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Ecstasy and Vendetta

The Making and Unmaking of a Catholic Priest

First published in 1973 by Peter Davies Ltd 15 Queen St, Mayfair, London W1X 8BE

LONDON MELBOURNE TORONTO JOHANNESBURG AUCKLAND

First WorldWide Electronic Internet Edition - Copyright © Colin Hamer 1999


  • Father Colin Hamer was granted dispensation by Pope Paul VI and released from all the legal obligations of his priesthood in February 1971. His plea was: “I worship G-d, but cannot reject the world.” Hamer spent twelve years preparing himself for the ministry; he was a Salesian priest for six years, and held a key position as Director of Studies at the Salesian House of Philosophy, Beckford. As a doctor of philosophy, also holding a degree in theology, he was in constant demand as a lecturer, and the author of many articles and papers. Yet at the age of thirty-six he rejected his position in the ministry to find for himself a more positive and human commitment to Life.
  • First written in 1971 and published eighteen months later, Ecstasy and Vendetta is a frank, sometimes shocking spiritual autobiography that deals openly with disturbing dilemmas and divisive issues within the priesthood. Lucidly written, brilliantly argued, and always authoritative, Hamer's courageous statement still deserves to be read avidly by all those even remotely concerned with the future of the Catholic Church.
  • Colin James Hamer (Shivananda), born Bolton, Lancashire 18 April 1934. Thornleigh Salesian College, Bolton 1945-52; St Joseph's Salesian Novitiate, Burwash, Sussex 1952-3; Salesian House of Philosophy, Beckford, Worcestershire 1956-7; Salesian College, Cowley, Oxford 1957-8; Pontifical Salesian University, Rome and Turin 1958-65 (ordained Priest 1964); Prefect of Studies and Professor of Philosophy, Beckford 1965-8; Salesian College, Battersea 1968-70.
  • Licentiate of Philosophy 1960; Licentiate of Theology 1964; Laureate of Philosophy 1966; Doctor of Philosophy 1968; Associate of the Faculty of Physiatrics 1975; Director of Creativity House 1981; Master of the Rainbow Program 1989; Doctor of Science honoris causa 1995.
  • Applied for Laicisation 1970; Associate of the Faculty of Physiatrics 1975; various Home Office, University and ILEA appointments, including full-time teaching in Wormwood Scrubs Prison and Head of the Department of Languages & Liberal Studies at Streatham & Tooting Institute, 1968-87; Communications Consultant 1988-90; Preliminary LibrArian I+N the Neith Network, 1991-99; Webmaster-Editor, 2000.
  • Translator of Theatre Through The Ages (1975); Social Structure In Italy (1976). Author of Encounter Groups (1977); Voice I+N The Darkness (1978).


  • AUTHOR'S PROLOGUE
  • The first thing I noticed as I switched on the light was the blood, streaming from my fingers, spurting from underneath my sharp, claw-like nails. It was Sunday, 12 December 1971. I glanced at my watch. Still going. The time was 10.52 p.m. The phone was ringing; I felt I had to answer it. A friend, Livinus Dorrian, was calling from his home in the Old Kent Road. Controlling my voice with just a trace of effort, I agreed to join him for supper on the following Wednesday. I put the phone down and took out my diary to make a note of the engagement. The blood seemed very red against the white pages, and my hand was trembling as I wrote. There was still some free space available on the page for December 12. Almost as an afterthought I made a brief entry: “10.52 p.m. I have just murdered my mother.”
  • Well, I thought, that was the end of her. Of course she'd had it coming to her for some time, but until then I had never quite managed to kill her completely. It was done at last! She'd only got what she deserved.
  • Mind you, the method I'd eventually used had been a bit drastic. It was the shock that killed her. She thought she had me in her grip. She didn't believe I was strong enough to live without her. It's funny, because she was right in a way. I wasn't strong enough to live without her, but - and she had overlooked this - I was strong enough to die with her. So, by leaving the religious Congregation of the Salesians of Saint John Bosco to which I had for so long belonged, and by renouncing my place in the official ministry of the Roman Catholic priesthood, I blew myself sky-high in smithereens, emotionally speaking at any rate; murdered my mother, and destroyed her and my own shared dream world. And yet not quite.
  • Because I'm a believing Roman Catholic still, I like to kneel down by my bedside and say three “Hail Mary”s before going to sleep. It is a practice that has been mine since childhood. That December night I decided that, even if I had blown myself up and murdered my mother, there was no point in crying over spilled milk. The best idea was to go to bed again and forget what had happened. As usual, then, I knelt down to say my three “Hail Mary”s. And that was when I got a big shock.
  • My mother's corpse was there under the blankets, stiff, cold, and motionless. I felt sorry for her. I was glad I had been to Holy Communion that morning and to Confession the day before; with G-d's help I would be strong enough to face any devil who came along. Fortunately, none did. I felt the need to confess my imagined murder and suicide to a priest, as I am confessing it now, but there was only myself in the room. I was weak, puny and naked, very much in need of protection. I decided, therefore, to rely on the power of my three “Hail Mary”s, which I recited slowly, with trust and love.
  • Before I was halfway through the second “Hail Mary” I noticed the blankets were beginning to look less drab and shroud-like. Something was stirring under the bedclothes. For some reason or other, I felt I didn't need to be afraid. And sure enough, the next moment there was a gurgle of laughter - I knew my mother was alive again, and I was alive, too.
