“They Aren’t Holy”: Dealing with Religious Differences in Irish Primary Schools

Abstract

Ireland’s demographic landscape has changed enormously in recent years. Primary schools however have remained predominantly denominational. The Catholic Church in Ireland owns and manages the majority of primary schools. By taking the example of the First Holy Communion ritual, this chapter examines how the sacrament is regarded not only as a “rite of initiation” into the Catholic Church but also as an initiation into an idealized notion of a white, Catholic, homogeneous Irish identity. It discusses the various educational, religious and consumerist factors that influence the children’s understanding of religion and religious practice not only by examining these social spaces but also by analyzing the children’s own views and participation in the discussion. In addition, it examines how the Catholic school’s communities of teachers, priests and parents deal with religious difference as it becomes apparent in the preparations for the sacrament and during its celebration and how the children perceive and respond to this difference. Based on extensive research with 7- to 8-year-olds, this chapter demonstrates the complexity of children’s learning (about) and making sense of religions across urban, suburban, town and rural contexts. This complexity is revealed by examining the situatedness of children’s religious beliefs and knowledge within Catholic primary schools. This chapter is part of a research project conducted in 2013 and funded by the Irish Research Council, entitled Making Communion: Disappearing and Emerging Forms of Childhood in Ireland. The ethnographic material is based on children’s participatory activities, children and adult-level interviews and focus groups.

Researcher::

“Anyone knows what Christian is?”

Child::

“I know what Christian is but I can’t remember.”

Another child::

“Meee! Someone who believe in God and someone who doesn’t live in public.”

Researcher::

“Someone who doesn’t live in…?”

Child::

“Public.”

Researcher::

“And what’s public?”

Child::

“Em, around our area.”

Researcher::

“Oh, this place. So people who don’t believe in God don’t live here?”

Child::

“Yeah.”

Arjun Appadurai argues that particular ceremonies that mark the “rites of passage” of an individual, like First Holy Communion , define who belongs to a particular community. Rites of passage, according to Appadurai, produce “local subjects” and are “complex social techniques for the inscription of locality onto bodies” (Appadurai 1996: 179). These rites are not only an expression of social aggregation, as he argues, but social techniques for the [re-]production of “natives” (Appadurai 1988). According to the findings of the 2009 Growing Up in Ireland study, 87 % of 9-year-olds in Ireland were identified as Roman Catholic (Williams et al. 2009). In the latest 2011 Census, 84 % of people in Ireland identified themselves as Roman Catholic (CSO 2012). Tom Inglis argues that this Catholic identification has become “more a matter of belonging to a cultural tradition and heritage, to a shared collective memory” (Inglis 2007: 207). This shared collective memory highlights a national Catholic-centered identity that is preserved and kept alive throughout generations, mainly through the Irish education system, in which over 90 % of Irish primary schools are governed and run by the Catholic Church (Darmody et al. 2012; see Hyland and Bocking [Chap. 8, this volume]). Part of the Catholic Church’s doctrine entails the performance of particular rituals such as the First Holy Communion sacrament among children at the age of 7 or 8 years. The preparation for this central Catholic sacrament is part of a year-long faith development program that takes place during school hours in Catholic primary schools across Ireland. In the 1970s, a new school type emerged in Ireland that claims to be more inclusive of children of various religious backgrounds and none, called Educate Together schools, which are multidenominational in nature (Darmody et al. 2012). The majority of these Educate Together schools allow for faith formation classes within the school’s premises after school hours which prepare children for up to 2 years for their First Communion sacrament. We observed an attempt, in both the Irish Catholic primary schools and in faith formation classes in Educate Together schools we visited, to produce “local Catholic subjects” who share a particular collective identity. These are spaces within the Irish education system that support an understanding, whether “real” or “imagined,” (Jenkins 2008: 133) of a homogenous group identification highlighting who “we” are and who and what “we” identify with or not. They encompass notions of similarities and differences—notions of “us” and “them.”

