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Personal Testimony of Monica Farrell Part 1

I just have a speaking again and I want to tell you something of the story of my conversion.
I was born in the city of Dublin of Roman Catholic parents and at the age of seven I found myself an orphan.
My father died six months before I was born and my mother died when I was seven years old.
As an infant I was very tiny and very delicate and not expected to live.
You wouldn't think that to look at me now but that's what I was like then.
After my mother died and the family began to scatter, my eldest sister looked after me
and my constant fear was that she would marry some man who wouldn't like me and that I'd have a very unhappy life.
I used to wonder what would become of me.
One day I spoke to a lady, I suppose I was about seven or eight years of age at the time,
and this lady said to me, oh you know God has a special protection over videos and orphans.
I thought well this is something for me.
I went into a big Roman Catholic church and went straight up to the head altar.
We were taught to believe that Jesus was in the tabernacle.
As I walked up the church I said to myself, I want to talk to real God.
Now I wouldn't have put it in words at the time but in the back of my mind the idea was
that Jesus in the tabernacle wasn't real God, wasn't the creator of heaven and earth.
He was the nearest that I could get to real God.
Keeping my mind right away from the images and pictures that were around the church,
I walked straight up to the head altar and I knelt down the high altar and knelt down at the altar rails.
In a kind of loud whisper, first I said to myself what if Jesus is in the tabernacle, real God must be here somewhere.
I said are you there God, can you hear me?
Well listen God, you've taken my father and mother away from me so you may just look after me as such now.
With that I sort of flung myself into God's hand by faith.
It was just as if God said to me, yes I look after you.
I got up and walked out and as I walked out of that church I said well that's that, now God's going to look after me.
I may say that every Christ in my life has turned on a little prayer, not a big long prayer, but a tiny little prayer.
There's an old saying that says, great doors swing on small hinges.
And the hinges in my life have always been a little prayer.
And that was one of the first hinges in my life.
From then on I regarded God as my father both earthly and heavenly.
And for other children to run to their earthly fathers would I run to God just to take away.
I didn't understand that there's nothing like that.
But I knew God had the learning to him that he had a special career to do.
And I always regarded myself as one of God's professors.
And I used to talk to God like that.
I never remember being lonely.
My sister and my friends used to sometimes sit right with him when they were going walking.
They would be careful and they wouldn't want me listening to what they had to say.
And my sister would say, you run along in front man and tell you don't leave it in there and you shouldn't go next to it.
And I used to go in front and I'd say, well God, they don't want you and they don't want me.
So we'd just take each other and keep each other company.
And I never remember being lonely.
Although in many ways I was like an only friend.
Now, after my mother's death and my family was scattered, I was eventually placed in a convent scheme.
First of all, I went to several kinds of daily schools because we moved from district to district.
We were rather untettled after mother died and it meant moving around to several different districts.
And in each district I went to the convent scheme.
So this meant I had the opportunity of standing in front of three kinds of schemes.
When I was sitting in a convent boarding school and my sister decided to go to America to see whether she'd like it,
if she liked it, she was going to stand for me and bring me out there.
She didn't like it, she'd come home.
And after about roughly speaking three years, she came home.
Now while I was in this boarding school, I was sort of pressure-cooked in the Church of Rome.
I had it all day and I had it all night.
If you woke up in the night time, the only light in the dormitory was a little lamp in front of St. Joseph or something like that.
And it was constantly borne in your mind that you were a member of the Roman Catholic Church.
The other thing that was borne in your mind continually was that the Roman Catholic Church was the one true church outside of picture with no salvation.
Now when my sister came home, I was taken out of this convent.
Up to that time in my life, I'd had very little contact with Protestants.
But before I go on, I must tell you one incident that happened while I was in that convent.
The priest came to hold a mission and we children were all brought into the convent chapel and the priest was preaching to us in this mission.
And he said, children, I've just come from the deathbed of a brother priest.
And with his last dying breath, he said to me, for God's sake will you warn men and women and boys and girls to get ready for dying before they come to die.
