Why indeed? thought Keelin despairingly as all the doubts and questions she’d suppressed roared back with the force of a tsunami.

At her weekly confession she was dismayed when Father Durand and not Monsignor Kelly pulled back the curtain in the confessional. Monsignor Kelly would always say, no matter what she confessed, ‘You’re doing your best my child, that’s all any of us can do,’ before giving her a light penance and sending her away. Would this new priest be full of righteous dogma, unable to understand what she was about to say? Would he accuse her of lacking humility and allowing her ego to dictate?

‘Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. I am troubled, Father. I have grave doubts about my vocation.’

‘Can you tell me your doubts, Sister?’ came the calm response from the other side of the confessional.

‘It’s like this,’ she said, and in a torrent of words, sometimes in English if she couldn’t remember the word in French, Keelin unburdened herself to a stranger, a young man not much older than her, who too was in the service of God.

When she finished, a long silence pervaded the confessional and she almost held her breath waiting for words of derision to come her way. Eventually, she heard the priest say with a deep sigh, and in a sad, grave tone: ‘Sister, I cannot help you. I am not the right person to hear your confession. I too have doubts. I agree with all you say. You have come here and mirrored my beliefs and brought up my reservations. Reservations I have struggled with since before my ordination. I too have been told it was ego. But, in truth, I don’t agree. Suppression by the Church is, as I see it, a form of control. If it is any comfort to you, you are not alone,’ Armand Durand said quietly, and she raised her eyes to his and in that moment felt a connection so deep and true, it took her breath away.

‘Thank you, Father,’ she whispered. ‘I should leave now. I’ve been in here too long. My Sisters waiting outside will think I’ve committed many mortallers.’

‘Mortaller? I do not know this word,’ he spoke in English.

‘Mortal sins,’ Keelin explained. ‘It’s what we Irish call them.’

Father Durand smiled, making his lean, austere face look years younger.

‘Indeed,’ he agreed. ‘But we will talk of this again, soon. Try to be unperturbed.’ He raised his hand and murmured a blessing and she was sorry to leave the place where, for a few brief moments, peace had embraced her.

‘You are not alone,’ Father Durand had told her. He too had doubts. It couldn’t all be ego.