The First Holy Communion is the reception of the Eucharist, the consecrated bread and wine also believed to be Jesus’ body and blood, for the first time in one’s life. This ritual is believed to unite the 7- to 8-year-old First Communicants with God and initiate them into the Catholic Church. The scope of this article does not allow for the examination of the children’s performance of the practices, gestures and symbols required to receive the Eucharist, such as making the sign of the cross while going up to the altar or bowing in front of the altar before returning to one’s seat in the pew. It rather investigates the children’s perception of this “rite of initiation” through analyses of their understanding of religions and religious concepts in general embedded within the various educational, religious and consumerist contexts.

First Holy Communion is regarded by scholars as a “rite of passage,” as children are believed to be moving from one stage of their life to the other (see for example Van Gennep 1960; Duffy 1984; Ridgely Bales 2005; McGrail 2007). This reflects Arnold Van Gennep’s understanding of rites of passage as “ceremonies whose essential purpose is to enable the individual to pass from one defined position to another which is equally well defined” (Van Gennep 1960: 3). How do parents, teachers and priests define these stages of life; how far do these definitions reflect the children’s own understanding of the stages; and what effect does this understanding have on children not participating in the ritual? Children’s understanding of religious rituals cannot be analyzed without considering the children’s own views. These child-centered interpretations of rituals are analyzed in this article in conjunction with adults’ attempts, at school, in church and at home, at shaping the child’s understanding of the sacrament. In taking children’s interpretations into account, I am arguing against the perception of some of the adults interviewed in this study that children are unable to understand religious concepts, beliefs and rituals, and who see therefore a need for constant religious nurturing, particularly in school and church (see also Punch 2002). Neither the children whose parents have decided for them that they will participate in this ritual nor those whose parents have decided against it are mere recipients accepting uncritically and unquestioningly their parents’ decisions and the subsequent consequences. Children engage in various levels of “active self-involvement” (Hemming and Madge 2011: 44) in their own identity formation, religious understanding and ritual participation (see also Bell 1992, 1997) and do not merely repeat adults’ definitions but rather, as Ridgely Bales argues, “reinterpret value-laden symbols” (Bales 2005: 7). My argument in this chapter resonates with Peter Hemming and Nicola Madge’s research finding in which they argue that “Families, schools, friendship groups, communities, localities and the media do not merely impose religion upon individuals. Rather, children and young people are actively involved in the negotiation of competing influences in the construction of their religious identities” (Hemming and Madge 2011: 45).

The focus in this article is thus on the children’s own views, articulated through their responses to our questions but also expressed in their own interactions with each other in their classrooms, through drawings and other activities, during their rehearsals in the church and during our focus group interviews. By combining these views and our observations of the children’s performances and actions in school and church with the adults’ instructions, perceptions and expectations, I intend to illustrate the racialized nature of the First Holy Communion ritual in Ireland which is not only seen as a “rite of initiation” into the Catholic Church but also an initiation into an idealized notion of a white, Catholic homogeneous Irish identity .¹ The intensive engagement with the preparation for the sacrament in school and church is only one of a range of external factors that influence the children’s perceptions of the ritual. In Ireland, First Holy Communion has developed into an industry or a market whose season starts in April and lasts until June each year, during which time the celebration of the sacrament is extensively expressed, mainly through material goods such as fashion and through entertainment services such as hiring bouncy castles for children , up to Communion bank loans to finance these expenses. This consumerism-centered time of the year is supported by advertisements on the streets as well as via various communication media such as television shows and internet sites (for a comparison, see Berger and Ezzy 2009). Seven to 8-year-old children are surrounded, willingly or unwillingly, by a rigorous First Communion atmosphere that manifests itself within their various social spheres, influencing their understanding of and their participation in the ritual, as well as their perception and attitude toward those not practicing in the sacrament. In the following, I wish to discuss how these various factors influence the children’s understandings of religion and religious practices by not only examining the various social spaces in which they are articulated but also by analyzing the children’s own views and participation in the discussion. In addition, I will discuss how the Catholic school’s communities of teachers , priests and parents deal with religious difference as it becomes apparent in the preparations for the sacrament and during its celebration, and how the children perceive and respond to this difference.

