The Dark Box: A Secret History of Confession (17 page)

Although it is the sobering argument of this book that countless children were oppressed, and many traumatised, by the practice of early confession, there are no reliable statistics, only the memories and testimonies of those surviving generations who endured it. Less widespread, and yet profound and
lasting in its consequences for victims, was the exploitation of the confessional for sexual child abuse. To understand the systemic connection between confession, the confessional oppression of children, and clerical sexual abuse of children, it is necessary to explore the seminary formation and the culture of clericalism that flourished after the pontificate of Pius X.

Eight

The Making of a Confessor

Total institutions disrupt or defile precisely those actions that in civil society have the role of attesting to the actor and those in his presence that he has some command over his world—that he is a person with ‘adult’ self-determination, autonomy, and freedom of action.

—Erving Goffman,
Asylums

It is not surprising that men kept in short trousers for years should be incapable of authority and responsibility when thrust upon them as parish priests in middle age.

—Charles Davis,
A Question of Conscience

S
EMINARY LIFE FROM THE 1920S TO THE 1960S WAS
largely a product of Pius X’s ‘restorations’ of the Church in the first decade of the century. The seminary training for Catholic priests, regulated centrally from the Vatican department known as Discipline of the Clergy, involved six years of full-time cloistered residence. Many seminarians had already spent between five and seven years in junior seminaries, which were similarly monastic. The aim was to create a ‘cleric’ whose characteristics included prompt obedience to authority in the vertical hierarchical structure, along with doctrinal acquiescence to Rome’s teaching, both in content and interpretation, especially on sexual and ‘life’ matters. As we have seen, Pius X’s seminary reforms emphasised segregation from the laity and especially from women. In theory, this was meant to produce dedication to celibacy and the disciplines of sexual continence. But the consequences also included a guarded, patriarchal attitude towards women; an expectation of deference from the lay faithful; and a tendency to close protective ranks against outsiders, involving instinctive secrecy.

The seminary prepared its ordinands to be judges and healers of souls: the arbiters and exemplars of what constituted sin and virtue. The newly ordained priest was endowed with sacramental ‘faculties’ bestowing powers, sanctioned by his bishop, to administer or suspend absolution of sins.

A
RRIVING AT THE SENIOR SEMINARY
for the Catholic archdiocese of Birmingham at the age of eighteen in 1958, I entered a red-brick neo-Gothic edifice with gables, turrets, and a cloister wide enough to drive two buses abreast. Situated north of the city of Birmingham, and bordered by two highways and a cemetery, Oscott College was screened by groves of trees. There were bars on all the ground-floor windows. The building resembled, as did many Catholic seminaries at that time, a Victorian mental asylum; and it was indeed a ‘total institution’ as defined by sociologist Erving Goffman: ‘a place of residence and work where a large number of like-situated individuals, cut off from the wider society for an appreciable period of time, together lead an enclosed, formally administered round of life.’
¹

I entered the seminary several weeks before the death of Pius XII, who had been pope for nearly twenty years, and the election of the stout and cheerful John XXIII. The ambiance of the clerical culture was patrician; legalistic in language and perspective. Attitudes towards other Christian faith groups were aloof; towards non-Christian faiths, dismissive. Seminary formation, the Church, and the priesthood appeared to us as unchanged and unchanging—
semper eadem
.

The seminaries were booming and turning out ever more ordained priests. There were 21 seminarians in my year, known as First Year Philosophy, and similar numbers in each of the years ahead of us, comprising Second Year Philosophy, followed by four years of Theology, making 120 students in all, with a dozen professors or lecturers.
There were at that time five senior seminaries in England with a similar student intake as well as four exclusively English seminaries abroad—one each in Lisbon and Valladolid, and two in Rome—all full. In the early 1960s, when I was due to be ordained, England was routinely turning out 200 ordained priests each year, about 120 diocesan and 80 from the religious orders. Elsewhere during that period ordinations amongst sizeable Catholic populations were at an all-time high, especially in Ireland, Western Europe, and the United States. Yet many of us had an impression of staleness and aridity even during those apparently halcyon years.

Only in retrospect would it be obvious that there had been something dysfunctional in the state of Catholic clericalism during our era. Given Pope John’s age—he was seventy-six—nobody could have guessed that he would initiate an epoch-making council that would shake the Church to its foundations, promoting the idea of the faithful as a pilgrim people of God, engaging with the world. The shock would expose the deep-seated problems of priestly formation. The mass exodus of ordained priests worldwide from the 1960s to the 1970s, and the collapse in vocations, would speak for themselves. Locally, in England and Wales, since the year 2000 the number of newly ordained priests, diocesan and religious, has averaged just above 20 each year; compared with the early 1960s, that is a decline of 90 per cent. In the United States the ordinations collapsed from 1,575 in 1965 to 450 in 2002. The decline of potential confessors would have been critical for the fate of the sacrament
of confession even had the faithful not rejected the practice: which they did.