  • I got into bed, after switching off the light. I had better lie still and stay very quiet. I didn't yet know what my new life outside the official priestly ministry would be like. I lay on my back, relaxed, and breathed out slowly and deeply. I began to feel all lungs. In, out; in, out; in, out. The air was very cold as it came in, and my lungs seemed to have to make very great efforts to press it out against the outside atmospheric pressure. It was hard for me to preserve a sense of my own identity in a strange and alien world. All the same I managed it, expelling the foreign air from my lungs. As my rate of breathing changed, my pulse-rate and the general condition of my nervous system adjusted themselves to it. Or rather, some master computer inside me attended to all the necessary adjustments.* I am still uncertain whether my successful adaptation was real or only imaginary. I had a vision of three clockfaces or speedometer dials, and as the fingers on these moved round, my body-responses changed.
  • I became aware that I shouldn't be looking at clock-faces, shouldn't be using my mind at all, although I wasn't sure why not. What was the use of relaxing my body by encounter experiences and bio- energetic massages, I thought, if my mind was anxiously peering into every nook and cranny of my situation? I let go. It seemed, at any rate, reasonable to sleep on things. I stopped thinking about myself. I stopped thinking about the need to stop thinking. I stopped waiting for sleep to come. I just stopped, sank down, let go, and dropped out of the whole scene. In this way, I died again - although this time very peacefully - for questioning is my very life.
  • Now, in a new body, I seemed to be somewhere in space above the bed, looking down at my former Salesian self. I had detached myself from both a rather comfortable and a pretty lifeless situation, and had not yet found a new way of inserting myself creatively into our contemporary society.
  • My experiences during that cataclysmic night in December 1971 have been decisive in my life. I felt I could never be quite the same again. I went to sleep deeply conscious of the need to clarify my mind once and for all about the significance these nocturnal events had within the context of my whole life as a Salesian priest. I wanted to bring my emotions to fuller expression within my new life outside the ministry.
  • As soon as I awoke the following morning, I wrote down this record of what had happened. I did not have to search for words; they were dictated by the voice of my innermost self, so that the description of that night's experience is for me a continuation of the experience itself.
  • A little later, I chose to write my spiritual autobiography for my own satisfaction and peace of mind. I wanted to express myself as fully and as clearly as possible, laying bare as much as I could of my experience of life in a religious community, showing why I had decided to leave the ministry, for the time being at least, confessing my present religious attitudes and beliefs, and tracing everything back to its roots in my own childhood situation.
  • This book is the result.*
  • ______________________
  • * Note: “This book is the result.” Although that sentence was true when it was written, it is not rigorously true of the 1973 published text, let alone of this revised 1996 edition. Although Encounter Groups was not published until 1977 and Voice I+N The Darkness until 1978, the contents of both made up the bulk of the original draft of Ecstasy And Vendetta, in which personal anecdotes were seldom presented in chronological order, but offered simply as a minimum experiential basis in support of my fundamental pastoral options as a Christian theologian with an above average grounding in both philosophy and psychology. I had, however, in 1971 no inkling of the importance that computers and computing would subsequently come to occupy in my life.


  • SHELTERING FROM DISASTER
  • When Field-Marshal Sir Douglas Haig, Commander-in-Chief of the British Army on the Western Front, decided to launch a full-scale attach on Passchendaele Ridge to the north-east of the Belgian city of Ypres, and actually initiated the battle on 31 July 1917, he set in motion a chain of events that, as far as my own father was concerned, reached their logical and horrible conclusion on 26 October 1917. Unlike many other Bolton men engaged in that bloody conflict, he did not lose his life. He was, however, very severely wounded in his head, and back, and shoulders, and he was completely blind in one eye for three months, as well as being severely handicapped in the use of it for the rest of his life. Emotionally speaking, my father was blown sky high at Passchendaele.
  • Born in Bolton on 13 June 1895, Levi had lost his mother when he was still a child, and had been brought up by a rather cold stepmother. Although he was baptized in the Church of England, he never attended church services; because the behaviour of most church-goers persuaded him that Sunday observance had done them little good. He had no patience with hypocrisy; it “gave him the pip.”
  • Levi received no secondary education. After leaving school at the age of twelve, he worked for a while as a messenger-boy with Kenyon's printers in Market Street. In the army he served as his captain's batman. Passchendaele taught him that whatever advantage a British victory might give to England, it was unlikely to do much for the ordinary man in the street. The financial compensation he eventually received was a miserable pittance; and the medical board treated him as an insignificant left-over from a past they wanted to forget, instead of as a war hero who had sacrificed himself in his country's cause. He had been too trusting. Indeed, he remained, if anything, too trusting throughout his married life.
  • Edna, my mother, was the youngest member of a large Irish Catholic family. Cissie, the second youngest daughter in the family, was several years her senior, and already established in her position as the baby of the family. My mother had only one brother, and his son died during the First World War. Her own father died when she was quite young, and her mother's next boy-friend was a heavy drinker and more interested in himself than in the children of the house. Faith in G-d was the one thing, apart from her own great strength of will, that kept Edna going. She had only a primary school education, but read all the books she could, and loved fairy stories and the legends of Greece and Rome. She was employed for some years in a dye-works for a few shillings a week, and then got a job in Yates's Wine Lodge on Bradshawgate, eventually becoming the manageress. She was amused to find how many members of the Temperance League frequented the bar; although she had no objection to alcoholic beverages taken in moderation, she viewed heavy drinking with disgust.