11.1 Child-Centered Research

This chapter represents part of a larger study that examines both the role of religion , as seen in family, community, school and popular culture, in constructing childhoods, and the role of children therein. The study does not focus only on religious and non-religious practices within child culture, but also on “the generational ordering of social relations” (Alanen 2003) among children, young people and adults through religious and non-religious practices. Given the significance of schools as settings where the majority of children in Ireland either learn through religion or witness such learning (Coolahan et al. 2012), primary schools were prioritized as the basis for accessing children and families. For this, my colleague Karl Kitching and I invited young people in local second-level schools and more senior citizens (including some children’s grandparents) to participate in our study, through contacts established through the primary schools.

Three case study sites were accessed, namely a Catholic primary school located in a small village, a multidenominational school located in a large suburban area, and a Catholic school located in a large town. Each site was visited for a week in January/February 2013, and returned to for another week in April of that year. The variety of communities that were accessed offered the study a mix of school patron,² class, gender, ethnic profile, school size and local population density. The different settings provided opportunities to look at the construction of childhoods, religions and communities from both spatial and temporal perspectives. These sites gave us the opportunity to analyze the variety of meanings and feelings embedded in the construction of different generations (children, young people, adults, senior citizens, priests and nuns) and articulated in particular notions of each place.³ We also attended religious education classes, as well as faith formation classes in Educate Together schools, to observe teachers’ and children’s teaching and learning time about religion .

We conducted in-depth interviews and/or focus groups with 170 participants whose ages ranged between 6 and 92 years. Children aged 7 or 8 years made up a significant percentage of the participants as they witnessed, or participated in, the preparation for the culturally significant sacrament of Catholic First Holy Communion throughout their second class.⁴ We introduced a variety of child-centered activities in order to examine the children’s definition of religious concepts, beliefs and rituals as well as their understanding of religious diversity in general through various drawings, photography, story-telling and role play activities (see also James 2001). These activities were used in each school to encourage children to participate meaningfully. Focus groups of two to three children in self-selected friendship groups were also conducted.

We not only sought the parents’ permission but also distributed consent forms every day to children to fill out in order to inform us whether they wished to participate or not in our daily activities. These consent forms use symbols (smiley/sad/unsure face) to indicate children’s desire to participate/desire not to participate/not sure whether to participate in the research activities. Those children who indicated that they were not sure whether they wanted to participate were given time to think while the first activity went ahead and were allowed to join in, or not, at any time they desired to do so. Children were also asked to nominate two friends whom they would like to work with in the activities and to be grouped with in the focus group discussions. The use of the data, the right to withdraw and assurances of anonymity were discussed with all participants.

11.2 The “Self” and the “Other” in Irish Primary Schools

Researcher::

“What about people who don’t do this [baptize their child after birth]?”

Child::

“They aren’t holy. Birth from the devil.”

Researcher::

“What was that?”

Child::

“Birth from the devil.”

Researcher::

“What was the first word?”

Child::

“Birth.”

Researcher::

“Do you think it’s a good thing to be blessed or is it also OK if you don’t?”

Child::

“It’s good if you do it, it’s bad if you don’t.”

Researcher::

“What will happen if you don’t?”

Child::

“You will get that look.”

The Irish education system provides a space for Catholic primary schools in particular to place children in a controlled, observed and measured environment that directs them toward a specific set of learning and behavioral codes. These pre-set codes are simplified, dichotomized and polarized worldviews that move between essentializing and totalizing beliefs and belief systems as well as exoticizing everything that is different.⁵ It is through these three trajectories (to essentialize, totalize and exoticize), I argue, that the Irish education system tries to produce local subjects that feed into the narrative of a shared, homogeneous, collective, white Irish Catholic identity . In the following, I will illustrate how these trajectories are expressed in our interviews with principals, teachers and priests and how these three trajectories influence the adults’ instructions in and perceptions of religion and religious practices. This will be interwoven with the children’s interview responses, as well as with some of our observations within the children’s classrooms.

