The year before he entered University College, Joyce had already begun separating himself from Catholicism; he apparently never took communion after Easter, 1897. Joyce's apostasy was motivated by his desire for freedom of expression and sexuality, as well by his anger toward the Church's intrusion into nationalist politics. By 1898, however, even his nostalgia for Parnell and liberalism had grown stale – finding his new identity as a secular artist more suitable, Joyce began to consider himself “apolitical.” But if John Redmond's new Home Rule leadership left Joyce irresolute, he was soon to rebel against forces he felt certain were misdirected: the Church, the Literary Revival, the Gaelic League – the very fabric of Dublin nationalist culture in his day. At University College, Joyce discovered the focal point of his rebellion to be the Church's disruptive roles in Irish literary arts. During the ensuing years he became increasingly incensed with Yeats' “rabble-pandering” dramas as well as with the Celtic Revival in general. By graduation Joyce had left for Paris, ostensibly to attend medical school, but actually to discover Europe and become a “European poet.” All of Joyce's pent-up anger toward the Church, however, exploded in the year of his matriculation, and that brief period also provoked his initial reevaluations of some key cultural positions of “the Jew.”