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Sister Mary and Sister Bonaventure, Elizabeth is soon prepared to accept it as perfectly natural.
    Then, of course, dear sweet innocent Elizabeth is herself perceived to be in danger of everlasting damnation, because she has not been baptised into the Catholic Church. The girls realise that it is up to them to set matters straight. Outside classes it becomes their purpose to save her soul. Elizabeth submits to four baptismal rituals and there is some concern whether any of them has worked. Were the words said at exactly the same moment as the water flowed? Should the service have been conducted in Latin rather than English? Later the class ponder on how they can arrange for her First Communion, because sooner or later she is going to have to make her confession to cast out the sins with which, as a Protestant, they believe she is riddled.
    As a child Maeve never had a Protestant friend like Elizabeth. It was a mortal sin at the time for a Catholic even to enter a Protestant church or attend a wedding that was not a Catholic one. A mortal sin meant that you would be consigned to Hell for eternity. As a Catholic child one knew that there was no way back from everlasting Hell. Children sensed the divisiveness of so exclusive a regime.
    Though there was a Protestant presence in 1950s Dalkey, and friendships and marriages across denominations did exist, generally there was minimal integration and sometimes a degree of unpleasantness about it when it did occur. ‘When my father married my mother, who was a Protestant,’ one woman explained, ‘there was a huge rift in the family. Honestly, they wouldn’t speak to her. When she had her first child, who died, one of her sisters said, “Well that’s one Catholic out of the way.”’
    Utterly convinced of everything she was told, and being a caring person inside, Maeve began to worry about the father of a friend of hers, who was a Protestant while the rest of his family attended the Catholic church. Every Sunday he would drive his family to church but instead of joining them at Mass he would go for a walk on the pier at Dún Laoghaire.
    She spent hours with her friend discussing the situation, fearful that he would suffer ‘the Devil and the pain that goes on forever’ and actually teamed up with her friend, faced her father with the situation and urged him to reconsider!
    The compassionate ethos of the Holy Child Killiney was clearly at odds with the Church’s wider determination to marginalise and alienate anyone outside the Catholic community,but this only fell clear to Maeve in her late teens when she went to university. And even then, so completely had she lived within an opaque Catholic bubble that when she travelled abroad in her twenties she found it difficult to believe that there were countries where the Angelus bell did not ring at midday.
    The Catholic family to which Maeve belonged at Killiney enveloped her completely – not only Mother St Dominic, but other less corporeal figures, like St Patrick, who was always looking out for her, St Anthony, whom she relied on to find things for her, St Peter, who was always dependable, and St Francis, her father’s namesake, who was the saint of the poor and of course friend of all the animals and birds.
    So closely did she come to belong that Maeve would sometimes rather be at school than at home. Once, for example, she opted to celebrate St Patrick’s Day by swelling the ranks of boarders at the school, attending Mass with them in Killiney rather than with her parents and siblings at the Church of the Assumption in Dalkey. She remembered persuading a nun to let her decorate the statues of all the saints, so that St Patrick ‘up there’ would have a good day and not feel over-adorned in the otherwise stony naked company of St Peter, St Francis and ‘the other lads’.
    During this time she was determined to become a saint. When this was mentioned by a priest during her funeral Mass sixty years later the congregation