Seminary Boy (32 page)

F
IVE WEEKS AFTER
leaving Cotton I travelled to a suburb of the city of Birmingham to enter Oscott College, a neo-Gothic edifice with a proliferation of towers, spires and gables. The famous nineteenth-century Catholic architect, Augustus Welby Pugin, had designed much of the college which with leaking roofs and crumbling plaster, was in need of restoration. Pugin was also responsible for designing many of the chapel’s decaying vestments.

Oscott had been a focus of the rebirth of Catholicism in England. In 1852 John Henry Newman preached his famous ‘Second Spring Sermon’ from the chapel pulpit, anticipating a great revival of the Catholic faith in England. By the late 1950s, however, the college, albeit filled to capacity, had an autumnal atmosphere. In my class, known as First Year Philosophy, were seven other Cottonians as well as six or seven mature men who were some years out of school. There were about a hundred and twenty students in the college and we were obliged to dress in cassocks and Roman collars at all times within the buildings and the grounds. I had bought a celluloid collar like Father Cooney’s that could be wiped clean with a damp cloth before I went to bed at night. However loose I tried to wear it, I felt that it was slowly choking me.

To my dismay, James Rolle and Peter Gladden had decided during their summer holiday not to proceed to the senior seminary. They did not reply to my letters, and I was never to see them again. Such defections between junior and senior
seminary, even on the part of the most promising priestly candidates, were not uncommon. For the sake of his prospective sacristy boys I was glad that Peter had decided not to persevere. James, I heard some years later, got married and raised a family. Derek had been kept back at Cotton for a further year to improve his Latin.

At Oscott we each had our own sparsely furnished room. Unless given express permission we were not allowed outside the grounds. When we did gain permission, usually to make a visit to the local shops or walk on the nearby common, we were required to go in groups of three, wearing black suits, black raincoats and Roman collars. We were instructed to walk one in front and two behind, or vice versa, so that we should not ‘crowd’ the pavements and inconvenience other pedestrians. The mature students, many of whom had spent time in the armed services, seemed to endure these disciplines with good humour. I heard one of them say: ‘Seminary’s a doddle after sar’nt-major!’ We had manual labour, mostly weeding and raking leaves, once a week. There was no obligation
to take exercise or play games, and there was no gymnasium.

The elderly rector was suffering from spasmodic senile dementia. He would address students by the names of men who had long ago departed the college, and even this life. His Masses were occasionally invalid; some days he missed out the consecration altogether. College discipline was in the charge of the vice-rector, a bustling martinet of a man, who had spent the summer previous to my arrival studying the regimes in the strictest Spanish seminaries in order to tighten up discipline at Oscott. He would patrol the outside of the building after 10.15 at night to ensure that lights were out in every room. After supper each evening he would stand outside the refectory accepting apologies from any who had broken the rules of the house: there were usually about a dozen self-confessing miscreants. The teaching staff comprised ten ‘professors’, who seemed languid and mournful. There were heavy bars on the windows of their ground-floor studies off the main cloister: to keep unwanted visitors out.

Many of my companions appeared to be thriving. Yet I was not entirely alone in finding the regime difficult. Every few weeks a student would slip quietly away without farewells. By my first winter I became afflicted with a form of depressive introversion, so overwhelming that I found it difficult to concentrate or sleep. The condition was exacerbated by the influence of our ascetical theology tutor, a gentle, dough-faced individual called Father Peter Lawler. Father Lawler counselled moment-to-moment ‘recollection’. He gave us instructions on how to dispose our minds as we studied, took a walk, enjoyed a view or read a book. ‘It’s important to time yourselves,’ he said. ‘Stop every five minutes for one minute’s reflection on what you have read…Always read with your eye on the clock…’ Most students cheerfully ignored all this. I took it seriously.

I was lonely, but my agitated interiority made me a poor companion. I found it difficult to make new friends with
students of my own age, including former Cottonians. In our new setting my old companions seemed stand-offish. Avoidance of special friendships was taken even more seriously at Oscott than at Cotton. I was interested in making friends with some of the mature students in the college, but they regarded the boys from Cotton as ‘mere boys’. I fell in with a set of garrulous would-be intellectuals in first-year theology who would sit around in one of our rooms, smoking and drinking instant coffee after lunch. We talked abstruse topics. One of our group was obsessed with ethical dilemmas presented in our moral textbook, H. Noldin SJ’s
Summa Theologiae Moralis.
For example, would one break the Eucharistic fast by chewing a piece of mahogany? Or swallowing dust? Or by accidentally swallowing a gnat? Would it be possible to eat without sin as much as one liked on a fast day by travelling from Louvain in Belgium to Oscott, via Paris, thus passing through different canonical abstinence zones?