Because he said, when you're dying, you're too sick and you're in too much pain and you can't concentrate your thoughts.
Now he said, I'm a dying man and you tell them from me, for God's sake get ready for dying before you come to die.
It's too late when you come to die.
Now I thought this was very good advice. I suppose I'd be about 11 years old at this time.
And I thought this was very good advice.
And I made up my mind that I was going to get ready, but unfortunately the priest never told us how to get ready.
Or when we'd know we were ready, he'd just let us say, get ready.
So I thought, well how do you get ready for dying?
Well I suppose you try and be good and you say more prayers.
So I got the rosary beads and I sat down and I tried my weary ways through the rosary until the inevitable happened and I fell asleep.
And I woke up, looked down, saw the beads in my hand and that's the sin to fall asleep when you're saying your prayers.
Your mind is not on what you're doing and you've sinned.
And I thought, well there you are on a Saturday to do something good and I've only done something bad.
I didn't know what the Apostle Paul said in Romans 7, but many a time when I read as I thought about these days,
when I used to try to do something good and always wind up doing something bad,
the good that I would, I do not, the evil that I would not, that I do.
And even when I would do good, evil is certain with me.
That was my experience in those days when I was trying so hard to be good.
And then I'd lose heart and think, oh well it looks like I've got to go to hell.
I'll never be able to go to heaven.
So I may as well be as sad as I wanted to be.
And then I'd let my head down and do all the things, fortunately the things I wanted to do weren't awfully bad.
But I just let go and did everything I wanted to do.
And then I'd get up to fight and think, oh well there might be different places down hell and I better be careful you know.
There might be low stories, bad, you know, very low down places for the people that are very bad.
A place a bit higher up and a little bit better for the people that are not so bad.
So it better not be too bad.
But it was such an unsatisfactory thing, the whole thing was quite unsatisfactory.
But now with all this, it still had been summed into my mind that the Roman Catholic Church was a one and true church.
There were certain things in the Roman Catholic Church that I did not like and that I doubted in my own mind.
I would never have dared to say out loud that I doubted.
I didn't like the confessionals.
Not because anything bad had been said to me in confession, but because I couldn't see any sense in it.
I used to think to myself, I kneel down by my bedside at night time and I ask God to give me my things.
I tell God what I've done.
Why should I go up to sleep and talk to a man that knows nothing about it, what's it got to do with him?
And I couldn't see any sense in it.
And then I didn't like the mass.
I didn't understand it and I didn't like it.
It was all because it doubled up to me and I couldn't follow it.
But I still wouldn't have stood anybody saying anything against the Roman Catholic Church.
I would still have fought for it and died for it in that period in my life, willingly.
Now, when I came out of this convent boarding school, I had a real concern for Protestants
because we had been so taught that outside of the Roman Catholic Church there was no salvation,
that I, of course, thought every Protestant was going to hell.
And I thought that was a shame. Somebody should tell them.
Well, as I say, up to this time I had very little contact with Protestants.
We treated them rather like people that had hysteria or some plague like that.
You were frightened to go through need and fulfil, you'd get the disease.
And we were constantly warned not to discuss religion with Protestants as we might lose our faith.
Well, now I was so anxious about Protestants not going to hell
that I coaxed my sister to send me to the only school that I knew in Dublin where I would contact Protestants.
I didn't tell my sister what I was intending to do.
But my idea was to get in the course of the Protestants as I said,
I'll hurry up and double-click time and join the Roman Catholic Church or they'd die and go to hell.
That's all there was to it.
Well, my sister allowed me to go to the school, but the day that she brought me to it,
she held me by the pinafore and she wagged her finger in my face and she said,
Now listen, when you go to the school, there's to be no arguing about religion because you might lose your faith.
And she thought I'd really taken it in.
She said, Do you hear that?
And I looked very sweetly and very neatly at her and said, Nothing.
I heard it all like that.
I know it's not eating it because this is my very critical going in there.
