Raised without religion, they are flummoxed by the practices and customs that accompany a Catholic ritual. Though he himself left the church as a teenager in the 1960s, he’s ambivalent about the loss of a binding and, at times, beautiful religious culture.

“People are rejecting something they don’t even remember,” said O’Doherty, whose 2008 book "Empty Pulpits: Ireland’s Retreat from Religion" chronicled the impact of secularization on Ireland. “We may have only a sterile, secular culture that looks at the Catholic Church as an army of priests raping children.”

As Pope Francis takes over the global church, O’Doherty, like many church-watchers in Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, ascribe the religion’s current troubles to secularization. In 1946, Pope Paul VI called Ireland “the most Catholic country,” but starting in the mid-1960s, a growing number of the Irish — like many in Western Europe and the United States — began questioning the authority of religious institutions. Today, the percentage of Irish practitioners remains high compared with most of the rest of Europe.

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Where I grew up, in mid-coast Maine, the primary industry is lobster fishing. Although I can now recognize my hometown as an oasis of beauty and tradition, as a kid I was terrified of the lobstermen and their stories and slang. They smelled of bait and had thick Maine accents I couldn’t understand.

One day a grizzled lobsterman, still in hip waders, came toward me down the stone steps of King Ro Market, our village’s general store, which kept an enormous block of hard cheese on the counter, to be sold by the slice, as well as motor oil, Wonder Bread, and my objective whenever I escaped the carob and kale of my childhood home: Swedish fish and other penny candy.

“Jesus Christ,” the lobsterman said, laughing with genuine amusement as I tried to sneak by. “What’d a seagull shit on your face?”

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