The Dark Box: A Secret History of Confession (18 page)

The most popular, and constantly recommended, work of spiritual guidance was the
Imitation of Christ
by Thomas à Kempis, which counselled ‘custody of the eyes’, avoidance of idle gossip, ‘recollection’ (a sense of constant, serious awareness), repeated examination of conscience, and avoidance of ‘curiosity’ about secular matters—the ‘world’. We were hardly capable of sensible discussions about current affairs, as we had little knowledge of what was current on the outside. The political tendency was reactionary. The models constantly put
before us were those of St. Jean-Marie Vianney—the
Curé d’Ars
, and the tragic
petite fleurette
, St. Thérèse of Lisieux, the simple young French Carmelite nun of the previous century who had achieved heroic sanctity in ‘little things’.

Our conversations were trivial, schoolboyish, repetitive, and anecdotal; some even had stocks of edifying stories and preachy conversational gambits which even the averagely pious found cringe-making. Given the hothouse atmosphere, and suppressed youthful and sexual energies, there were occasional subterranean infatuations, jealousies, sulks, and periodic tears. On more than one occasion a student stood poised to throw himself off the crenelated central tower, to be talked down by the long-suffering spiritual director. Those with more self-control, or less labile emotions, would manifest a prim exterior of reproach in the face of such dramatics. For some, being priggish was a full-time job.

Every so often a student would disappear without warning from his place at table and chapel. The ‘defection’, which might well have been expulsion, was never discussed or explained. Following an intense on-off ‘special friendship’, one of our number left the seminary without warning and later threw himself under a train near Oxford.

T
HE WORD ‘SEMINARY’
derives from the Latin for ‘seed’: the image is of a protective environment, a greenhouse, where the seedbeds are being protected from the damaging environment
of the world outside. The seeds are being specially grown, forced artificially into clerical plants. The problem for those responsible for clerical training was that the world outside had been increasingly inimical to Catholic ideals of chastity and celibacy. Pius X knew this all too well when he tightened up the disciplines of clerical formation at the beginning of the century against the background of ‘Modernist’ thought, which included psychoanalysis alongside a host of other ‘heresies’. By the late 1950s and early 1960s, however, a tide of influence, carried through the media and known as the ‘sexual revolution’, was threatening traditional standards of Catholic chastity, not least within the clerical and religious estate.

Despite the attempts of our superiors to make the seminary a media-free environment, and to control our reading and our egress into the world, the impact of the new sexual freedoms seeped into our world through every nook and cranny. We did, after all, go home for several weeks a year, where we were exposed to television and magazines, and went to the cinema. Most of us had brothers and sisters in their teens and twenties whose music and dress brought the new youth culture home to us.

I
N THE MEANTIME
, and in stark contrast, our minds were being shaped and narrowed through the educational curriculum. The first two years involved the study of Scholastic philosophy, which was unrelentingly abstract and dogmatic.
It was taught through dictated notes from the lecturer’s rostrum. There was a single textbook in Latin with numbered paragraphs, like a car maintenance manual. There was a campaign within the Church to maintain Latin as the required language of our lectures, which was to impel the new Pope John XXIII, even as he planned the reforming Second Vatican Council, to order the exclusive use of Latin in seminary courses.
³
There was variety in the study of the history of philosophy, but we were obliged to endure the dictated notes of the lecturer rather than be exposed to original texts. There were no classroom discussions, or even opportunities for discussions among ourselves. We had a well-stocked library, where the dust gathered on the rarely consulted volumes. The consequence, for those of us who digested the diet of spoonfed information, was the development of a didactic tone of voice: a dry, one-way, finger-wagging certitude. Despite the acquiescence, obedience, and humility required of us (or perhaps because of it), seminary was a school for authoritarians.

There were occasional surprise events, which only served to demonstrate the institutional tedium. There was the student who appeared in chapel for night prayers on his first evening in the college wearing pyjamas and dressing gown instead of the cassock and collar. What was he thinking! That we were a relaxed, home-spun domestic fellowship? There were gales of nervous giggles, as if a wave of insanity had gripped the entire student body. Then there was the intensely devout student, older than the rest of us, who set his room on fire with the votive candles he kept blazing all night before a
statue of the Virgin by his bed. More nervous tittering ensued in the choir stalls whenever he took his place in the days that followed. On another occasion, a small, intellectually rebellious group invited a Jesuit philosopher to meet and talk with them—he had not reckoned on being smuggled into the college clandestinely through a barred window, where he got stuck for twenty minutes. Such were our small diversions and rebellions.