I made friends with a mature student who had been an army officer and had read natural sciences at Cambridge. He broke the rules of the house to entertain me in his room after lights out (he covered his windows with wartime blackout material). He always had an open bottle of claret hidden in his wardrobe and he was never short of cigarettes. As he poured the wine, he would murmur ceremoniously: ‘Drink up, it’s sacramental!’ I confided my problem of self-consciousness to him, and he told me of the French theologian Teilhard de Chardin’s ‘practice of self-forgetfulness’. ‘It is possible,’ he said, ‘to forget the self in a sympathetic union with all men.’ It was this kind of language, ‘the
practice
of self-forgetfulness’, that drove me straight back into my self. But there was something unctuous about the way he said ‘sympathetic union’. I was not aware of a homosexual clique in the college, but I suspected without evidence that he was a homosexual when he dropped me suddenly for an effeminate-looking youth, also in first-year philosophy.

The six-year seminary course of studies began with two
years’ metaphysics. I found the numbered-paragraph spoon-feeding of this abstract mode of thought tedious. We were also dictated a potted version of the multi-volume history of philosophy by Frederick Coppleston SJ. Most of the major philosophers in the history of Western thought were set up to be knocked down by our superior ‘scholastic’ critiques. We were not encouraged to read original texts. The mature students were mostly content with the spoon-feeding since they had been away from books for some years. I managed to cadge a lot of cigarettes and alcohol by helping older students with their shaky Latin. I was getting through more than twenty cigarettes a day. I started to suffer from a stomach ache which the college doctor thought was ‘an incipient ulcer’.

We had a well-stocked library that included not only theological works, but aslo large collections of ‘secular’ books, mostly donated by wealthy Catholics in the hope that future priests would read widely. Some of us did. I began to read and to be influenced by recent British philosophy as an antidote to metaphysics. I started to read anthropology, history of science, sociology and biography. Due to Father Armishaw’s encouragement at Cotton, I was interested in astronomy and cosmology. I became a library cormorant, but my reading lacked direction and opportunity for discussion.

I missed Father Armishaw’s subtle intelligence: his encouragement of independent thinking and debate, and of exploring different sides of a question. I missed reading and talking literature; I desperately missed listening to music and choral music. Oscott’s music was exclusively Gregorian chant, and although it was done expertly and possessed an austere beauty, it lacked the rich variety of the four-part descant motets we sang at Cotton. We were not allowed radios or gramophones in our rooms. The landscape of our private grounds, bordered by a busy highway and a Catholic cemetery, was flat and enclosed by trees. I felt in exile from Cotton’s valley with its wild weather and steep woods.

The prospect of six years at Oscott stretched ahead like a life sentence. We stayed in the college for the whole of Easter and Christmas, and rarely went home. On my occasional visits to London, Mum and the family seemed to treat me distantly and uncertainly. Back in Barkingside I spent a lot of time pacing the streets and public parks, saying my beads which I held inside my clerical raincoat pocket. One day in Valentine’s Park, Ilford, a girl passed me who took my breath away. I turned and followed her at a distance. The beads of the rosary continued to pass through my fingers, but I was looking at her swaying hips and her head of beautiful dark hair.

By the beginning of my second year at Oscott I felt that I had been buried alive. Like Thomas à Kempis I was attempting to claw my way out of the tomb. In second-year philosophy I began to experience sexual torment, quite different from those earlier years at Cotton. I was thinking about women, and my fantasies were mostly fed by films I was seeing in Birmingham. I would sneak out of the college and down to the city centre, covering my clerical collar with a scarf. I never once joined the queue after supper to confess these misdemeanours.

At Easter during my second year I received a reprimand from the vice-rector. I must mend my ways or a poor report would be sent to the Bishop of Brentwood, my sponsor. I forestalled further acrimony by leaving of my own accord after a brief interview with the rector, who seemed to think I was somebody called Andrew. The vice-rector, who knew exactly who I was, was relieved. And so I left, without saying goodbye to my companions. I slipped out of the college while the community Mass was in progress. I travelled all the way to Ilford wearing my black suit and Roman collar. I took it off at home in the presence of Mum.

