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| Title |
A terrible sin? |
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| Description |
When I was young, I just can’t bring myself even to a Protestant wake or Protestant funeral. When I was in Belfast, I was living with a lady and I was only a month there and the poor thing took ill and died. And her sister came over from England, she was there and when the, before the corpse went out, before the funeral went out like, the room was packed with people and the Clergyman was there and this lady comes out to me and says "Margaret, maybe you’d like to come and join with the prayers, before the remains goes out." Well I didn’t know what to do, I took a kind of a shiver and said ah sure I shouldn’t go in to say the Protestant prayers, it wasn’t Protestant prayers I say, but then I thought "gosh, I can’t insult her either, it was nice of her to ask me in." I just went inside the door there, and I said my own prayers the same as I was in the Chapel. And them people were praying away like good ones. It's great to hear the Protestants praying, they can pray in earnest. But anyway, I didn’t see any harm in it because I said my own prayers, I remember saying my own prayers as well and for the poor lady that was goin out to, on her last journey. But some girls I was telling and they told me that was a terrible sin. So that worried me then and didn’t I go to confession in Belfast? Oh the lacerating the priest gave me for doing such a thing. It terrified me. So that was alright, I was so upset about it, I’d to promise him I never do it again, so I promised him I'd never do it again. But still it worried me that much to think, the way the priest talked to me so much about it and scolded about it and oh, I suppose he was afraid me being a young lassie do y'see that I turn a Protestant maybe, y'know? Isn’t that funny? And I know like, it’d be no harm now because times have changed so much. But like when I was young you weren’t supposed to go in to Protestant funerals or Protestant churches.
Ref: 99-022-111.
Interviewer: Joan Duffy, Women's Oral History Project.
© Fermanagh County Museum and Clogher Historical Society. |
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| Speaker |
Margaret Flanagan |
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| Sound |
99-022-111.mp3
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