… Not because it is dark, but because it’s what you do in a church, at least in the church I attended.

I was raised Catholic, with a few quirky bits around the edge. My paternal grandmother was very Catholic – my dad – well – that’s a long story.

My paternal grandmother, the granddaughter of Irish Catholics from Tipperary, married a Swedish Lutheran, so Dad was raised in a half-Catholic half-Lutheran family. I don’t remember ever hearing about the Lutheran part of Dad’s upbringing, so I imagine the Catholic side won out over the Lutheran side.

But what happens when a Catholic boy falls in love with a girl from a strong Church of England family?

They marry in the Church of England.

And what happens to their children? Are they baptised Catholics or christened in the Church of England?

In my family’s case, my mother may have won the battle of which Church to marry in, but my father ultimately won the religious war. I remember, as a small child, sitting in the car with Dad outside the Catholic Church at night, on numerous occasions, waiting for my mother. I didn’t understand at the time what was keeping Mum so long, but as an adult I’ve pieced together a seemingly plausible explanation. Mum was being instructed and initiated into the rites and rituals of the Catholic religion. I’m left to wonder what prompted her decision. Did Dad’s religious conscience niggle at him about his unbaptised children, if indeed they were unbaptised at that time? Did my grandmother put pressure on my father about his ‘heathen’ offspring? If we were baptised as infants, did Mum feel like the odd one out, being the only protestant? Or did Mum have some kind of religious awakening or epiphany that led her into the Catholic faith?

I’ll never know.

But I remember the long trek into town every Sunday to attend Mass; I made my First Holy Communion at the appropriate age, and I remember both my parents receiving Communion that day, and every other Sunday.

Just before Christmas 1961 we moved from our twenty acres out of town, to a house on a small block in town. I was almost twelve years old and from then on I attended Catholic Schools, and Catholicism played an even larger part in our family’s life due to closer proximity to the church.

Religion even played a part in who the daughters in my family married. Dad might have been strict about Mass on Sunday, not eating meat on Friday, and other faith-based rules, but he seemingly had no control over the romantic intentions of his four daughters. As the oldest daughter I was the first to receive Dad’s warning:

‘I don’t care who you marry, as long as he is Catholic and not in the Armed Forces’.

I married a Presbyterian (in the Catholic Church) who was in the RAAF (Royal Australian Air Force) when I was eighteen, and Dad couldn’t have been happier. Despite not being Catholic, my fiancée attended Mass with us whenever he could before our marriage. Dad loved him.

Each of my three sisters received the same warning as they approached dating/marrying age. Each married a Protestant who was in the Armed Forces, so Dad ended up with two RAAF, one Army, one Navy, non-Catholic sons-in-law. Eventually we all drifted away from the family home, on postings, but Mum and Dad continued to occupy the last row at the back of the Church every Sunday, albeit without their tribe of offspring.

A few years after they retired, Mum and Dad sold up and joined their youngest daughter, son-in-law, and two grandsons, north of Brisbane in Queensland. The lives of the other daughters changed over the years as their husbands left their Service lives behind, and one way or another, they all moved to Queensland. Dad’s only son, and oldest child, stayed close to our hometown, in the Hawkesbury area of New South Wales. My brother had long since given up on religion, having been on the wrong side of Dad’s strict rules about attending Mass every Sunday, when he was eighteen. It didn’t end well.

It seems none of Dad’s five children continued their Catholicism beyond marriage. Dad also became a non-practicing Catholic when he left our hometown and moved interstate, even though the Catholic Church was opposite their Queensland home. Mum continued to attend Mass, but I suspect it was from a more social than spiritual position; the cup-of-tea with the ladies after Mass was the focal point of conversations post-Sunday. Perhaps I’m judging Mum too harshly – yes – she was a very sociable person, but she worked tirelessly at our old church when we were young, as did Dad. But Mum eventually stopped going to Mass after Dad died.

I can account for my departure from being a practising Catholic in the early seventies, when I spent more time stopping my toddler daughter from running up and down the aisle than focusing on the service. Not a good reason, but I felt at the time I had just put religion on hold, not parted ways. I never went back.

But I can’t explain my devout father’s departure, especially when religion was used as a weapon in the relationship between my father and brother, at a time when a teenage boy needed his father most. Dad took away the keys to my brother’s car for a week because he had missed Mass to go to the beach with friends. My brother was eighteen. Their relationship remained fractured, civil, but fractured.

When my father died in 1995, Mum approached the priest in the Catholic Church opposite their house to arrange Dad’s funeral. Dad was denied a service in the Catholic church because he hadn’t been to Mass for many years. We arranged a service in a non-denominational chapel, officiated by a minister of a non-catholic faith, and we couldn’t have asked for a more personalised service. Mum’s funeral service in 2015 was officiated by a celebrant, not a Catholic priest, and was held in the same non-denominational chapel as Dad’s.

Would either parent be denied their proper place in the afterlife because they drifted away from the strict rules of their faith? I’d like to think not.

One day I will light a candle in the old church in my hometown for my father, to honour his years of dedication and devotion as a Catholic; to thank him for working seven days a week to provide a Catholic education for his children; to recognise the hours he spent making sure our priest’s car was mechanically sound; to acknowledge the time spent on Sunday nights counting the collection money from the day’s Masses; and for his diligence in ensuring his children had a solid faith-abiding foundation on which to build their adult lives.

And I’ll light a candle for my mother for all the years she slaved over the brassware of the church of our youth, polishing it to within an inch of its life; and for giving up her own faith in favour of my father’s religion.

May the candles I light for them glow as brightly as they did in the lives of their children and grandchildren, and may they both rest in peace in the best place any afterlife can offer – they both earned it.