Well, I wasn't five minutes in the school until a little girl leaned over and said to me,
What religion is you?
And I just delighted her.
She said, Right down my street, this is what I wanted to talk about.
And I leaned up and I said, I'm a Catholic.
And she said, Oh, no, you're not.
You're a Roman Catholic.
I'm a Presbyterian and just as much a Catholic as you are.
And this was new to me.
I'd never had a Presbyterian Catholic before.
I began to get a kind of romantic squint.
And then she said, In fact, all of those problems are just as Catholic as you are, Monica.
But I'd never had a Protestant Catholic and Catholic problems.
This was a kind of contradiction of terms for me.
And I looked so amazed at her that she said to me, Do you know the meaning of the word Catholic?
And I said, Yes.
And she said, Well, what does it mean?
I said, It means us.
And she said, The word Catholic means universal and all over the world.
And the Catholic Church is composed of all the people all over the world who love and trust the Lord Jesus Christ as their own personal Savior.
She said, We love the Lord Jesus just as much as you do.
Just as much as you do.
The head of our church is the Lord Jesus Christ.
The head of your church is the Bishop of Rome.
And, of course, you never saw a head walking around with two bodies on the top.
And so, obviously, if the heads are different, the bodies must be different.
But we didn't stop to work that all out.
Now, this was the beginning of what turned out to be a series of serious arguments between Marjorie and I.
Marjorie was a little Scotch Presbyterian.
I admired her tremendously.
And I loved her deeply, but she never knew I loved her.
I did everything in my power to try and make her lower her standards.
But had she lowered them, I would have been bitterly disappointed.
Well, we used to meet in the playground.
She'd have a crowd of problems with her.
And I'd have a crowd of Romans with me.
And we'd have a furious argument.
It was quite against the school regulations.
But we didn't bother with school regulations.
And whenever she said anything good, her crowd cheered.
And whenever I said anything, my crowd thought it was a good day to cheer.
It was a bit like a football match.
You know, you've got to go with the Celtic and Rangers football matches that they play in England and Scotland.
It's a war. It's not a football match.
But anyway, these are the discussions that we had.
We were only children.
They were not personally spiteful, I had to mention that.
We never said anything nasty to each other.
But we said something nasty about each other's religion.
And we talked as children, talked straight to the point.
One day I said to Marjorie, well anyway Marjorie, only for Henry VIII and Martin Luther,
you old problems that wouldn't have any religion at all were there.
Now I thought that would flatten them all out, that they wouldn't have a comeback on that.
But Marjorie quietly took her Bible out of her school guide.
And she handed it to me, she said, Marjorie, that's my religion, that's the Bible, the word of God.
Now you show me what part of that book either Henry VIII or Martin Luther wrote and I'll give up believing in it.
Bless your heart, I didn't know what part anybody wrote so I couldn't show you the bits of Henry VIII or Martin Luther wrote.
So I got out of a very awkward situation by saying,
did you ask me to take a Protestant Bible into my hand? I couldn't touch it with a fork, it was cold.
Take it away from me.
And she said, go on, you're afraid to.
And of course the Protestants all laughed at me.
And I pretended somebody was calling me, nobody was really calling me.
But I shouted, I'm coming, and I ran for the night and listened to the Protestant artist.
Now these little discussions that we had didn't do me so much good when I was having the discussions.
It was going home on the way home thinking over the discussions, sort of chewing the cuddle over it, you know,
going over it and seeing the weaknesses in my own argument that made me begin to think that there was something radically wrong with the Roman Catholic religion.
One day I said something brilliant talking about Marjorie's religion, I forgot what it was, it doesn't matter just as well.
And Marjorie said to me, Monica Fowl, don't you ever dare say anything to me about my church again until you've been into my church and seen a service here.
And she said, I'll tell you what I'll do.
Next Sunday morning I'll go to Mass with you.
If you'll promise me faithfully, next Sunday evening you'll come to church with me.
Then you can tell me what you think of my religion.
