the forced confession. I was also baffled to see some of the positive commentary written by some of my classmates from the same group; had we really experienced the same thing? I rolled my eyes at an entry written by an anonymous source: apparently she really “felt Jesus in the room.” I didn’t know where Jesus was; he certainly wasn’t in that fucking room.