Visiting a cilliní will show you, better than any university research paper, why this is the case. The Roman Catholic church is unique in the Christian world in having believed in both Limbo and Purgatory, two notions unknown in the early Church and unreferenced in the Bible, and the notion that all humans automatically inherit grievous personal sin at birth was drummed into Catholics here and elsewhere. It explains, if you ask me, the sense of darkness that can sometimes permeate the historic Irish Church, especially in the period after the Reformation. I’m no theologian, but I can’t see how the God of the Gospels could have any truck with Christian mothers weeping as their dead babies are buried at night in unmarked graves.

– Paul Kingsnorth