On the question of how far other beliefs and religious practices are considered to be part of the school community and how far their religious events can be taken into account within the school’s Catholic environment, one of the priests we interviewed for this study was reassuring: “[N]o child feels that they are not being acknowledged because of their faith, or because they have no faith or they have a different culture, it doesn’t really matter.” He continued by saying: “I have always felt that you can accommodate these things, and should accommodate them.” One of the examples raised by this priest was the celebration of the Diwali festival which is a religious festival celebrated by Hindus, Jains and Sikhs. The priest had a very essentializing and exoticizing attitude toward describing this festival, ignoring its religious significance and historical context and rather highlighting its cultural aspects, saying: “it’s like folk music, every country and every culture has its own take on it and festivals, regardless of their cultural background they have, should be accommodated because it has something we can learn from. The valley (is that how you say it?) I found that enthralling. I have always felt that you can accommodate these things, and should accommodate them. You can certainly learn from them, it’s a different culture admittedly, but at base, like music or dance, there is a common denominator, Riverdance when they went to China, in essence there is no difference, they got Chinese dancers and Chinese musicians, and there was no difference.” By comparing the religious festival of Diwali with a neo-traditional theatrical Irish music and dance production, the priest exoticizes it, reducing it to a merely cultural event and diminishing the religious importance of this celebration. The priest’s attitude toward other religions and religious practices resonates with the opinion of one of the non-Catholic parents in the same school, who says: “Well, I mean the reaction of the priest to learning about other religions, is, there are no other religions that matter.…If you’re not a Catholic , you’re not a Christian. That’s the strict interpretation.” His wife described an incident between her and one of the school’s teachers one day after the First Holy Communion celebration in the school hall, saying: “I was talking to the teacher then and she said, ‘you know, it’s good for the children to see that there are other religions out there.’ And I said (wryly here), ‘yeah yeah, mm mm it’s good yeah.’ And she said, ‘[in] one of religion classes I’m going to go through the different religions that there, em you know Hinduism, Buddhism, Protestantism, Muslim ,’ and the priest, who was across the hall talking to somebody else, was obviously listening to what we were saying, and he shouted over, in all seriousness, ‘no you’re not, you are not doing that. You will not teach that.’ So, the teacher went (nonplussed), made a face, and I went ‘OK.’” The priest’s interference in the conversation illustrates his influence in the school not only in terms of the preparation for Catholic sacraments during school time but also what is taught within the school.

The Irish education system is based on both the Irish Constitution (1937) and the Education Act (1998a) (Rougier and Honohan 2015: 73). The family in the Irish Constitution is defined as “the primary and natural educator of the child” (Art. 42.1). Both Catholic and Educate Together schools reflect this right in the Constitution in their open attitudes toward the inclusion of other faith groups within their school premises and through emphasizing the freedom parents and their children have to articulate this faith within the school community. In this particular Catholic school, for example, the priest has had the experience of non-Catholic parents approaching him to ask whether their children are allowed to participate in the First Holy Communion sacrament preparations, in order to feel part of the class,⁶ particularly as it is taking a great amount of their school day.⁷ One of the non-Catholic parents described how her daughter would like to be: “part of the community [and] to be involved with friends on the day.” The priest expressed his willingness to allow these non-Catholic children to participate in the preparation, describing it as a step toward “accommodating” other beliefs within the school community, saying: “I find, sometimes, people misunderstand the Catholic approach, to things sometimes, Catholic is universal. It isn’t a specific ‘thing,’ it’s universal, it accommodates everyone. Most Catholic schools accommodate different religions, or different whatever.” The principal of the same school also refers to the freedom parents have to decide whether their non-Catholic children would like to participate, saying: “Well, I think it very much depends on the parents of the child involved, I mean each case is different, there are parents who opted out but at the same time they want their children, maybe, for example to learn the prayers and to be part of this. Last year we had a little girl who…dressed up in white dress and she was really part of it.” The principal here describes the positive experience parents of non-Catholic children have in her school in terms of choice and inclusion. This has been acknowledged by the mother of the girl the principal was referring to, saying: “Yeah. They were very welcoming in the process, even though we weren’t Catholic, and the priest…included her as if she was doing it [the sacrament]”. She continues, saying: “On the day we did feel that we had been part of the community.”

There is a tendency in Catholic primary schools we visited to totalize classes by treating children in the classroom as homogeneous subjects all believing in the same religious tradition—thus ignoring religious plurality in the class. This explains the harsh reaction of the priest toward the teacher’s suggestion of including a discussion of other religions and beliefs in the classroom. For the parents of the girl who participated in the sacrament they highlighted how important it was “[t]o be seen…to be viewed”; as the mother explains: “I wanted people to understand that we understood, that we were participating and not just doing it. We were involved on the day, she very much was part of the whole ceremony.” The mother emphasizes that: “we are not making Communion , we are participating in the Communion.” Even if the priest and the school in general totalize the school community, particular parents express an urge to be visible and to be recognized as members of that community, whether of a different religion or of none.