She said, I'm not fighting to go to your Mass, I've been to her Mass before, I'm not afraid.
So she said, well will you do that, Monica?
Oh, I can imagine, don't you really?
It's quite all right for you to come into our church.
Your church will don't affect you coming into our church.
But it wouldn't be right for me to go into your church.
Because our priests don't allow us to go into your church.
And she said, Mother, why?
Oh, I think it's because we've got the right to listen and you've got the wrong religion.
It's all right for the people with the wrong religion to go to where there's a right religion.
But it wouldn't be all right for the people with the right religion to go to where there's a wrong religion.
That's right.
And that was just a bit too much for Maggie.
Up to that she had put up with it.
But this just did her answer.
She said, Monica, I'll tell you why your priests won't let you into a Protestant church.
Because they know jolly fine if you went into a Protestant church and read a truth.
And if you heard the truth, you wouldn't believe the pack of lies they're telling you any longer.
And they wouldn't be able to bully you and knock the money out of you.
And that's why they won't let you into a Protestant church.
But to say that I was annoyed about it was very mildly.
I was mad.
But of course I knew I'd brought it on myself.
You know the story about Abraham Lincoln when he met up with the bully.
He was a proud big man.
And the bully charged him.
And Abraham Lincoln took up his walking stick.
And it must have been like an Irish chalala.
And he felt it into the bull.
And before he was finished, the bull was lying there squealing.
And he stood there and he said, well, you began it.
And I knew I had begun it.
And I knew I had to take my emergency.
But that day, going home from school, I was licking my throat and feeling very tired from the fact.
And I said that, Jesus, Maggie, they're saying that I have pizza.
I tell you this is like a lie.
And I wonder why they don't let them do a Protestant church.
They're all the same.
The cheek of a thing.
They wouldn't be able to bully us, knock the money out of us.
But I wonder why they don't let them do a Protestant church.
Just as going for once.
As satisfied as I was, I think it was all wrong.
They come out contented then.
And I made up my mind that when I was old enough to do what I wanted to do,
without other people pushing me around,
I'd go into a Protestant church and find out everything for myself.
Now you can see how these little discussions were getting underneath my skin
and disturbing a false piece of Romanism.
Well, just before I left school,
another little incident happened that had a big influence on my life.
Somebody called Marjorie Leary, the liar.
Now actually, Marjorie was an upright, honorable, straightforward girl.
And she was terribly perturbed about this.
And she was in tears.
Of course, when I saw Marjorie in real trouble, I was by her side like a shot,
because I thought the world of her.
She didn't know that, but I did.
I admired her honestly and straightforward.
I would have told many a lie in defense of my church,
Marjorie, wouldn't you rather lose an eye than to tell a lie?
And I knew that.
And so I had my arm over her shoulder and I was patting her on the back
and saying, don't you cry, Marjorie.
You know you're not a liar. We know you're not a liar.
You know what they say, sticks and stones can break my bones,
but names will never hurt me.
I said, I wouldn't bother if they called me a liar.
But immediately the thought came into my mind,
well, you wouldn't have any reason to bother because you are one, she isn't.
Marjorie looked at me with her tears streaming down her cheeks and she said,
Marjorie, it's an awful thing to be a liar.
Nobody can believe a word out of your mouth.
Now up to that time, I had been very careless about the truth.
But when Marjorie said that and she stuck her sword through me,
she couldn't have hurt me more, she didn't need to hurt me.
But it was a very truth of what she said that hurt me.
And immediately I became aware of all the lies I'd ever thought of.
Because if every lie sat up and took on an ugly little face
and a horrible little finger and pointed a finger into my face and said,
I'm your liar, you told me.
And I was aware that there was no such thing as a white lie.
That a lie was either a lie, a fake, and it was either a lie or a truth.
And that she couldn't run behind the white lie distance.
And immediately I saw myself as the makings of a liar by what will I do.
Now just as these thoughts were going through my mind,
I heard two girls behind our backs saying,
well that's one thing that nobody in this room could ever say about Marjorie Lee.
