Meet those bucking a trend and going BACK to Mass

Paul D’Alton has done something he hadn’t done for 20 years — returned to Sunday Mass. And he reckons he wasn’t the only ‘prodigal son’ there

IT was like riding a bike for the first time in years. It was instinctive. I was climbing the steep hill up to my local church and doing something I had never expected to do again: going back to mass.

The last time I was in a church was seven years ago, at my father’s funeral, so that memory was raw. But what, on Easter Sunday just gone by, made the experience unnerving and surreal was that, like many lapsed Catholics, I had never thought I’d voluntarily and happily line up behind the regular faithful and walk through doors I’d sworn never to darken again.