These totalizing tendencies enacted on a daily basis in a school environment exercise huge pressure on children (and their parents) who are different in their worldviews and religious beliefs (if any) from those of the school, particularly on parents deciding where they want their children to stand in terms of religious participation and where the boundaries are in compromising their own beliefs or disbeliefs for the sake of the school’s dominant ethos. As the mother of the girl mentioned above who participated in the Communion explained: “you have to weigh up that risk against the children being different. And…you don’t really want every day for your child to be different. It’s harder for them to be different. Although I do tell them all the time that being different is good. It’s very boring if we are all the same. But, sometimes, you have to choose. It’s a very personal thing and you have to decide how far you want to let your child in, it would be easier if they were Catholic …and we could just—buy into the whole, buy into everything [smiles]”. She continues in describing the importance of this year in the preparation for the First Holy Communion sacrament, highlighting that it is “the big year.” The mother was concerned about her daughter’s social inclusion in the class and weighed it above her own religious beliefs, saying: “yeah, you just have to come to an internal compromise and say I’m doing this for my child. And eh, I can’t eh—I shouldn’t impose my beliefs too much on her, and we are doing this to be part of the community.” The mother emphasized that “there really isn’t much choice” and that “[t]here is a lot of pressure out there in the end” as her daughter, as we were told, refused to go to school any more when her parents, at the beginning of the year, did not at first allow her to participate in the Communion preparation. The father saw the problem in the amount of time spent for the preparation, saying: “if that was only the day then that would be fine, but it’s not just a day.…It’s 9 months of [sigh] preparation.”

To what extent parents adhere to the dominant religious ethos of their children’s school, as well as when and how they show that their religious beliefs or worldviews are different, varies. In this particular example, the parent who decided to allow her daughter to participate in the preparation for the sacrament nevertheless insisted on showing that they were different in the kind of dress their daughter wore on the day. Originally, the parent’s compromise included only the daily participation in the preparation over the 9-month period and not being present on the day of the sacrament itself. The girl, however, as we were told, was very upset about not being allowed to be present on the day, to the extent that she was affected by it emotionally and behaviorally, which drove her parents to give in and attend on the day of the sacrament (for similar findings on the emotional impact of children opting out, see Richardson et al. 2013 and Niens et al. 2013). This then led to the question of dress and appearance. The mother criticized the development of the First Holy Communion sacrament into an increasingly consumerist event shaped by global market and consumer culture. As a response to this development, she suggested to other parents wearing a school uniform on the day but as she explained: “they were shocked, someone said: ‘that is child abuse, you can’t make a child wear a school uniform on Communion day.’ And I said ‘but we are not making Communion, we are participating in the Communion.’” The mother decided in the end, despite her daughter’s complaints, to buy a white party dress: “[S]he was very simple,” as she explained, “no tiaras, veils or umbrellas.” The mother opted for a party dress and not for a traditional Communion dress to express to the community on that day that her daughter was different and was only taking part and not doing her Communion. The mother explained to her daughter: “We bought this dress, this is our dress. You know we don’t all have to be the same.” Here the mother tried to break the essentializing and totalizing tendencies within the community by dressing her daughter differently. The Communicant children on the altar generally all dress in formal traditional white Communion dresses for girls and black or brown, sometimes white, suits for boys. The bodies of the children here act as a symbol of an essentialized and totalized Catholic entity, expressing a unified community of homogeneous, white Catholic subjects. The mother, who had to endure enormous pressure for over 9 months and who was forced to compromise her own religious beliefs for the sake of her child’s feelings of inclusion in the Catholic school’s community, insisted on dressing her child in a different kind of dress in order to express visibly her being different. The girl’s body on the altar is presented in front of the community in a way that counters the narrative of a homogenous collective identity .