Everybody knows her to be an honourable, upright, straightforward, truthful girl.
Oh, I thought of a lovely character.
Oh, wouldn't I love to have a character like that?
Wouldn't I love to be supported and respected by a teacher?
How could I expect him to talk to me?
Because I do tell lies and she doesn't.
And I thought, now in five or six years time I'm going to be a young woman.
I'd be out of school and I'd be a young woman.
What kind of a woman am I going to be?
How are people going to say about me?
Are they going to say, do you see that woman going down the street?
You know, from there, don't believe a word out of her mouth.
I don't want to be that kind of a person.
Well, if I don't want to be that kind of person,
the only way to avoid it is to begin to tell the truth.
So I thought, when I leave the school,
I'll mix with a completely new love of people who won't know me,
won't know that I ever told lies when I was young.
If I start now, tell the truth, always tell the truth, whatever the cost,
then when I leave school, mix with other people, tell the truth,
they won't know that I ever told lies and I'll build up an honest character
for myself and people will respect me.
Now, I knew I couldn't do this in my own sense
and so I prayed another little prayer,
another little inch turning on my leg
and in my heart, I didn't say it out loud
because I was in the midst of a noisy school playground
and the children would have thought I was mad if they heard me talking,
but in my heart, I said, oh God, if you'll only help me,
I'll never tell another lie.
Now, I'm not going to say now that I never, never went back on that,
I'd be telling one now if I did,
but it made a complete change in my attitude to truthfulness and lying
and after that, if I exaggerated or if I told a lie,
it was something that sent me immediately to my knees,
sent me to God to ask His forgiveness and pardon.
It wasn't like going to a feast
and telling Him just the same old things all over again.
I knew God knew my heart, I knew the feast didn't know my heart,
I knew God knew my heart, I knew God knew about that comic
and this did more than anything else to get me out of the Roman Catholic Church
because now I discovered something that I hadn't noticed before,
that most of my lies were told in the interest of the Roman Catholic Church
and when I'd be discussing or arguing with somebody,
I'd suddenly find a lie, a slight mellif and I'd have to swallow it,
so I stopped arguing in the interest of the Roman Catholic Church.
I thought, if my church can't stand on its own feet without being touched up with a pack of lies,
well, it can flop, as I'm concerned.
I'm not going to touch it up any longer and thin my soul with lies.
So I stopped arguing and I listened to others arguing
and I heard them telling lies.
I left school in Marjorie and all my school companions and I went to business
and as God would have it here again, I was in a Protestant firm
and in this firm there was a young man named Johnny Baldwin,
he was a Chick of Ireland,
part of Mike Chickareen in here, even Jonathan Chickareen,
and there was a girl named Jo and she was a Roman Catholic
and every time these two met they cast on religion.
I didn't take part in it, I just listened
and I heard this girl one day in one of the offices
tell this boy the biggest pack of lies that ever rolled off anybody's tongue.
And when he went out of the room I turned to him and I said,
Miss Jo, in all my life I've never heard anyone tell so many lies
in such a short space of time.
I said, you know that was not the truth about our religion, the truth of all that, young man.
Why did you do it?
He said, it's quite alright.
Father so and so says that a lie in a good cause is a good thing
and a lie for the good of the church is a lie in a good cause, so it's a good thing.
Well I didn't see it like that.
She had plenty of good things and she was very good natured with them, they didn't cost her anything.
I didn't see it like that and going home that day, now this was a Saturday,
and we got off work early, about half past twelve, one o'clock we got off work
and going home from the office, I was turning this over in my mind
and I thought there's something radically wrong with this religion of mine.
Now my first thought was to go to a priest and ask him would he kindly tell me
what were the answers to these Protestant arguments that were not lies.
And I knew immediately that if I went to a priest and asked him to give me an answer to a Protestant argument
where you're having these Protestant arguments, you give up that job, you lose your faith.
You mustn't argue with Protestant, you lose your faith and I thought well now why should I?