The courses in pastoral and moral theology, which sourced our training to be confessors, were based on treatises that went back to the original work of the paragon of moral theology—Alphonsus Liguori. There were two sets of manuals: the three-volume Latin textbook
Summa Theologiae Moralis
by H. Noldin and A. Schmitt, and the four-volume English textbook
Moral and Pastoral Theology
by H. Davis. The Noldin and Schmitt, whose first edition appeared in 1926, effectively set the direction of Catholic clerical thinking on morals up to the end of the Second Vatican Council in 1965 and somewhat beyond. For the English-speaking seminaries, Davis, first published in 1935, was essential, although sections of it, mostly dealing with sexual morals, were in Latin in order to bar the laity from acquainting themselves with material that might have put bad ideas into their heads. Davis was considered to be impressively up to date. He expounded perspectives from the latest neurophysiology in the ‘morbid sexuality’ sections. For example, he cited neurologist Santiago Ramón y Cajal’s ‘law of avalanche’, from around the turn of the century, to explain
how in the nerves ‘a disturbance, at first localized, is diffused over a great many of the cells of the brain if attention is focused upon it.’
⁴
He thereby explained ‘how sex feelings get beyond control if the original stimulus is fostered rather than suppressed.’ He had in mind, naturally, masturbation, the single, unrelieved obsession of Catholic moral theology and daily, it sometimes seemed, preoccupation of Catholic clerics in those days.

A review of these texts tells us much about the Catholic moral mentality that shaped generations of clerical notions of virtue and sin, and hence the influence exerted via confession over generations of the Catholic young through two-thirds of the twentieth century. One is struck, first of all, by the dysfunctional casuistry. Take fasting before Holy Communion. It was taught that to break the fast and receive the Blessed Sacrament, as we have seen, was a mortal sin. The textbooks enlarged on the circumstances in which the fast might or might not be broken. The rule admitted, it was pointed out, of no exception, and it extended ‘to the smallest quantity of food or drink taken as such’.

So what does it mean to ‘eat’ or ‘drink’? The thing consumed must be ‘taken exteriorly’. So it is not a violation of the fast, for example, ‘to swallow blood from the gums, or teeth, or tongue, or nasal cavities’, although it would be a violation of the fast ‘to swallow blood flowing externally from the exterior parts of the lips, or from a cut finger, or from the nose, or to swallow tears, unless in each case only a few drops entered the mouth and were mingled with the
saliva.’ To violate the fast, moreover, requires that a substance ‘must pass from the mouth into the stomach, so that the fast is not broken if liquid is taken into the mouth, as an antiseptic or for gargling, and is not swallowed.’ A third condition insists that violation of the fast occurs ‘by the action of eating and drinking’, and inadvertence ‘has no bearing on the matter’ even if it is a ‘drink given to a patient during sleep’. Davis declares that the ‘divines’ are still disagreeing whether a ‘nutritive injection’ is food, but certainly the introduction of soup or milk through a stomach pump is not allowed, ‘whether the injected liquid be intended to nourish or merely to flush.’ Turning to the vexed question of nail-biting, Davis reports that he believes that this does not affect the fast, ‘but biting off and swallowing pieces of finger skin might do so, if the particles were more than the smallest and not mixed with saliva.’
⁵

In the section on what constitutes ‘food’ as opposed to ‘non-food’, the fingernails appear again. In a final wrap-up, Davis writes:

Metallic substances in specie (gold, silver, iron, lead, etc.) do not violate the fast, but if taken as powder and chemically treated, as iron jelloids, bismuth, charcoal tabloids and powder, sulphur, they do certainly violate the fast. The same is true of stone, and glass, probably of earth and chalk. Straw and green branches are nutritive, but not dry wood; human hair is not digestible, nor, probably, human nails. Wax is digestible and also linen and cotton, but
neither silk nor wool. Paper is not certainly food, nor are dried fruit stones cleansed of all fruit, though the kernel is food.
⁶

As we sat digesting this information, the proposition that anyone would actually consume iron jelloids, fingernails, and sulphur never struck us as absurd.

A similar approach was applied to other potential mortal sins within the ambit of obedience to ecclesiastical rules, such as late arrival at Mass (meaning that the Sunday obligation to attend Mass had not been fulfilled), and rules for days of fasting and abstinence. The law of fast days during this era, and going back centuries, prescribed that only one full meal be taken, but that a smaller ‘collation’ might be consumed at two points during the twenty-four hours. Lengthy casuistic argumentations followed in Noldin-Schmitt and Davis on what constituted a ‘full meal’: how many ounces; how long it could take (longer than two hours?); whether one could take a break in the middle, or several breaks, and so forth. Liquids were also a subject of arcane hair-splitting. ‘Wine, beer, tea, cocoa, coffee, do not violate the fast, but soup, oil, thick chocolate, fruit and whole milk, are foodstuffs and violate the fast.’ To complicate matters, it was allowed that while one was taking a drink, a small item of food might also be consumed ‘
ne potus noceat’
, as Noldin had it in Latin: ‘lest the drink by itself should do harm’. But there was much written on how much, and how often, these morsels accompanying drink could be consumed. Abstinence from meat on Fridays
(a mortal sin to break) also had its complex reservations and ordinances. We learned, for example, that ‘fish’, in the view of the moralists, included ‘frogs, snails, tortoises, oysters, lobsters, otters, beavers, crabs’—also, by the peculiar ancient tradition of certain dioceses, ‘gulls, ducks, teals, and coot’.
⁷

What we were drawing from this approach to ‘moral theology’ was the importance of discovering, and being conversant with, myriad distinctions and hair-splitting rules in preparation for our lives as confessors in the dark box, until common sense, individual moral agency, and exercise of conscience became redundant.

Nine

Seminary Sexology

Immodest acts, however slight they may be, that are done from the motive of exciting lust, even though it do not ensue [
sic]
, are grievous sins.