Similar to this village school, a teacher in another Catholic school in a larger town argued that it was the parents’ choice to decide which school to send their children to and highlighted the importance of ensuring the Catholic ethos of her own school, saying: “you do have a choice of schools, that is what I feel as a parent, this is a Roman Catholic school, that is the ethos of the school, there is going to be religion daily, there is going to be. There is a lot of choices out there now that weren’t there years ago. I just feel I’m saying that as a parent as well as a teacher, if I didn’t want my children to be Catholics I wouldn’t send them to a pure, something we’re really proud of here. We are, Roman Catholic school, it’s not that we’re wishy-washy about it.” Another teacher in the same school described some children opting out of religious classes as “very annoying” raising a plea to these parents by saying: “just don’t come to us because it is very frustrating.” Unlike these teachers we interviewed, parents we interviewed do not see much choice and highlight the lack of enough different primary school types in Ireland . Particularly in rural areas, parents would only have a choice of one denominational school, either Catholic or Protestant , or at least an hour’s drive each day if they opted for a multidenominational type of school. As one of the mothers explained: “It was just because it was around the corner. There is a nondenominational school in [the neighboring city]…but I didn’t want to commit the children travelling half an hour each way twice a day. So it’s a good school, it’s up the road, and you have to weigh the positives and negatives. Because I work part-time, I can walk the children up to school, and I think that’s very important, it’s a nice start to the day. We can talk and I think if you are going in the car in the mornings, ‘[C]ome on…come on, we have to go. We have to go. We have to go.’ It was simply because it was local. If there had been a local nondenominational school, we would have gone to that.” Some parents will thus go against their own religious beliefs for the sake of their child’s comfort and wellbeing. In addition, as the mother continued, living in the countryside where the community was so small and bound together, if the family had decided against the local school they would become isolated from the local social environment they had decided to live in (see also Ouseley 2001 and Richardson et al. 2013). Playmates for children would have to travel an hour for playdates. Parents’ school choice involves more than just deciding which school to send one’s children to—they consider the quality of life, family time and social integration, in addition to religious beliefs and the academic performance of schools.

In general, we noticed that more parents decide for children to opt out from religious classes or subjects with a religious tone, as well as from any religious event such as the preparation for the First Holy Communion sacrament in Catholic schools. Children opting out have not been given much thought in terms of how they should be dealt with, either in the classroom or elsewhere (for similar observations, see Mawhinney 2006, 2007 and 2015). As the responses of teachers show, these children do raise a challenge to teaching staff as they need to be given a task or just be sent to the back of the class to do additional homework. The additional work that these children are asked to do is, however, according to our own observations, in most cases not monitored or inspected (for similar observations, see Mawhinney 2015: 293). Not giving children credit for what they are doing could give them the feeling of not being seen, of being left out and their effort not being valued, whereas the rest of the class is receiving full attention. In the Communion year, children spend a lot of their time during school hours in the preparation for the sacrament, as one of the parents explains: “[I]nstead of having all the Communion sessions, did things like maths and English or French or German at the same time, but they don’t, they just sit around and do nothing. You’re not forced to take part, but the time taken out of the curriculum to do it. It’s a bit old-fashioned. It belongs to an age when religious instruction to the Catholic Church was very important in the nineteenth century. But not in the twenty-first I don’t think, no. It’s a bit overdone.”

How do children opting out of religious discussions and practices in a dominant religious school environment feel? What impact do these religious preparations have on the child’s social world in the classroom? How far can a 7- or 8-year-old child deal with being different and how do other classmates understand this difference and how is it discussed between themselves? These are questions I would like to engage with in the following, in which I argue that the Irish education system provides a space to construct a collective homogeneous Catholic identity through essentializing, totalizing and exoticizing worldviews among children (see Appadurai 1988).

