It’s embarrassing to admit that I will go to Mass on Easter Sunday because I am clearly a bad Catholic. I am short-tempered, impatient, often the opposite of serene, and the number of Vatican rules I break doesn’t bear admitting. But hey – if I didn’t go to Mass I’d probably be far worse!

I am a ‘cradle Catholic’, it is the religion into which I was born. As a young woman in the radical 1970s, I angrily rejected it as reactionary and anti-female, and for years refused to darken a church door. But not for nothing is it said, ‘Once a Catholic, always a Catholic.’

About a decade ago, like so many church dissidents before me, I came back. A radical friend was horrified. How could I, as an investigative reporter who had exposed numerous paedophile scandals, return to a Church which seemingly specialized in them?

Yet, aside from a couple of years of godless teenaged angst, I had never really lost my sense of a higher power, or of gratitude to the loving nuns who taught me. However unfashionable it may be, I don’t have a single horror story about them or the many priests I have known.

But not for nothing is it said, ‘Once a Catholic, always a Catholic.’And so on Easter Sunday morning I will, with a weird and wonderful collection of other unlikely Catholics at my usually packed inner-city church, sing my heart out with the choir, and give thanks that I returned. For within the Church, scandals notwithstanding, I nonetheless find a kind of magic – what Christians call grace – and enormous strength and love.

During all the years that I was ‘lapsed’ – as Catholics put it – I desperately missed the Church at Christmas and Easter. I suffered what Salman Rushdie memorably called the ‘God-shaped hole’ of the former religious believer.

In my heart I pined for lost certainties, whatever my political differences with the Vatican were. Who can read Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount and not be moved? Forget what may seem vengeful or reactionary in the Bible, and concentrate on Jesus’ words. He was the guy who befriended prostitutes and lepers and offered hope and healing to all.

I had been educated at London state schools by bright nuns and committed Catholic lay teachers who firmly implanted the rhythms and inspiring messages of the Church’s great festivals. The commercialism of a godless Christmas and Easter, reduced to conspicuous consumption and shorn of their epic tales of redemption, felt empty. My religious formation was such that I could never quite bring myself to use the popular abbreviation ‘Xmas’. Christ, the nuns always reminded us, was the feast’s whole point.

For years I used to sneak into my local church to pray when no one was there. During my work on various child abuse horror stories I had worked with an inspiring Christian police officer and confided my religious doubts. He gave me good, simple advice: ‘Take them to God. Just pray, ‘Lord, help me with my unbelief.’’

God is innocent, even if we are not.

Eventually I surprised myself by even going to confession, for the first time in years. The priest was a Central Casting Irish priest of great heart and humour, and he put things in a nutshell when he gently asked: ‘Is your main argument with God or the Vatican?’ ‘Oh, the Vatican, Father,’ I blurted out. ‘Ah well, then,’ the priest chuckled, ‘I’m sure God the Almighty has even more problems with the Vatican than you. Welcome back!’

I found a Church very different than the one I left decades before. The emerging paedophile scandals had shamed and humbled it. But Christians were meant to embrace humility, one priest told me.

I also found less tub-thumping emphasis on sin, and more on the love and wisdom of Christ’s message. The congregation also felt more inclusive. It included openly gay Catholics, divorcees and couples who were unable yet to marry so – however guiltily – were cohabiting. They were living according to the dictates of their conscience or current difficult circumstances, and did not want to do without God or a church community just because they couldn’t live by all the Church’s ideals.

Many were inspiring. They worked selflessly with asylum seekers, the homeless and the dying. They lived out Christ’s message of love. One explained: ‘I value the Church even when I disagree with it. It holds the line.’ It promotes monogamy and self-control in a free-for-all over-sexualized world in which children are having children, and its belief in the sanctity of life makes it practically the only outspoken opponent now to the slide into possibly involuntary ‘euthanasia’ for the old, sick and disabled.

What of the Church’s failings? How, my shocked radical pal still insisted, could I rejoin a Church when religion had led to so many wars? But some of the worst mass-killing dictators of recent times – Stalin, Pol Pot and Mao tse Tung – have been militant atheists. God is innocent, even if we are not.

My investigative work means that I more than most know that the Church’s cover-ups of errant members are, although shameful, typical. Until recently, every institution – social services, public schools, boy scouts, charities and progressive Woodcraft Folk alike – turned a blind eye to any child abusers in their midst. Preserving their public image – and donations – mattered more to most than exposing evil and protecting children.

I would shop a paedophile priest to the police as soon as look at him. But the Church was no worse than most. It should of course have been far better. But the failings of God’s alleged servants do not make me doubt God himself – or even the value of the Church’s promotion of clerical celibacy, for those who can cope with its demands.

To this day, faith schools achieve near miraculous results, even in impoverished inner cities; hence the number of parents who begin to attend church and pretend faith in order to get their child into what may be their only decent local state school. Some, in the experience of priests I know, genuinely acquire faith and become believers.

A nun who taught me once explained to me that her vow of celibacy meant that she was free to devote herself far more than a married teacher could to children like me. Indeed it did: she supported me wonderfully through an often difficult childhood.
I suffered the ‘God-shaped hole’ of the former religious believer.

A good friend of mine runs a nursing service for children dying of cancer and – unknown to most of his patients and their families, or the organizations which regularly shower him with awards for his work and cutting-edge teaching – is also a consecrated Benedictine monk. He wears civvies at work and, he explains, does not speak about his religious beliefs or vows to patients and parents because they have enough to deal with. But I know he prays for them as he nurses, and works miracles most do not understand, in bringing peace and meaning to an inevitably painful journey. He is humble beyond words, and I do not doubt that his loving sacrifice of a family and partner of his own explains the great gifts of time and love which he gives to heart-broken people at this most difficult time.

Jesus taught that whoever hurts a child hurts him, and I suspect that an especially hot rung of hell awaits those who espoused grand ideals while hurting God’s innocents – be they priests or the supposed ‘lefties’ who once encouraged mass child abuse within Margaret Hodge’s Islington children’s homes, under the guise of ‘liberating children’s sexuality’.

Sometimes, being the rubbish Catholic that I am, when I try to pray my mind drifts to the week’s grocery list. But I keep trying, because I know the power and peace of the times when prayer works. Jesus also taught that ‘Wherever two or more are gathered together in my name, there will I be also.' I feel strengthened by the sense that even bemused atheists tell me they sometimes pick up from churches, the echo of years of shared prayer, yearning and reverence. And that, ultimately, is why I will be at church on Easter Sunday, to give a prodigal daughter’s thanks.