The Number One Bestseller
Shortlisted for the Irish Book Awards 2021
''A great achievement . . . Brilliant, engaging and essential'' Colm T-ib-/b>
''At once intimate and epic, this is a landmark book'' Fintan O''Toole
When Dubliner Derek Scally goes to Christmas Eve Mass on a visit home from Berlin, he finds more memories than congregants in the church where he was once an altar boy. Not for the first time, the collapse of the Catholic Church in Ireland brings to mind the fall of another powerful ideology - East German communism. While Germans are engaging earnestly with their past, Scally sees nothing comparable going on in his native land. So he embarks on a quest to unravel the tight hold the Church had on the Irish.
He travels the length and breadth of Ireland and across Europe, going to Masses, novenas, shrines and seminaries, talking to those who have abandoned the Church and those who have held on, to survivors and ca