One of the teachers in a rural Catholic school described a boy in her class with no religion , saying: “I have a child in my class with no religion and em, I’d respect that completely as well like and he doesn’t feel in any way separated, he doesn’t take part in the prayers or religious songs or anything that we do but it doesn’t, it doesn’t bother him and he doesn’t feel like an outcast or anything because of it. Even though it is a Catholic school.” Identities are multifaceted constructions that change over time through the interaction with particular social structures and other social factors that influence our distinctive and unique understanding of ourselves (see Bradley 1996; Hall on “sociological subject” 1992). Such influences could come from core family and extended family members, school type, friends and peers, community leaders, neighbors and media, etc. (Hemming and Madge 2011). Identities can articulate how we understand ourselves and refer to what we are. However, they can also relate to what we are not, by highlighting differences (see Payne 2000). Identities can also be assigned to us by others, expressing how others see us in ways that do not necessarily agree with our own understanding of our selves (Hemming and Madge 2011: 40), as the example of the boy who is understood not to be believing in God illustrates. In one of our focus group interviews in a Catholic village school, children were referring in our discussion to that particular boy as an example of someone not believing in God:

Researcher::

“We talked in the class about people who don’t believe in God.”

Child 1::

“Ya there is a boy in our class who doesn’t believe in God that, so he is not having his Communion.”

Child 2::

[names the child].

Researcher::

“Do you think they get to talk to someone, or what do they do? Because you guys all talk to God apparently, what do they do? Or do they need to…”

Child 1::

“They don’t like God so they em…don’t pray to him, and talk to the devil.”

Researcher::

“So they just don’t talk.”

Child 1::

“No.”

Researcher::

“Did you say that they don’t like God?”

Child 1::

“Yeah.”

Researcher::

“And they talk to the devil then?”

Child 1::

“I suppose, I’m supposing. Like if they don’t believe in God they obviously don’t talk to him.”

Child 2::

“What do you mean by ‘they talk to the devil’?”

Child 1::

“Obviously they probably believe in the devil so?”

Child 2::

“Devil [makes a face of a devil]!”

Researcher::

“So they have to believe in something, is it?”

Child 1::

“Yeah.”

Child 3::

“I don’t believe in him [referring to the devil]!”

Child 3::

“They can’t believe in God, they can’t believe in nothing.”

Catholic primary schools we visited avoid discussing religious plurality with the children —as the reaction of the priest cited earlier shows. Non-Catholic children are allowed to opt out of religious instruction but their beliefs and worldviews are not discussed within classrooms but rather ignored. Children, however, are not silent and passive recipients but interpret and participate in discussing the world around them. As this focus group interview shows, children try in their own way to make sense of their peer being different and not believing in God. Being in a Catholic school, children are taught about the existence of God and the way of communicating with Him through prayer. In addition, according to our observations within religious instruction classes, children are assured that because they are Catholics they are loved by Jesus Christ whom they can always refer to whenever they are sad or have a problem. It is not therefore surprising to see that these children would assume that their peer, who does not believe in God, would also need to talk to someone and believe in something. A simplified, totalized and essentialized understanding of religion generally characterizes these religious instruction classes and highlights dichotomous and polarized worldviews. This explains why the children assumed that since their peer did not talk to God he would ‘obviously’ talk to the devil. Hemming and Madge argue that schools “may play an important role in influencing how religious difference is perceived and constructed” (2011: 42). Not providing a space within school hours to discuss with the children different religions and worldviews can have an enormous influence on social cohesion, particularly peer relations (see also Hemming 2011; Smith and Denton 2005). Children themselves question the Church’s and school’s construction of a homogenous collective Catholic identity by continuously referring to that boy in our interviews. Discussions about differences among their peer groups cannot be avoided by totalizing and essentializing a school’s identity . Not providing information about different religions or about people who do not believe in any religion , as well as not offering a space in which the needs of minorities within schools are catered for, affects children’s understanding of the normality of differences.