‘I always thought you were acting a part when you got to that Oscott,’ she said. ‘It never was you.’

Standing in front of the mirror, she tried the collar and black stock round her own neck. It was a terrifying sight:
Canon Sheehy-Egan. In a Dublin brogue she cried: ‘Y’are all sinners! And y’are all goin’ ter Hell!’ We burst out laughing.

The next day I called on Father Cooney in his presbytery. He seemed unaffected by the news. He said: ‘Ah, wisswiss…Do you say so! Well now. Keep the Faith.’ Then he shut the door. I was never to see him again.

D
UE TO
C
OTTON’S
education I earned a place at Oxford University to study English literature, supported on a full state grant. At Oxford I was intellectually and imaginatively stretched. I continued to practise as a Catholic although I no longer attended Mass every day, nor did I pray regularly. Increasingly I was finding a different kind of spiritual sustenance in literature, especially in the Romantic poets: Wordsworth and Coleridge in particular, reviving memories of the landscapes around Cotton and a sense of a spirit ‘that rolls through all things’. I went to Mass on Sundays, but my devotions were as perfunctory as a prayer wheel. The scourge of malign interiority I had experienced at Oscott receded. I was living life on the surface, going to parties and meeting girls. The Cottonian misogynist attitudes evaporated on getting to know them. I loved dancing. I went to dances in the colleges and a weekly nurses’ ‘hop’ at the Radcliffe Hospital. We jived to the strains of the Marvelletes’ ‘Please Mr Postman’, and to Jimmy Dean’s ‘Big Bad John’. We twisted to Chubby Checker. Through my years at Oxford, Cotton seemed a world away, but with the power to affect me – like a strong, emotionally charged dream. There were nights when I dreamt that I was back there, trying to find my place in the refectory or the church, and being turned away. Somebody would say: ‘You don’t belong here any more.’ And I would
wake feeling miserable and abandoned. I thought of Father Armishaw sometimes when we revisited in university tutorials some of the texts I had studied in his class.

At last I wrote to him. It was a long descriptive letter, a result of many drafts. I told him that I was disappointed that F. R. Leavis had no influence in the English faculty at Oxford, but it was just an excuse to tempt him into a correspondence. He wrote a few lines in response, telling me that he himself was no longer enamoured of Leavis. He recommended that I read C. S. Lewis’s
Experiment in Criticism
as an antidote to Leavis’s ‘stocktaking’. The important thing, he told me, was to learn how to read and write. I was crestfallen that he had not congratulated me on having got into Oxford. There was nothing about himself or Cotton. Only when I read Lewis’s book did I realise that Father Armishaw’s advice had not been an insult. I never wrote again.

By the time I went on to Cambridge as a post-graduate student everybody was dancing to the Beatles’ ‘From Me to You’, but I had become a fan of Bob Dylan and Joan Baez. The times were indeed a-changing. I had stopped going to Communion, because I no longer went to confession. As a young man in love in the early 1960s, I could not make a firm purpose of amendment, while failing to abide by the mores of the Catholic Church on sex outside marriage; but I was convinced that my lapse would be temporary. I missed the Eucharist. Sometimes I dreamt that I was receiving Communion and would wake in tears. Then, as a result of a crisis, came a decisive, conscientious decision that had been creeping up on me for some time.

I was a member of Christ’s College, Cambridge, where John Milton and Charles Darwin had been students. During my third term at Christ’s I had spent many hours in the college library acquainting myself with two distinct world pictures. I had been reading, more or less side by side,
Paradise Lost
and
The Origin of Species.
The underlying tension between these
two versions of reality, I realised, had been forcing me into a kind of intellectual schizophrenia.

One afternoon I was walking across a stretch of grassy open ground called Parker’s Piece in central Cambridge; it was a sunny day and there were students sitting around on the grass reading and chatting. In the distance I could see the neo-Gothic tower of the Catholic church on Hills Road where I still attended Mass occasionally, without going to Communion. The sight of the tower, rising huge and solid, filled me with unbearable tension. The tower represented for me at that moment two irreconcilable choices. My old Cotton dilemma, make-believe versus reality, had returned.