  • After my parents had become acquainted, Edna stopped working in the Wine Lodge and started going to evening classes to learn cookery. They took out a mortgage on a small confectioner's shop at 55 Deane Road, and went to live there after their marriage in Saint Joseph's Roman Catholic Church, Horace Street, on 16 April 1927. The official Roman Catholic attitude towards Edna's marrying a non-Catholic was one of great disapproval, so that the marriage was performed not in the Church proper, but in the adjoining sacristy, without flowers, without music, and without an accompanying Mass.
  • Edna and Levi kept themselves very busy after their marriage. They passed the early part of the night baking loaves and cakes together. During the day Levi worked as a cloth-overlooker in Kershaw's mill, a small local concern, and took his position there very seriously. Edna looked after the shop, and also did a lot of sewing, making her own coats and dresses, shirts for Levi, quilted bedspreads, hand-knitted socks, mittens, gloves, cardigans and scarves.
  • My parents soon found, however, that despite all their hard work and late nights success was not automatic. Some customers took bread on credit and never paid up. It was only as a result of a very great deal of saving and scraping that my parents contrived both to pay off the mortgage on their shop in Deane Road and to purchase a five-roomed dwelling-house at 113 Beaconsfield Street as well. They wanted to rise above the poverty of their previous condition, and to create a home in which their children could enjoy cakes as well as bread. Their efforts speak volumes for their sense of purpose and strength of character.
  • These were the years immediately following the economic depression of the late 'twenties, and although it must have been a bitter blow when Edna and Levi's first child, a girl who would have been three years my senior, was still-born, they probably experienced a certain relief as well. My mother may have felt this miscarriage was a sign of God's anger on account of her mixed marriage, a warning to her that she must get her husband into the Catholic Church before either of them died, or else! My father, perhaps, felt that he had failed to manage things properly. He had not delivered the goods.
  • I came next. I was born on 18 April 1934 in Haslam's Maternity Home on Chorley New Road, Bolton, at twenty past four in the morning, and weighed seven pounds eight ounces. (That same day across the pond the first launderette opened in Fort Worth, Texas; it was called a washeteria.) To make room for me in their lives, my parents moved to the house in Beaconsfield Street, which had been paid for by that time, and though Father kept his job at Kershaw's for some years, the baking nights were over. Hence my arrival prevented my parents' working together in the old way; Mother was left to attend to the whole organization of home life, while Father gave his full attention to his work at the mill - the livelihood of the whole family depended, in fact, on his having a steady job.
  • The shop on Deane Road was leased out to someone who ran it as a Communist bookshop, the first of its kind in Bolton, but he eventually went bankrupt, and stole the fittings when he left the place. The shop was then sold at a loss. My mother consoled herself with the thought that the short-lived Communist venture was instrumental in the Bolton Catholic Workers' deciding to open their own rival bookshop on Moor Lane.
  • Mother was always disappointed that my father was too honest to be a likely social climber - she once laughed bitterly over his being gulled by a passing gypsy girl into paying a whole shilling for a two-inch piece of white lace. Because she had spent her own childhood on the outskirts of Bolton, in the Birches' family house on Cloister Street, just off the top of Halliwell Road, she always retained a certain nostalgia for the simple and reliable country style of life. However, her practical instincts told her that in a town house success would depend on know-how as a matter of life and death. She would walk a mile to take a bad egg back to the shop that had sold it, rather than allow herself to be diddled, duped or twisted out of the least farthing. Father had know-how for his job, but lacked know-how with people, and was too easily led by the nose. Edna had to be his mother as well as mine, to be his domestic servant, too, and in some ways to be a father substitute for me, filling in as best she could when Father couldn't cope.
  • She presided over my religious upbringing, and on 20 May 1934 I was baptized into the Catholic Church by Father Thomas McGrath in Saint Ethelbert's, Melbourne Road. I do not remember very much of my early life. I know that in November 1934 I wore shoes for the first time, and that on 11 March 1935 I cut my first tooth. I seem to remember my mother teaching me my first words, with me repeating them very slowly after her - Mummy, Mary, Mummy, Mary, Mummy, Mary. As I look now at a photograph of myself as a baby and consider the smiling features on my relaxed childish face, I feel how much I must have enjoyed the self-satisfaction of consciously and successfully imitating my mother's pronunciation of these two words.
  • I don't suppose such success came without effort. I remember how once, when my mother and I were out walking together somewhere in the countryside between Bolton and Westhoughton, we stopped to lean against a wooden fence and have a look at the sheep in a farmer's field. Some of the sheep were large, black and nasty, but there were also some small white lambs frisking about playfully in the sunlit grass amidst the buttercups and daisies. The black sheep seemed to say “Muurrh, muurrh” and the little, white lambs said “Maay, maay.” This is connected in my mind with my mother teaching me the “Hail Mary” as a child, and with her insistence that I address the Mother of G-d not as “Muurry” but as “Maary.” All Catholic children learn the “Hail Mary” by heart at a very early age. In my case its elegant recital was associated with the Gospel scene of the last Judgment, in which Jesus Christ condemns the black sheep to eternal slaughter in the flames of hell, while, as Good Shepherd, he pats the white lambs on their lovely little heads, allowing them to follow meekly after him wherever he goes in his heavenly pastures.
  • My Roman Catholic belief has certainly been very much influenced by my mother's religious attitudes, but it would be a wild exaggeration to pretend that the whole of my faith in the reality and power of Mary the Mother of G-d is a mere extension of my having liked the look on my mother's face as she said “Mary.”