If I have the right religion and they've got the wrong religion,
surely the more I argue the better until I prove to them that I'm right and they're wrong.
Of course I said it was a kind of afterthought.
If I had the wrong religion and they had the right religion then it might be dangerous to argue
but then they'd see that I was wrong and they were right.
And I'd see it.
How much of it could be possible that we are wrong?
This possibility had never really dawned on me before
although as I say there were a few things I didn't like.
To think of them being really wrong, I never sort of got down that far.
But now I began to think of the possibility that we could be wrong.
And immediately Marjorie rose up before me in my mind's eye
and I could see her right finger in my face and I could hear her saying
Monica Farrell I'll tell you why your peace won't let you into a Protestant church
because if you went into the Protestant church you'd hear the truth
and if you heard the truth you wouldn't believe the pack of lies they're telling you any longer.
They wouldn't be able to bully you the way they do and knock the money out of you
and that's why they won't let you into a Protestant church.
And we just didn't know how Marjorie was right.
The truth has gone out of this now.
Several things I've seen have struck me and it's made it much easier for me to really believe this.
And I thought well, I'll have to get to the bottom of it.
I'll have to try and, I won't go to a priest, I'll do a bit of thinking for myself.
So I went home and I sat down on a kitchen chair at the kitchen table.
I was in the house alone and I began to have a sort of a one man debate at the top.
One man who had pretended to be a Roman Catholic and the next man who had pretended to be a Protestant
and answered the Roman Catholic argument.
I was looking for an honest answer to these Protestant arguments that would not be an I.
Now there were seven points to answer to the arguments raised.
The infallibility of the Pope.
Transubstantiation on the mass.
Purgatory, prayers to the dead.
Confession into the year of a student.
The fact that priests and nuns were not allowed to marry.
Prayers to Mary and the saints for the use of idols in worship.
Those were the seven points around which both an idol was raised.
Now I'm just going to give you a few thoughts of the priests.
Because you don't think much quicker than you can speak.
And I can speak very quickly.
But I don't think a lot quicker.
I said to myself, well now we say that the Pope is infallible.
Protestant say that not only is the Pope not infallible, but there shouldn't be a Pope at all.
They say that when the Lord Jesus Christ left this world, he left the Holy Spirit in charge of the church.
He didn't leave any human being in charge.
Now I said, where did the idea of the Pope come from then?
They say that's what the Bible says.
That there's no specific of the Pope in the Bible.
But if it's not in the Bible, the Bible is where we get our religion from.
Where did it come from? Who began it?
Well I didn't know who began the idea of a Pope.
But I asked myself, have I any proof that the Pope is infallible?
I don't know anything about it.
Well why do I say it?
Because I was taught to say it.
You talk to any Roman Catholic and when you get them up against the wall they say,
well that's our religion, I was taught that.
And the fact that they were taught it seems to satisfy them.
And I was just hiding behind this.
Well I said, well where did the people who taught me, where did they get it from?
The ones who taught them? Well who's that? Somebody must have taught them.
Well now I did happen to know the answer to this.
That Pope Pius IX declared his own infallibility in the year 1870.
So then he said he was infallible and then he made all the other fellows in front of him instead of infallible.
Although they were 1,870 years before they discovered him.
So I said, how did he make himself infallible?
He sat on the chair of Peter and he pronounced his own infallibility.
Well now I stood up and I sat down very solemnly on a kitchen chair
and I said, Monica Powell is infallible.
Now does that make me infallible?
If anybody came in the door there and heard me saying Monica Powell is infallible,
would they go round and tell everybody I was infallible? I would have said I was not.
But why doesn't somebody say the old fellow in Rome is mad?
He thinks he can make himself infallible by just saying he's infallible.
Jesus.
And I began to see how silly this old thing was.
And I took up doctrine after doctrine very different from the Protestants where there was no 611.
And I only had to look at those doctrines to see how utter stupid they were.
And I was annoyed with myself to think that I hadn't seen it before.