One world picture involved the supernatural realm beyond the veil of appearances where resided the Holy Trinity, the angels and the saints, and the dead from the beginning of time – in hell with the Devil and all his demons, or suffering in purgatory, or enjoying celestial happiness in the presence of God. Here the powers of light were pitched against the powers of darkness. Here was the Creator, who sustained from moment to moment all of his creation in being. Here the shape of human history was determined, depending on the extent to which we appealed to the mediating power of the Virgin Mary. This sacred cosmology, moreover, was entirely subject to belief and imagination rather than direct empirical knowledge and reason.

The other world picture, admittedly skewed by my youthful Cambridge optimism and sense of certitude, acknowledged the wonder and mystery of the vast material universe, and the emergence, through blind evolution, of the stupendous fertility of life on the planet. It paid homage to the dignity, genius and resourcefulness of humankind. It was a world picture that could be constructed and perceived by direct knowledge, underpinned by the natural sciences and unaided reason. The shape of human history, within this world picture, depended not on contending unearthly powers, but on the responsibility
of individuals and groups of individuals working out their destinies in communities and societies.

It struck me that I could no longer hold these mutually exclusive world pictures in parallel, let alone reconcile them. What was more, while science allowed for scepticism and healthy falsification of theory, Catholic truth made outrageous and dogmatic demands on my acquiescence, and with everlasting penalties. No intelligent, educated Catholic, it seemed to me, was spared the choice that had to be made between these contrasting world pictures. On that day I made my choice. I abandoned the Faith. It was a decision that seemed to bring instant relief. There were no pangs of conscience and no heartsearching. Importantly, it suited all the plans I had for myself; how I wanted to lead my life.

I did not renounce my belief in the historical reality of Jesus Christ, as described by Daniel-Rops, nor did I entirely renounce that great Gospel account of the Sermon on the Mount. But was he God?
Was
there a God? If there was a God, I reasoned, He must be a God who lay beyond all rational understanding, all proof and all human description. He was a God who was indifferent to the universe, detached from the emergence and evolution of life. He was remote from the problems of evil and suffering in the world. I was none of God’s business, nor He mine: I no longer believed in a life after death when I would come to know Him face to face. I had become an agnostic. Yet what had happened to all that accumulated religious experience at Cotton? The years of daily ritual, spiritual reading, meditation, the disciplines of spirituality? The shaping of my younger soul? On that last morning, sitting above the valley, I knew that Cotton had claimed part of my soul. That day in Cambridge I decided to bury that claim deeply.

This is not the place for the narrative of a life journey that, twenty years on, would find me a returning Catholic, except to say that my marriage to a Catholic woman, and the birth
of our children, whom she brought up as Catholics, kept the spark of Faith alive in me by proxy. But there was always a thread, tenuous, subconscious, that led back to Cotton.

In the meantime there had been rumblings in Rome, which to some presaged damaging storms, and to others, rain for famished lands. The Second Vatican Council of the early 1960s shook the Catholic Church to its foundations, and the reverberations were certainly felt at Oscott and at Cotton. Half of the twenty students who started in our year at Oscott did not make it to the priesthood. Of those who did, half had abandoned their calling by 1980; they were part of the army, a hundred-thousand strong, that left the priesthood during the 1970s. Those who remained, both profs and students, have to the best of my knowledge remained good and faithful priests: some in parishes, some in seminaries, and some on remote missions in Africa and South America.

The Cotton staff priests of my time were all of them faithful survivors except Father McCallum, whose predatory ways were soon exposed. He was removed from Cotton shortly after I left and died of a heart attack during the 1960s. Father Doran was appointed to a parish in Oxford, where he died in the early 1990s. When I was doing research in Oxford in the early 1970s, I telephoned him to suggest that we meet. He said: ‘Give me at least a month’s warning for an appointment, and not at all during Lent.’ Lent was three weeks away. I never attempted to contact him again. He was said to be a dutiful parish priest, if a little dry.

And what of Cotton itself? In the 1950s there were five minor seminaries in England, several hundred in Western Europe, and more than seventy in the United States. Most were filled to capacity and the system appeared to be expanding. By the late 1960s liberated social attitudes and a growing youth culture had set the minor seminary formation at odds with the times. Many boys were failing to proceed to senior seminary and the priesthood after minor seminary. As a result of the
reforms of the Second Vatican Council, moreover, bishops had doubts about recruiting boy ordinands. By the late 1970s the minor seminaries were as abandoned as the monasteries of England in the late Middle Ages. Cotton attempted for several years to make it as a regular boarding school for Catholic boys who had no intention of becoming priests, but it never got over its long reputation as a minor seminary. It closed its doors in 1987.