  • I had a thoroughly Catholic education. In 1939, after earning my first 1½d for maypole-dancing in the streets on May 2, I started going to Saint Ethelbert's primary school. I can remember my tears at being separated from my mother on my first day at school, and I recall slapping my first teacher, Miss Etough, because she wanted me to pronounce the letter “p” in a way other than that taught me by my mother. I also remember the first day of the Second World War, and my being reluctant to wear a gas mask or to use ear-plugs, as well as my being absent from school for several months because of the chance of an enemy bomb attack while I was on the road and without any shelter or protection. On the whole I was a very industrious, even if a somewhat quiet, schoolboy.
  • I made my first Confession and first Holy Communion in June 1941, by which time I already knew off by heart all the answers to the questions in the child's Catechism of Christian Doctrine, which is still in print, thanks to the importance attached to it by His Eminence Cardinal Heenan. Perhaps I should explain that Confession for me meant telling a priest what I had done wrong, being sorry for it, and getting G-d's forgiveness, while Holy Communion was feeding on the body and blood of Jesus Christ, the Son of G-d - not the way cannibals do, as some of the enemies of the early Christians used to imagine, but under the appearances of bread (and wine, too, once I was a priest, or when the service was very modern).
  • As I look back on my Roman Catholic boyhood, I see that I was always intensely interested in G-d, and that I tried to get to know him in two ways. I wanted, and still want, to know the truth about him. I also felt, and still feel, the need for a personal relationship with him.
  • The practice of fortnightly confession was the biggest single factor in the development of my personal relationship with G-d. This relationship was one I often betrayed. The personal failure of which I most commonly accused myself as I knelt down to tell the priest my sins, was that I had told lies. I don't suppose those small boyish untruths have made much difference to my life, but my fortnightly ritual of saying to G-d's representative in my part of the world that I was sorry I had not told the truth and that I would really try to be more honest in future did, I feel sure, help me towards my present determination: to base my relationship with G-d, and with other people for that matter, on truth, honesty, sincerity, uprightness, authenticity and genuineness to the maximum degree possible, come what may, with a relentless disregard for the consequences, and with a passionate belief that all this matters and is well worthwhile.
  • My Catholic education also satisfied to a considerable extent my personal desire to know the truth about G-d. The Catechism of Christian Doctrine told me the ten things G-d had commanded, the six further things the Church founded by his Son had commanded, and the very many extra things implicitly commanded under these sixteen headings. I grew up, therefore, with the feeling that certain patterns of behaviour were very definitely always displeasing to G-d, and that it was naughty to behave in such ways; other things, however, G-d liked to see done, and those who did them went to heaven to live happily with him for ever and ever.
  • More than this, the catechism provided me with a complete picture of my place in G-d's universe. I knew that he had made me, and I knew why. The Apostles were my teachers in my efforts to come to grips with the mind of Christ, who was G-d made man. The twelve of them had known him personally, and the Apostles' Creed, printed in the catechism, explained what they had believed. The Lord's own prayer, the “Our Father,” was also dissected and interpreted in detail, and so was the “Hail Mary.”
  • At the age of seven I did not know very much about uraban development or industrial science and technology, and yet I already knew, because the catechism told me, that G-d had made the Earth, the sea and the sky, the beasts, the birds, the trees and the flowers, and that these were all very good. If man didn't know how to enjoy the world and be at home in it, it was his own fault, not G-d's, nor even the devil's. There was a devil, I was told, but he could never rob me of my freedom. G-d had seen to that.
  • I don't think it matters very much that the catechism for children as I then understood it when interpreted by my more or less enlightened teachers and guides was inaccurate in many points of detail, or incomplete, or constructed upon the basis of an official system of thought that was ill-adapted to the needs of contemporary man. (The Teaching of the Catholic Church - A New Catechism of Christian Doctrine written by Father Herbert McCabe, OP, was first published in 1985.) The important thing was that it helped me to become familiar with the notion that growing up really meant growing up in the knowledge of G-d.
  • I felt it a great honour when, at the age of eight, I started to serve Mass in the Parish Church. I learned to perform all my new duties with exactness, a sense of decorum, and an utter conviction of the importance and value of what I was doing, even if I sometimes felt tired and restless, or became confused when a bigger altar-boy ducked my head under running water in the sacristy sink. My mother made me a black cassock to wear in the Church together with a white cotta or surplice ornamented with white lace in a “Hail Mary” pattern that she spent several hours crocheting.
  • My father's life also changed about this time. I think it was when I was nine that he started working for the Bolton Co-operative Society, delivering milk from door to door in the Church Road area with a push-cart or dandy. Every school holidays and often at weekends he had me help him make his deliveries. Both my parents had always attached great importance to my progress with primary-school problems in arithmetic, and to my results in the weekly tests in speed and accuracy with figures. My mother was proud of my ability to recite by heart a certain poem exactly as written. Now my father got me to add up for him the number of bottles of milk he had delivered that week, or to work out the amounts owed by different customers. His insistence on precision fostered the growth of my own orientation towards a pattern of living in which I knew objectively what was what in the world, and who I was and where I stood.
  • The behaviour of both my parents impressed on me the conviction that the whole of human life takes place on the brink of disaster, and that every human being must never fail to safeguard the best interests of “Number One,” if he can find out for certain what those best interests are. He must also do to others as he would be done by.
