Kicking the Habit

The astonishing catalogue of sexual and physical abuse of children uncovered by the Ryan and Murphy reports has disgusted and disillusioned many Catholics. It's one of the many reasons Mass attendance is plummeting in Ireland. But for some people, merely distancing themselves from the Church isn't enough. Which is why hundreds of Irish people are opting to formally renounce their membership of the Catholic congregation.

Statistics for the country as a whole aren't available, but already this year 288 people have applied to defect from the Catholic Archdiocese of Dublin. Of these, 86 defections have been completed and 202 are currently being processed.
Those who want to leave the Church for good are assisted by a nine-month-old website, CountMeOut.ie, which provides all the documentation you need to formally ratify your defection.
Gráinne O'Sullivan (30) is one of the site's founders. Like many Irish people of her generation, she grew up in a Catholic family but membership of the Church never tallied with her own beliefs.
"I felt separated from the Church, especially its views on homosexuality and on women. It wasn't relevant to my life," says Gráinne.
"My mammy baptised me because her mammy baptised her. They baptised me partly because it would make life easier. Everyone else on the road was baptised. But we [Count Me Out] don't think that's the future of Ireland anymore, blindly going along with religion."
Last summer, after reading the Ryan report, Gráinne's friend Cormac Flynn decided he wanted to leave the Church. However, the process proved to be quite difficult as all the relevant information wasn't available in one place. Cormac and Gráinne set up Count Me Out to address that difficulty, and after a few weeks the third of their number, Paul Dunbar, came on board.
Count Me Out is an internet phenomenon through and through, arguably Ireland's first really successful one. It harnesses the web's hugely under-exploited potential for campaigning and social change. There have been over 100,000 visits to the site since July 2009. Around 10% of visitors download the defection forms. Unsurprisingly, it scooped the award for ‘Best Social Campaign' at the 2009 Irish Web Awards.

Motivation
So what motivates someone to defect from the Catholic Church?
Frank Donelan (28) from Dublin did so a few months ago. Frank, an anti-theist (someone who is opposed to the idea of the existence of God), had "thousands of reasons" for leaving the Church.
Like many who defect, he went to a school run by a religious order – in this case, the Holy Ghost Fathers. He has a pretty low opinion (to put it politely) of the priests he met at school, which is one of the reasons he holds the Church in such disregard. He also finds it hard to credit the spirituality of any religion which amasses so much material wealth.
"If they're so worried about heaven, why do all religions want power, and money, in this world, in the here and now. That's all they will ever be about," says Frank.
The reaction from his family was mixed. "My dad is not religious either, but my mum wasn't very happy."
Frank is typical of the largest group using Count Me Out, which is urban 20 to 35-year-olds. But without hard and fast statistics, Gráinne says young urban people are not vastly in the majority.
"We had someone in their 80s, we've had people in their teens, people from the back arse of nowhere, people who have emigrated out of Ireland or into Ireland."
Interest has been far higher than the founders had anticipated. "We didn't do it for media attention or for fame and glory – not that we've gotten either!" says Gráinne. "We thought there might be 100 people in the whole world who were interested. But within the first week there were 100 people downloading the forms." The website currently gets about 500 hits each day, but interest invariably spikes when there is coverage in the media of scandals like the Murphy report, or when El Papa does or says something particularly horrible.

Church/state relations
Disillusionment with the Church itself isn't the only common motivating factor. According to Gráinne, a huge proportion of people who get in touch with Count Me Out feel very strongly about church/state relations in Ireland.
For many, the Church's control over hospital and school management boards (93% of all primary schools are Catholic) is an outrage, and defecting seems like an effective way to object.
"If everyone who's not religious did it, at least we could have a proper education system in Ireland," argues Frank.
Gráinne agrees: Count Me Out is now appealing to people not to describe themselves as Catholic on next year's census unless they genuinely consider themselves to be active members of the Church.
"If everyone ticks Catholic, all the government are going to think is that 93% of the population are practising Catholics. But obviously 93% are not turning up at Mass every week," she says, adding that this could have a major impact on government policy in education and in other areas.
For Frank, like many of his generation, the level of religiosity in Ireland is a mystifying anachronism – and, he believes, not a benign one. He points to the recent "apparitions" at Knock as an example. Thousands of people (many of them elderly, or Travellers) descended on the Marian shrine after a "visionary" promised they'd see the sun dancing in the sky. Sunburn and damaged retinas all round but no sign of Our Lady.
"This is what I hate about religion. It takes advantage of vulnerable and gullible people. The older generation are completely brainwashed. My granny wasted her life praying, praying, praying, when she could have gone out and lived her life. Religion poisons the mind, which kills the human spirit. In my local parish, the community centre is huge. People used to go to Church and pray if someone was an alcoholic or had a problem. But that's not helping people. Now people are going to AA in their community centre – that is helping people. We need to help people rather than give them hope. Hope is useless."
For the Church itself, the growing number of defections is a worrying sign of the times. A spokeswoman for the Dublin archdiocese told Hot Press: "Obviously every time someone wants to leave that's cause for reflection. We have to respect their decision. It's a reality you have to deal with."
But though the empty church pews tell a different story, there are many people who continue to consider themselves "Catholic", even if they never go to Mass. The historical link between religion and nationalism in this country has yet to be broken. Catholicism is fetishised in Ireland as "more than a religion" and conflated with Irish identity itself.
Gráinne and many others like her are choosing to turn their back on that. "In Ireland, Catholicism is thought of like a blood type, like being Catholic is an ethnic group. It's not."
And, having defected, she has the piece of paper to prove it.