Believe it or Not: A Memoir

Patrick Semple was born into the minority Protestant community in Wexford shortly after the second world war. ‘These were the days of Catholic triumphalism when ecumenism in provincial Ireland was non-existent. Relations between individuals and families were good but as a parish level there was no contact …Canon Hazley would have had no contact with the Catholic clergy and if they met in public they would simply have exchanged polite greetings and passed on.’ ‘The Sunday morning service was much more than a meeting for the worship of Almighty God according to the Anglican tradition, it was the coming together of a tiny minority affirming their distinctiveness and their determination to survive …There was a strong sense of allegiance …to the Church of Ireland, which was more 'tribal’ than theological.‘ This is a very straight-talking, honest and often humorous account of growing up in such a society and church. Religion was also a factor in getting his first job in Brittain’s motor assemblers in Rathmines, but did not interfere with the lively and loud social life of his late teens. From there, the development of a sense of vocation, entery into the ministry and further education at Trinity College, led to ordination and a first parish appointment in Belfast. Again, he chronicles the culture-clash between the world in which he grew up and the very different circumstances of religiously-divided Belfast. In a very full life in the ministry, Patrick Semple talks of ecumenism at parish level, of the idiosyncracies of aspects of the life of the Church of Ireland, and about difficulties with various aspects of Christian faith itself.