  • Thus, even in the worst of weather, when there was snow and ice on the roads, and it was impossible to use the dandy, my father remained faithful to his task of supplying people with the milk they needed. The fact that the rest of the staff took the day off was not allowed to divert him form a sense of his own responsibility. We used to fasten a rope round one twenty-bottle crate of milk at a time, and trudge shivering through the wind and the snow, with many a fall along the way, to deliver the daily pints. My father saw this work as a labour of love that gave meaning to his life and helped to preserve his feeling of self-respect.
  • Often when I helped my father on his round, there was nothing for me to eat or drink from seven-thirty in the morning until five o'clock in the evening. Sometimes I had to walk around all day in soaking wet clothes, feeling very cold, doing heavy enough work, and not exactly enjoying myself. My home-made clothes were warm in dry weather, but I didn't like them. The couldn't keep my face out of the cold, and the trousers never seemed to fit properly and were not well creased. My bed was spread with old coats and a patchwork quilt. I seldom had a change of bed-sheets and very rarely wore pyjamas. The family bathroom was not a relaxing place, but a draughty room cluttered up with pots of paint and boxes of never-used tools: symbols for me of my father's lack of initiative, his failure to really go out and bring home the bacon.
  • There was also my sister, Edna, to contend with. I was three when she was born on 31 May 1937, and my first words about her were, “Throw her in the ashpit!” I suppose that when she was born I was afraid of losing my mother's attention. I didn't want to be bossed around by two women instead of one. I suspected my mother would use my sister as a means of keeping me away from other possible companions in the neighbourhood. I was sorry Mr Stork had not brought me a baby brother.
  • In the event we were brought up separately, almost as if each of us was an only child. Since my sister's chin remains marked to this day from her having bumped into one of the legs of the kitchen table while I was chasing her with the bread-knife, it is hardly surprising, perhaps, that as children we were seldom left alone together. My mother liked to keep us both under her eye, birds loved but very much caged. Even when we were together in her presence, she didn't want us too close. Thus, she didn't like my looking at my sister in the bath - possibly because if I wasn't having sex with her, she didn't see why I should be free to have it with anyone else.
  • However, neither my mother's vigilance, nor my father's meticulousness, nor my knowledge of the catechism saved me from trouble. Once, when I was about nine, a group of boys who lived in the same street as me, and with whom I was only very rarely allowed to play, let me go with them in a gang to Queen's Park. There they got me to strip naked in the bushes, and then one by one they beat me on my bare backside. I didn't like the humiliation or the pain. At the same time I did find some perverse delight in the shame with which we all ran away furtively through the undergrowth as soon as an apparently irate and possibly interested male adult appeared among the trees. I told my mother what had happened, and my father took me with him back to the park to see where it had all taken place. I resented it when my parents then separated me from non-Catholic companions of my own age in the neighbourhood, and so I became less open with both of them, and, indeed, rather suspicious of my father. After all, he too was not a Catholic.
  • This fact assumed greater importance in my mind on 30 April 1944 when I received the sacrament of Confirmation - by which I was to be made a strong and perfect Christian and a soldier of Jesus Christ - from Bishop Henry Vincent Marshall, the Roman Catholic Bishop of Salford. He had known my parish priest in his student days, and like him he was a rather awe-inspiring Irishman; he came from Kerry. He made me promise to convert at least one person I loved to the Catholic faith before I died. In making this promise, I took it to mean that my father would have to become a Catholic, and that I would have to have a hand in it, but it seemed very difficult and a tough assignment. I would much rather not have had to make that promise, and resented the Bishop's position in the church authorizing him to run my private life for me. I suppose I would have liked to be able to shrug him off as a silly old fool, but I was too weak to take an independent stand against his imposition.
  • My mother didn't like bishops either. There were, in fact, many aspects of official Catholicism that she resented. Above all, she disliked all forms of bowing and scraping. She wanted to be free and independent. Not that she said very much about this. She preferred to remain reticent and determined, just as my father was agreeable and bewildered. I refused to trust myself entirely to either of them, and wanted a life of my own.
  • My parents and I resembled three people standing together in a circle, waiting to see who would be the first to come up with the correct answer to a vitally important riddle. We were spending our period of waiting in laughing at ourselves and at each other, playing games to lessen the strain of life in a vacuum. I suppose I laughed a lot as a boy because I knew that neither of my parents could say anything that I would be able to accept as the answer to this vital question, and because I realized that, so long as I remained silent myself, there was no proving that I was not going to give a completely accurate reply when I eventually voiced my thoughts. I imagine the riddle is best put this way: which comes first, the hen or the egg? This is partly the question: who is the boss, Mummy or her child? I sometimes fancy the first egg is in my mouth, that its shell has cracked, and that the chick is on the point of popping out, its fresh down mixed with blood and bits of egg. To answer this riddle correctly, I don't really need to speak at all. I just need to eat both the first egg and the chick and I shall be the cock of the walk. There is never any point in argument, which is always six of one and half a dozen of the other, the real answer is in experience. That is why my father, too, chose not to speak, but to get on quietly with his job, as well as he could, anyway.
