The search for the soul of Italy

It was around this time that I decided that I probably needed to be a Catholic. With hindsight (there's a lot of that in this story), it was an awfully teenage and superficial observation but I made it nonetheless. I didn't see it as being a shallow, teenage decision at the time. In my quest to fulfil my promise it seemed an obviously necessary step to take.

I was living in York Terrace East on the outer circle of Regent's Park and I'd decided I needed religion and not only religion but the Roman religion. When I was born, I'd been named (not christened or baptised or anything like that) in a ceremony in the Ancient Mystical Order of the Rosæ Crucis (AMORC or the Rosicrucian Order). When I started school, I went to St Mary's Church of England Primary School. I didn't have the first idea what it meant to be a Catholic.

Anyway, (shallow decision No. 2), I'd heard that St James' church in Marylebone held a Latin mass. I'd loved my dalliance with Latin at Comprehensive school so I decided that was the one for me. I went religiously for the guts of a year. I never really understood the significance of the whole thing. After all, I'd never had to learn the catechism that way that good Catholic children have to. It wasn't part of my history or my upbringing. It was totally foreign to me ... apart form the language.

I loved the Latin mass. I loved the gravity that the language gave to the ceremony. I loved the choir in the balcony. By the end of a few months I knew the mass off by heart and, what's more, I understood every word of it ... more or less - credo in unum Deum Patrem omnipotentem, factorem cæli et terræ ...

I always came out of the mass feeling somehow uplifted but, even then, it seemed to me that it had more to do with the spectacle than it did with the meaning behind it. After all, I didn't understand the background. The only thing I understood was the language - and I loved the sound of the choir.

It didn't last long of course. Adherence to any religion requires understanding ... or fear. I had neither. Within about a year of my first visit to St James' I had returned to my heathen ways. Even the attraction of the Latin language had gone. After all, they used the same words every week and I knew all of those words now. I wanted to learn new ones.

Anyway. Grampa had never gone to church. It was just that, for a while, it seemed to me, in a terribly, superficial -almost Hollywoodesque - way, that being a Catholic was an integral part of being an Italian.