So by the time I was finished I just started taking everything I'd ever learned about religion
and pitching it out to the window.
Fortunately for me I didn't know anything about communism.
But had I known about communism it would have just suited me then.
Religion is dope. I would have loved to have gone round saying that.
But I stopped myself at this point and I said, now I'd better be careful.
I might throw out the baby in the bathwater.
I'd better stop. I'd better just put the thing first of all to the acid test.
Find out whether my religion is definitely wrong or right.
It may be right even though it seems all wrong to me.
But if I experiment with it, we have been taught in schools, in science, that liquids and solids expand and heat it.
And that a theory was a theory until you experimented with it.
And if the experiment worked well then it was an established act.
And the example was liquids and solids expand and heat it.
Then they kept it with water.
Put it on the fire or on the gas and make it boil.
When the water boils, the kettle won't hold it.
It will splash all over the place.
So you know it's expanding and that's the answer to that.
Well now I said, can I test the Roman Catholic Church in this way?
So I went back to the teaching and procedure for a little while.
And I remember the nun telling us, if you went into a Protestant church during your service
and put out your hand and took that Protestant Bible,
maybe your eyes would roll out of the floor.
Maybe you'd drop dead, maybe your arm would wither, some terrible curse would come on you.
So I thought to myself, all I have to do is walk into the church deliberately during the service
and just see if my eyes do roll out of the floor.
Well I thought this was really funny. I was going to enjoy it.
But I suddenly realised it was my eyes that were going to roll out.
And I thought, well I wish I could see somebody else's eyes rolling out.
But it's not very nice to be shaking your eyes up the main aisle of a Protestant church,
trying to put them back into the sockets where they belong.
So I thought, no I'm not going to do that. That's too public.
I don't want everybody laughing at me.
Couldn't I do something here at home in the privacy of my own home?
Then I remember the same nun, a little girl, put up her hand one day and said,
Sister, sister, you never know what happened in our house.
How was that serious to the nun?
We forgot it was Friday and we'd baked an egg for breakfast.
So one day, you'd stick your neck and choke this to the nun.
So I thought, well there's an idea. I could eat a bit of bacon.
The egg was all right. It was the bacon that was wrong.
Who can but plan on common sense?
How a bacon slice could have got a fence or that a herring had to jam.
All mighty vengeance to the sun.
I didn't know that by the time.
But anyway, I decided I'd eat a bit of bacon on Friday and see what happened.
Now this was Saturday when I had this thought.
So I had the rest of Saturday,
Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday,
to wait before I could come to Friday to try out this experiment.
And what I went through during those days was nobody's sister.
It was just like I said, there were two little men inside here.
One little fellow was saying,
Oh, don't do it, Monica.
Oh, you might drop dead. The house might collapse on top of you.
The ground might open and swallow you.
You might be paralyzed. You might drop dead.
You go down to hell.
Don't do it, Monica.
And the other little fellow was saying,
Go on, Monica. Don't let them put the wool over your eyes like that.
Pick up for yourself and find out whether they're fooling you or not.
Pick it out.
Try it out. It can't hurt you.
And, you know, this is the way I kept going.
Well, Friday came and I tried a bit of bacon and I sat down.
Force of habit, I had my hands together and I was going to say grace.
And I suddenly thought at myself,
Well, if I'm flying in the face of all mighty God and doing something terribly wicked,
I better not say grace. I better cut that out.
But then I thought a little thought, and the thought was,
They say that God has those that have himself.
And I thought, well, if I'm going to choke it and not be the one to chew it, I'll chew it.
So I cut off the first bit of bacon.
I broke my jelly and my hands were trembling like that.
Now, I often think, I could see the passion there.
I could see the plan, how God was leading me.
He was breaking the power of priest class in my life.
And the priest to an early storm of Catholic is just like the witch class, by the way, even.
And you see, I didn't realize what I was doing, but I was resisting the devil in this
by trying out this experiment.
And this is how God showed me the emptiness of the pain for the priesthood.