  • How rich was the world of my childhood imagination! I still recall the celluloid duck I floated in the bath, grey wooden battleships I sailed across the table-cloth, a green wooden cannon that shot out match-stalks, small English racing cars, tin soldiers, a clockwork submarine, a German red saloon car, a wooden railway station, my meccano set, a candle-operated speedboat, ludo, dominoes, chess, draughts, lexicon, lotto, snakes and ladders, a toy farm full of animals and fences, a bow and arrows, a revolver with a roll of caps, a pair of handcuffs, a feathered head-dress, a toboggan, all sorts of fireworks, a toy train that moved in a figure eight, a jet-car that looped the loop, a sand-operated toy coalmine, balsa-wood kites and toy aeroplanes, tanks, barrage balloons, golliwogs, pelicans, teddy-bears, pandas, rabbits, toy shops and post-offices, toy ovens and a toy kitchen, a miniature sewing machine, a toy type-writer, yachts, bombers fitted with machine-gun turrets, jig-saw puzzles, sets of cigarette cards, fingerprint outfits, telescopes, stamp collections, a conjuring set, and, in short, a whole world of fantasy under my entire control, until the time came for me to put my toys away!
  • But even my fantasy world suffered some severe jolts because of things that happened publicly in the real world. My toys would be stolen or get lost, and I remember that when I was still quite small, the gramophone on which, on Sunday afternoons, I used to listen to the “Overture to William Tell,” “In a Monastery Garden,” and “Christopher Robin is saying his Prayers” broke down. It was never mended. In the same way, the second time the radio went out of order, it was not repaired.
  • Again, there was that day in 1944 when I was walking past an air-raid shelter in Wellington Street and, acting on a sudden impulse of boyish curiosity, decided to take a look inside. My opening of the door of the shelter disturbed the activities of a number of teen-agers, including two girls, who were having some kind of meeting. A rope was fastened round my neck, and some of the lads held me against the wall, while the rest fastened the other end of the rope to the inside of the open door and got ready to bang it shut. They were all non-Catholics and told me that the time had come for me really to begin to say my prayers. It is hard to remember whether I was mainly afraid of their violence or of my own secret sadism, hatred, and aggression, with which I was brought into contact at that moment. At any rate, while the girls laughed, I screamed, and was eventually released.
  • At that time I used to have a toy pop-gun which fired corks as far as the length of string to which they were attached would allow. This gun could also be used to fire other small objects. A month or two after I had been ridiculed by the girls and almost strangled by the boys in Wellington Street, I was playing in the back street when I noticed the gang-leader sauntering along Board Street. I pointed my toy gun at him, and fired it. Physically there wasn't the slightest chance of my doing him any injury, and both of us knew that, but emotionally I was playing top-dog, because being on my own back doorstep I felt territorially secure. Somehow or other he felt the emotional injury, and he retaliated. He shot me in the eye with his air-pistol, and then pursued me further. I panicked. After closing and barring the back-gate, I went into the house, locked the kitchen door from the inside, and then stooped my head to squint through the keyhole in the kitchen door and on through the latch-hole in the back-gate. I wanted to see if he was still outside. I kept my eye glued to the keyhole for a long time, but still saw nothing. A cold wind blew into my eye, and I got a stiff neck, which has remained with me to this day.
  • On the whole, I managed to smother my feelings pretty well while I was at the elementary school. When I was one of a group of boys dressed in brown crêpe paper chosen to represent Earth in a school play, I made no complaint when the teacher inadvertently drove a safety-pin though the skin on the nape of my neck, and attached the paper to my person in this way. I assumed she knew what she was doing, and stood on stage for the whole performance with the pin firmly in place! I only remember losing my temper at school once, and that was when during the mid-morning break I kicked another lad with my clogged foot. Most of my energies I used in giving all my attention to speed and accuracy in arithmetic, and to solving questions in I.Q. tests. I passed the scholarship examination easily.
  • In September 1945, then, I became a day-pupil at Thornleigh Salesian College, Sharples Park, Bolton, a Roman Catholic direct grant grammar school. I was a scholar there for seven years, never taking part in sports, occupying an above average but never top position in class, and taking an increasing interest in all the religious aspects of college life.
  • During my seven years in college I learned how to serve a High Mass as well as an ordinary or Low Mass, the High Mass being in those days typically one that simultaneously involved three priests, with a larger consumption of candles, vestments, time and holy smoke than the Low variety. A High Mass was always accompanied by a special sacred music called Gregorian Chant, and I also learned to sing this music. In addition to this, I read most of G. K. Chesterton and a lot of Belloc and was glad to feel their wits were sharper and, of course, more honest than those of the non-Catholic H. G. Wells and G. B. Shaw. The big division in the world, as far as I was concerned, was not that between man and woman, or black and white, but between Catholic and non-Catholic. I was glad G-d was on my Catholic side, and moderately sorry that my father had backed a loser.
  • Meanwhile, I studied Latin, so as to be able to take part more closely in Catholic worship. I joined and eventually became President of a Conference of the Society of Saint Vincent de Paul, established to visit the poor, the elderly and the sick, and to bring them a word of spiritual consolation. It was an interesting life, and a very satisfying ego-trip. At Christmas-time I accompanied the Parish Priest in his car as he went round to distribute the prizes to winners in the Xmas raffle. Every Sunday I took up the outdoor collection from about sixty houses in the Parish. Every three months I collected money for the College Chapel building-fund from the homes of parents of pupils and past-pupils, and was regarded as one of the best collectors the school had had. In this way the details of practical Catholicism filled my days, and I did not have time to brood too much over my loneliness.
