Confessions of a Lapsed Catholic

Book excerpt: Sheila Cassidy’s honest and wise books on suffering and healing have made her one of the UK’s best-loved and most popular writers on pastoral care and personal growth. She is widely known for her work in the hospice movement, and as a young doctor who survived torture for daring to give medical care to an opponent of the Pinochet regime in Chile. Her Catholic faith has led, comforted and sustained her for over sixty years. Now, in Confessions of a Lapsed Catholic, Cassidy writes: ‘I no longer attend Mass, I no longer avail myself of the sacraments, those “outward signs of inward grace” which sustained me in my earlier years. God is to be found outside the Church even more than in it: in nature, in people, in animals, in poetry and in all the wild and wonderful works of the Divine. God is everywhere, in everything shining forth, if we only care to look. ’