W
HEN
I
ENTERED THE SEMINARY
there were more than enough priests to confess the long lines of penitents waiting to enter the dark boxes every week. Few of us could imagine the collapse in numbers that lay ahead. In the United States, about 3 per cent of parishes, 549, were without a resident priest in 1965. In 2002, there were 2,928 priestless parishes, about 15 per cent of US parishes, and rising. By 2020, it is estimated that a quarter of all parishes, 4,656, will lack a priest. Between 1965 and 2002, the number of seminarians in the United States dropped from 49,000 to 4,700, a 90 per cent decrease. Seminaries have closed in their hundreds across America: there were 596 seminaries in 1965, and only 200 in 2000.
²

There were many fine, decent men of generous temperament at Oscott. A small group of ex–national service men, and late vocations, exerted a modicum of common sense, knowledge of the world, and even at times ribald good humour. Yet the younger majority, fresh from junior seminaries, dominated the tone and were only too willing to be moulded by their superiors. The majority of our intake were born Catholics who had been catechized for confession from the age of six and younger. Many were from large and relatively poor families, many originally of Irish extraction.

In common with my companions who had been in the junior seminary, I had no notion of what a celibate life would in time entail. Apart from brief vacations, we had been segregated from girls and women, including mothers, aunts, sisters, and cousins. We were emotionally and socially immature, certainly not prepared to make long-term commitments about our future emotional and sexual lives and relationships. We did not know, most of us, what an intimate marital relationship was, let alone what it would mean to abstain from it for a lifetime. While final ordination would take place at the age of twenty-four, six or seven years off, the commitment was not a one-off decision to be left to the day of ordination. We had already committed ourselves to something that we did not understand.

And yet, we were not even preparing for lives as bachelors. We lived like schoolboys. Each student had his own small, sparse, identically furnished room. We were obliged to wear a cassock, Roman collar, and black shoes at all times. On rare trips outside the college, we wore black suits, black raincoats, and Roman collars. We were called at 6
A.M.
for meditation in chapel before Mass at 7
A.M.
A student would rap on the door and call out: ‘
Laus Deo
’ (Praise be to God), to which one replied ‘
Deo Gratias
’ (Thanks be to God). Breakfast, consisting of cold toast made the night before, cornflakes, and All-Bran, with anaemic coffee or tea, followed thanksgiving after Mass. There was usually time for a cigarette after breakfast. Most students and lecturers were addicted to smoking, which was seen as an aid to the celibate life.

The mornings were spent in classes (punctuated by breaks for a quick smoke), followed by prayers in church before lunch at 1
P.M.
We were free between lunch and supper, which was at 7:30
P.M.
, when we would eat in silence while listening to stories from the lives of the saints, excerpts from the Code of Canon Law, and an improving Catholic book, read from a pulpit in the refectory. Through the long afternoons and evenings, which were meant to be taken up with private study, spiritual reading, or perhaps praying, students would spend a lot of time sitting around in each other’s rooms, talking, drinking instant coffee, and, of course, smoking. If we took a walk outside the college grounds we were obliged to go in threes (having sought permission, and given a good reason), and it was laid down that there should be one in front and two behind so as not to inconvenience others on the pavements by walking three abreast. Rosary followed supper, and the Greater Silence was observed from 9
P.M.
, when we gathered in church for night prayers. The silence continued until breakfast the next day. ‘Lights out’ was at 10:15
P.M.
, with no exceptions.

The regime was remarkable for its restrictions. We did no voluntary social work, even though the city of Birmingham had more than its fair share of poverty, the sick, the hospitalised, the homeless, and the unemployed. Women, apart from the hidden domestic servants, never entered. No visiting speakers came. Nor were we allowed to attend lectures, concerts, movies, or the theatre on the outside. There was only one ancient radio, which was situated in the billiard room. I
only got to listen to it once, when there was a repeat broadcast of the Jesuit philosopher Father Frederick Copleston’s debate on the existence of God with Bertrand Russell. A single copy of
The Times
was delivered to the common room, to be somehow shared among the 120 of us. We visited no parishes, no offices, no factories. We never entered a school, and would learn nothing of child education or child psychology—although we were destined, as priests, to spend much time with children in catechism classes and confession. There was no gymnasium; there were no visits to public swimming pools. We were allowed brief holidays, but not at Christmas or Easter, when we might have come in contact with our wider families. Relatives and friends never visited. Despite much potential talent, there were no musical groups, and we had no record players. There was one out-of-tune piano. There was no television.

Seminary life in its diurnal routine essentially enabled a young man to avoid the responsibilities that are shouldered by most adults of that age. For six years we were fed and sheltered gratis. We never cooked a meal, washed a dish, or laundered a shirt; nor did we sweep the floor or change the linen on our beds. The most we did for ourselves was to polish the shiny toe caps of our black shoes. We did not serve others, even our
confrères
: we lived to ourselves alone; yet we would have been astonished had anyone suggested that we were acquiring a warped sense of entitlement.

Individualism was eradicated by routines of conformity, starting with our dress. Our hair was cut to a conformed
shortness by visiting barbers. Being ‘singular’, or ‘ostentatious’, were the buzzwords for transgressing conformity (a contemporary in another seminary, a non-smoker, told me that his spiritual director ordered him to smoke in order to avoid being ‘singular’ among the majority smokers). Our lives, ruled by bells, meant that we made few choices about our day; the big decision about our future, to the end of our lives, had already been made. Even the decision to leave the seminary, we had been told, must be made by our superiors, lest we departed in bad faith. There was little scope for making committed friendships at just that time in life when the forging of significant relationships is crucial for growth in character, personality, generosity, and human empathy. We were encouraged to treat our fellow seminarians with an equal measure of detachment. ‘Special’ or ‘particular’ friendships, as they were known, could lead to occasions of sin. We were conscious, in any case, that committed relationships, apart from being a spiritual imperfection, would be pointless, as we would all be scattered geographically after ordination.