João Mooney

I was born in Formosa, a small city in the Brazilian state of Goiás, into a deeply Catholic family.

My earliest memories of the Church are not of Mass, but of sound.

Some mornings, long before sunrise, I would wake up to the distant music of the *Folia do Divino* making its way through the streets. My mother would wake up too, and together we would call my grandmother and stand outside our house, waiting for the procession to pass.

First came the voices.

Then the instruments.

Only then would the people carrying the flag of the Holy Spirit come into view.

As a child, I never stopped to think about what it all meant. It was simply part of life. It was the sound of the place where I grew up.

I also remember Sundays when a white Fiat Palio would leave the house packed with my cousins, all of us wearing the red shirts of the *Folia do Divino*. We would spend the morning at community gatherings, sharing breakfast, talking with friends and neighbours, and taking part in the celebrations.

The Church was woven into my family's everyday life.

The first church I ever visited was the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception in Formosa. I received Confirmation at the school just around the corner from the house where I grew up. I spent countless weekends at parish festivals, charity bingo nights and youth gatherings.

Back then, I never paid much attention to church architecture.

Churches were simply there.

As I grew older, I gradually moved away from religion. By the time I was twenty, I no longer felt that I belonged to any particular faith, and over the years I developed my own views about religion.

What never changed, however, was my love for churches.

Wherever I travel, I almost always find myself stepping inside one.

I'm not looking for answers.

I simply love these spaces.

The way sunlight filters through stained glass. The silence before Mass begins. The sound of a choir filling the building. The gardens, the old wooden pews, the stone walls, and the quiet feeling that thousands of people have stood in the same place long before me.

I've always been fascinated by the architecture of Catholic churches.

In December 2025, during a visit to Brazil, I returned to the cathedral in Formosa for the first time in many years. The building hadn't really changed.

I had.

When I came back to Dublin, I started thinking about the churches scattered across the city.

I had already visited many of them over the years, simply out of curiosity. Then one day a simple idea came to mind:

**What if I visited a different church every Sunday?**

That was the beginning of Sunday Pilgrimage.

Since then, every Sunday I attend Mass in a different Catholic church somewhere in Dublin. I photograph the building, pay attention to the light, the architecture and the small details, then write about whatever stays with me after I walk back out into the city.

This isn't a religious guide.

It isn't an attempt to explain faith or compare beliefs.

It's simply my way of getting to know the city I now call home through places that have, in one way or another, always been part of my life.

I may never believe in quite the same way I did as a child.

But there is still something deeply familiar about hearing a choir, watching light pour through a stained-glass window, or sitting quietly inside an empty church.

Sometimes I think this project began in Dublin.

Other times, I think it began many years earlier, with a little boy standing outside his home before sunrise, waiting for the *Folia do Divino* to pass.