IT’S Easter Sunday and it’s 9am. The kids are still snoozing, blissfully unaware of their good fortune in being raised as godless heathens. Had I not discovered the curative properties of science and a smattering of mild vices, they’d be complaining about wearing a tie and having their hair brushed, instead of waking up and gorging themselves on the eggs des cloches de Paques (the French Easter bell) dumped in the garden.

If you’re a Catholic, as I was, Easter is the real deal. Bigger than Christmas. Even if the floorshow is lacking, the stories are better. Betrayal. Murder. Shock comeback. Even so, as a kid there was a sense of obligation in attending church, rather than enthusiastic participation. Yes, my soul needed to be saved but, more immediately pressing thanks to Lenten prohibition, chocolate needed to be earned.

I’d be lying if I said my attendance at church on Easter Sunday was more about Jesus than greed. But at least I recognised it and eventually did the honourable thing and admitted it. If I hadn’t, les enfants would be thumping each other in a pew, whispering over the scripture, in a room that smells like candle wax and discount potpourri.

I’m as much an atheist as a former Catholic can hope to be. Even so, I still look like I know what I’m doing at weddings and funerals. My non-religious kids aren’t squeamish about questioning inconsistencies or laughing at the absurd, meaning they’ll say, or do something that reminds me how deep the roots of organised religion go. “I know about Jesus. He’s that baby they nailed to the cross,” they giggle. That’s three Hail Marys, at least.

It’s not that I’ve made a concerted effort to disabuse them of religious notions, more that I’ve tried to teach them to question everything. An inevitability of that is their protestation over religious observance, something you have to deliberately opt out of, or else the school will take your kids to church. They’ve developed a healthy scepticism when it comes to things grown-ups tell them, and can already recognise the problems with religious pluralism, “How come everyone has a different god?”. Sometimes that backfires on me, but it’s running interference when they’re asked to talk about Christianity at school. They ask awkward questions. I wish I’d felt free to do that.

As a kid, I thought I was a good Catholic. I went to church. I said my prayers. I had a shrine in my room, complete with a crucifix, prayer cards, a portrait of Bernadette Soubirous, and a little bottle of holy water. I believed in heaven – the fluffy clouds and harp-playing cherubs – and in the red devil with a pitchfork-and-flames version of hell.

I knew the Ten Commandments, and when you had to sit, stand or kneel in church. I used to count sins like calories. For a while, I seriously considered becoming a nun (a career choice informed by Sister Act and The Sound of Music). It took me a long time to realise quoting scripture and living by it are entirely different things, and that if you’re doing one and not the other, then you need to either reconnect with your faith or get the hell out. I did the latter.

Being young and Catholic is easy enough. You do what you’re told, you repeat the words you don’t really understand. Sins are inevitable in the young who don’t know better. The problem comes later, when you give in to temptation, get away with it and develop a taste for sinning.

You say the Lord’s name in vain. No lightning. You try a cigarette. The ground doesn’t open up. You make something up in the confessional so the priest doesn’t judge you. No smiting.

Cause and effect loses its gravitas when the punishment is metaphysical and a lifetime away. As you get older, you know better, but it doesn’t really change anything. It’s something my sister and I learned early. We were both altar servers – the most performative act of bona fide faith a Catholic kid can do, short of a pilgrimage to Lourdes or the Holy Land (my cousins beat us there). In our robes, we looked like tiny nuns. We sang communion hymns in harmony, rang the bells at consecration and lit the candles. We also nipped each other behind the lectern and elbowed each other during the sacrament. As long as we did a rosary or said bedtime prayers, all was squared away with the Big Guy.

An evolution of this sentiment would prove my ultimate religious undoing. Not just feeling like a failure for trying to cheat the system but recognising others were doing the same thing. Do as I say, not as I do seemed to be the unspoken 11th commandment for both clergy and congregation. Bad Catholics were 10 a penny. The alcoholic neighbour who never missed mass. The married teacher having an affair with another teacher. The priest who ran off with the parish funds.

The older I got, the more absurd it seemed. It wasn’t religion itself that bothered me, but the hypocrisy of professing to believe everything and living by none of it. Too many people took the Etch A Sketch approach to salvation, doing what you wanted because it would be wiped off the slate as long as you begged forgiveness for your weaknesses.

Yesterday, as at Christmas, the church would have been heaving with my fellow lapsed, bad and incorrigible Catholics. From one sinner to another, it’s all or nothing with religion. If you’re doing the bare minimum, you might as well not bother. Sleep in, skip the prayers, enjoy your pagan chocolate. Your soul might be damned, but your body will thank you for it.