  • During this time of adolescence my growth in intimacy with G-d - now as loving and kind, now as terrible and exacting, and always as majestic and powerful - was fostered by the enriching experience of three-day annual retreats held in the College. These were the occasion for prolonged meditation on goodness and evil, heaven and hell, death and the judgment of G-d. During these three days each year I used to examine my conscience more clearly than ever, and to make a particularly exact confession with a view not only to saving my skin from the eternal flames but also to doing my bit for the general betterment of mankind's spiritual health.
  • I did not always find it easy to admit my faults to the priest and to make a clean breast of it, but it paid handsome dividends. I was consoled by the Catholic doctrine of original sin, which saved me from feeling completely isolated in my wickedness. Basically we were all in the same boat together, and just as we could help to pull each other under, so we could also help each other to pull through. The better I became as a person, the more abundantly G-d would give his grace to other people, and, in consequence, the less likelihood there was of their being unkind to me.
  • During these years my ideas about learning the objective truth about G-d's world became more sophisticated. On the one hand, I found the truths of religion which were really certain and definite. On the other hand, there were the provisional theories and hypotheses of scientists, the current interpretations of history, the changing fashions in dress, the revolutions in industry, the fluctuations of war and peace. In public life the reign of G-d was secret and hidden, and I had no lasting or abiding city in any human institution.
  • While I was at Thornleigh, my father was plodding on with his job on the milk round, but no longer had to push a dandy. His horse, Drummer, which he believed would keep him company in heaven, was pulling his milk-cart round Chalfont Street and Back o' th' Bank. If there was snow and ice on the roads, my father fitted chains on to the wheels of his cart, and fitted special screws into Drummer's hooves, to save it from falling. He never gave up his job because of bad weather conditions.
  • When he came home after delivering milk in the pouring rain, his wet clothes were all over the place, and the smell of sour milk and horse manure filled the house. I believe this may have been his unconscious protest at his realization that mother was the real boss in the home, that her activity determined much of the daily routine, as she gave us her domineering service - meals are ready now, I've tidied this room, I've ironed these clothes, fed you at my breast, done everything for you, don't you dare complain!
  • Mother's slavery to the rest of us was really self-punishment for her guilt at being bossy and domineering. I can appreciate in retrospect how my father must have resented this right from the earliest days of their marriage, and found a way of expressing his feelings. As well as being a baker of bread and cakes, my mother was especially fond of potato pies. Father, too, had liked meat-and-potato pies, and was quite fat. He also liked his pint of beer. But shortly after their marriage he had cut his weight down from fourteen to nine stone, and he kept it at that for the rest of his life. He gave up all alcohol and became a semi-vegetarian. He excluded all boiled potatoes from the menu because he thought they were starchy, and ate chips instead because he enjoyed them. We never had meat or cabbage to eat, but he allowed bacon, occasional cauliflowers, lots of fruits, and home-made brown bread, cakes, honey and cheese. For breakfast he liked to have crunch, a sort of cake made out of equal quantities of oats, margarine and brown sugar. He insisted that everything we ate ought to be chewed sixty times, and since he didn't allow my sister or myself to talk at table, our meals took place almost in complete silence.
  • My father preferred silence. In the evenings he sat quietly in front of the table near the fire in the front room, smoking his pipe and entering up in ink the delivery books he had filled in only in pencil during the day, while he was out on his milk-round. He wrote very beautifully with what, from a practical point of view, was quite superfluous care. He thought it was a fault not to get the dot straight over the letter “i” or the stroke not quite evenly through a letter “t.”
  • I took this to be among the reasons why my father seldom wrote a letter to me whenever I was away from home, but left letter-writing to my mother. He wasn't good at dealing with people, though he was really affectionate towards them and always ready, even too ready, to be of service. By not writing letters he avoided having to give himself away, even to himself. On the other hand, he kept neatly filed away throughout his life bills and receipts going back over forty years, perhaps as a comforting reminder that he really did know how to cope with routine problems quite well. Even my mother had not to upset the order of his special drawer in the large black sideboard, or dresser.
  • In his work at Kershaw's mill and later with the Co-op, my father had to obey and make himself small. At home he needed to keep up at least some pretence of being the boss, and he sought to enhance his stature by keeping his distance. By reserving the use of that special drawer in the front room to himself, he kept his private life an unshared secret. He did love my mother, and he was also afraid of her.
  • I suppose he also resented her interest in her children. In saying that the bread she had made needed chewing sixty times, he was, I suspect, making it plain that he found it stale, insipid, and hard to digest. The smell of sour milk he brought into the house was, I feel, some sort of complaint about my mother's breasts. Like the horse with blinkers on its eyes that pulled his milk-float, father resented his need to repress his wider interests, and to focus all his attention on his immediate job.
  • This partly explains his insistence on the value of silence. He felt that if he wasn't free to communicate in his own house, then none of the family should be allowed to communicate either.
  • My mother, however, struggled valiantly to make up for my father's deficiencies. She talked by her behaviour. Although he didn't approve of mashed potatoes, she made sure they, at least, were available when we wanted them. She rarely settled down during meals, but busied herself in her own world, hovering between the pans on the stove, the tea on the hob, and our cups and plates.
  • Even while I was at Thornleigh, it was my mother who washed me, cleaned my shoes for me, made all my clothes except my school uniform, and, until I was about fourteen years old, always bathed and dried me.