But I don't mind telling you, for instance, you are very hungry and I put a cute little dinner in front of me.
Lovely dinner. We'll say roast pork and, you know, bread sauce and onion sauce and everything because it's lovely.
And you're really hungry and you're just going to make a dive into this dinner.
And I say to you, isn't it beautiful?
Yes.
Now, before you eat it, I'd like to tell you something about that dinner.
That dinner is loaded with aspects.
And the first mouthful you say to it, your body will be trimmed and twisted into the figure eight
and you'll die in agony and then you'll go straight down to hell for all eternity.
And no matter how hungry you were, if you thought there was a slice of tooth, an atom of tooth in that, would you touch that?
You wouldn't.
Well, now, that bit of bacon was all that to me.
If the Roman Catholic Church was right, anything could happen to me and if I dropped dead, I'd go straight to hell for all eternity.
So, really, it was a horrific try, although I laughed at his absence and I laugh at his mouth.
And at the time, it was really everything was in the manner.
Well, I was tempted as I cut the first bit of bacon off and I chewed and I chewed.
I never chewed a bit in my life before or since, like I chewed that bit of bacon.
So, there was nothing left to chew.
And then I gave a very decisive swallow.
And I expected anything to happen, but thank God nothing happened.
The ground didn't open and swallow me. The house didn't collapse on top of me.
I wasn't paralyzed. I didn't drop dead.
And I eat the rest of the bit of bacon without being quite so f**ky.
And it's useful bacon, because you've never tasted bacon until you've tasted Irish bacon.
It's beautiful.
And I finished that bit of bacon.
And I was just going to enjoy the joke when I suddenly thought,
when I haven't tried to walk, I might be paralyzed.
I'd better get up and make sure that all the straight parts are working properly.
So I got up and ran up and down the kitchen stairs and wiggled my head to make sure it was still on.
I wiggled my arms and wiggled my legs and everything and that was all right.
And then I sat down and I roared laughing.
And then I said to myself, I've got big grief.
The Protestants are eating meat every Friday of the life. Why don't they choke?
They should be choking all over the place.
The Protestants go to church every Sunday and their eyes don't roll out on the floor.
I've got to roll your eyes out. Why doesn't he roll their eyes out?
Surely God hasn't one lot of rules and regulations for Roman Catholics and another lot.
For Protestants, God talks to people, not religion.
As a stranger, I said all that to myself and yet I didn't take in what I was saying myself.
Because now I'd come to the place where I knew the Roman Catholic religion was wrong.
And I thought, if I go on thinking, I might discover the Protestants are right.
If I discover the Protestants are right, I'd have to become a Protestant.
And at this time, there was a terrible persecution raging against Protestants.
There were troubles going on like this going on in Belfast at the present time, only there were a lot worse.
Protestants were being shot dead every day of the week, their homes were being burned down,
their graves were being dug up.
Terrible things were happening to Protestants in the south and west of Ireland and in the north too.
Only in the north, the Protestants were strong enough to retaliate
and they sometimes gave back as much to the Romans as they gave to them.
But down in the south, we couldn't do that because we were only a very small minority.
And I didn't want to be a Protestant because it was going to mean persecution.
You know, the Lord Jesus said, if any man loses life for my sake, he shall find it.
If he holds on to it, he loses. If he lets it go, he'll find it.
Well, I used to think this was a clear sort of a saying.
I understand now because I was trying to hold on to the comfort of a knife.
I didn't want to suffer persecution.
And I thought, well, I don't have to tell other people if I don't believe in the Roman Catholic religion.
What business is it of the day? I don't have to wear a placard back and front and say I don't believe in this religion anymore.
I just hold my tongue.
As long as I go to Mass on Sunday morning with my sister, nobody's going to ask me any questions.
I'm sure there are thousands of Roman Catholics like this.
And so I decided I'd say nothing about it.
I'd just give up believing in it, but I wouldn't go to Mass.
I mean, I'd go to Mass, but I wouldn't say anything.
But I tried this on, but...