In line with Hemming and Madge’s research findings (2011), I argue that children are active role players in constructing their own complex and multifaceted identities that are influenced by social spaces and contexts which change over time and location. As Giddens (1991) argues: “The reflexive project of the self, which consists in the sustaining of coherent, yet continuously revised, biographical narratives, takes place in the context of multiple choices as filtered through abstract systems” (Giddens 1991: 5). In our first encounter with that particular boy in the Catholic village school, he tried as much as possible to appear in control of the situation of his worldview being different from that of the rest of the class. When talking about his religious beliefs or opinions on religion, he consequently described himself as not believing in God. When we met him again in our second round of research few months later, when preparations for the First Holy Communion had intensified with the day of the ritual performance approaching, we observed a change in the boy’s self-confidence. Whereas before he had referred to his own conviction of himself not believing in God, at this point he refers more to his parents not believing in God, saying: “Cause I just really…well my family doesn’t really believe in God. I didn’t know that until I was in seniors.” Whereas a few months ago the boy believed he had a particular and secure identity position and religious set of (un)beliefs, now his identity understanding was based on his parents’ and he appeared to be in a more in-between position, not knowing where he himself stood (compare Marcia 1980). He now seemed to detach himself every now and then from this view and relate it back to his parents’ ideas rather than his own. This time, he appeared to be more vulnerable and aggressive toward religious topics discussed in the classroom. One of the classroom activities with the children was to color a picture of a church building in any way they liked. This particular boy put a lot of different faces on the windows. When asked about the reason he said: “cause I just like to have a bit of fun with other people.” Asked whether through these faces the church would turn into a funnier place he said: “Yeah, besides just always always always always always always always being holy.” To the question of what “holy” was, he said: “It’s where people have to believe in God but I don’t do it.” Here he referred again to his own beliefs rather than his parents’. As Hemming and Madge argue, “children and young people may attach their own value and importance to particular concepts, ideas and practices in their religious and spiritual lives” (2011: 44). The boy’s opinions about religious beliefs and worldviews were strongly affected by his relationship with his peers and their environment as well as the influence of the denominational school context. His motivation and tendency in changing his views on religious beliefs had less to do with a sudden religiosity than with his wish to integrate into the school’s community, as the discussion below illustrates:

Researcher::

“If you would go back a year and I would ask you, would you do your First Holy Communion again, would you do it?”

All::

“Yeah.”

Boy::

“Well, I would if I could.”

Researcher::

“Why?”

Boy::

“Well, I just wanna get my Communion. I feel left out. I’m literally the odd one out in second class.”

Another child::

“You don't believe in God, you didn’t get your Communion, you haven’t been baptized.”

Boy::

“I know, that's the whole point of not getting, when you’re a baby you don’t get baptized.”

Researcher::

“So if you had a choice, would you baptize yourself and go and do your First Holy Communion?”

Boy::

[nods].

Researcher::

“And why would you do that?”

Boy::

“I just wanna get my Communion so I won’t be the odd one out.”

This was part of a conversation we had with the children in the village school, a few days after they had received their Communion. During this conversation, all the children had things to share. They all had positive if competing experiences of their “big day,” except this one child who, despite his parent’s beliefs, wished he had done the Communion too in order to feel included and part of his class.

11.3 Conclusion

By taking the example of the First Holy Communion ritual, this chapter has examined how the sacrament is regarded not only as a “rite of initiation” into the Catholic Church but also as an initiation to an idealized notion of a white, Catholic, homogeneous Irish identity . The Irish education system provides a space for the construction of this collective identity through a behavioral instructional approach that controls, monitors and pre-sets learning and behavior codes. These codes are embedded and articulated within a simplified, dichotomized and polarized worldview that essentializes and totalizes belief systems and exoticizes difference.

I argue in this chapter that, despite Catholic primary schools’ attempts to encapsulate children within this notion of a collective homogeneous Catholic Irish identity and despite not providing a space within the school to engage with religious plurality among their peers, children are active in making sense of the world around them in their own way. However, as the examples of the children discussing religious difference among their peers illustrates, they are affected by the terminology used within their Catholic religious instruction classes that reflects their schools’ binary ethos of good/bad, God/devil and so forth.

Through the bottom-up approach to research that focuses on children’s views on religious differences as well as their religious concepts, beliefs and practices, this study has shown that because of the intense preparation for Catholic religious rituals during school hours, children who do not participate in these sacraments and who opt out of religious instruction in Catholic primary schools are affected by it, both emotionally and behaviorally. This effect or anticipated effect on children leads some of their parents to set aside their own religious beliefs and worldviews to enable their children to connect to and feel part of their school community. For other children, however, as the example of the boy above illustrates, the only compensation for being the “odd one out” in the class is to escape in fantasies. The boy wished to be a chameleon—a kind of lizard that is known to have the ability to change its skin color in order to adapt to its environment and to camouflage in order to protect itself from others it fears.