  • I resented this dependence on my mother, but found little comfort in my occasional escapes into the company of local lads. When I was twelve, for instance, I went for a ramble to Barrow Bridge with the boys who had previously humiliated me in Queen's Park. At Barrow Bridge they floated me in an empty dustbin across a river and capsized it in mid-stream, so that I got all wet. After demonstrating their own masculinity in this way, and laughing at the mess I was in, they pretended to be helpful by lighting a fire for me to dry my clothes, while I sat on the ground wearing a belt and a few tufts of grass. The people on the opposite bank looked at me with an interest I did not welcome. I resented my own impotence, and the fire the gang lit expressed my feelings of frustration, my jealousy, my desire for revenge.
  • I was envious of other lads having well-cut clothes, nice swimming trunks, a good physique, and the ability to get on well with each other and with girls. Although I pretended to pay no heed to such boys, I took a quiet interest when they talked about petting girls, shaped their own stomachs from the navel down like one long vagina, or provoked an ejaculation inside their swimming trunks.
  • At times I felt the urge to spend the summer naked on the hillside, or to pass the hours caressing the buttocks and thighs of a lovely, pale-skinned boy whose appearance in swimming trunks during school outings to the baths I very much admired. Such urges I suppressed. I did, it is true, once go for a swim in the all-together near the Jumbles. However, even on that occasion I was afraid of someone coming up unexpectedly, gaining a bad impression of me, rebuking me, stealing my clothing, or, perhaps, girls who would quickly reveal how incomplete and shallow my so-called manhood was!
  • I was under my mother's control. Even when I was thirteen, as well as putting me to bed and getting me up in the morning, sitting me on her knee, and having me comb her hair or scratch her back, she would bath me completely. In drying me afterwards, she went to work from behind with the towel, and then passed it round to me for me to dry my own genitals, inviting me to finish off by myself.
  • This aspect of my mother's relationship with me at that time was, I suppose, an indirect complaint about my father, and about his failure to play his rôle as father and husband in society. She saw him escaping into the dream world of his work, and didn't like being left to cope alone. She hoped I would give her at least companionship.
  • On the other hand, even if my father had his own secret longing for a wife who was a full woman and not just a breast, he remained faithful to what he saw as his family obligations. Only one other woman entered his life, a Mrs Gaskell who lived in Sutcliffe Street and gave him a cup of tea when he was halfway through his daily milk-round. Nothing improper ever passed between them, but even this very distant approach to a partial break-away from Mother's apron-strings left him with a certain sense of guilt.
  • My father gave me no help at all with my sexual difficulties. Indeed, his only attempt to enlighten me on sex consisted in his calling me, brusquely and without warning, to the bathroom, where he stood naked. I ran away downstairs at once, and refused to talk to him. I was unwilling to accept my manhood as a personal responsibility, and wanted either to have it cared for by a real man, or to nurse my problem alone, or to hand it over to my mother's keeping.
  • However, like my father, I found home-fare hard to stomach. Unlike my parents and my sister, I never drank tea at home, but kept to orange juice, so that there is a sense in which I remained a baby. During my holidays from Thornleigh I would spend a long time in church to keep my mother waiting, and I used to go almost without food in Lent so as to distress her. I was showing her what the Catholicism she had given me was making me suffer, and reminding her that her own behaviour and choice of husband were not consistent with her protestation of belief in the claims of the Roman Catholic Church. For so long as my parents were separated in religion and remained emotionally estranged from each other, my own emotional development was in some sense blocked, and my religion seemed a legalistic affair devoid of human affection and warmth, though not without pageantry and colour.
  • Because, I suppose, I sensed a lack of something in my father, I attacked him as best I could in the language I knew, giving him an occasional angry talking-to on the need for him to become a Catholic as the only escape from the peril of eternal damnation.
  • Such outbursts of temper did little to relieve my own sense of frustration. Because I wanted to be free and self-sufficient, I studied hard and escaped into the fantasy world of books. I told myself that I had no time or energy to spare for sex, because unless I put everything I had into my studies, I would never make it. In reality, of course, I knew that study by itself could not provide the whole answer.
  • This was brought home to me in High Street baths when I was about sixteen and an adult tried to grab hold of my penis. When he complained at my resistance, I told him to leave me with my mother, in effect, claiming that I couldn't let him have his way because I was a Roman Catholic. He assured me that I was just a smug, escapist hypocrite, and said that every time a woman bares her paps, the male penis pops up, Pope or no Pope. I took flight into an argument about the theology of Adam and Eve. Since then I have often prayed for him, and pondered over the meaning of our encounter.
  • Indeed, K. G. Rey, in his study Das Mutterbild des Priesters (Einsiedeln, Benziger, 1969), notes that from the point of view of social psychology human growth is largely the result of questioning. Thus, a boy feels the need to reach a personal decision when something presents itself to him as ambivalent, insecure and, therefore, questionable. He is, on the other hand, largely indifferent at first to those qualities which his parents have in common. He is interested in differences.
  • According to Rey, the first step in the development of a priestly vocation is very often the boy's identifying himself with the attitude of a religiously minded mother, and his subsequently making her particular form of piety his own. When the mother is hostile to religion, a priestly vocation is improbable. On the other hand, when the mother is religiously inclined, the father's relative indifference or even hostility to religion will, on the whole, increase the chances of the boy's feeling drawn towards the priesthood.
  • It is found that this is even more the case when the boy's relationship with his father is somehow inadequate so that, as far as he is concerned at least, there is no strong consistent father-figure for him to look up to. Lack of a happy intimacy with the father, especially when linked with marriage problems and a poor family atmosphere occasioned by the mother's being mentally disturbed or unsuitably employed, easily induces in the boy psychic disorders, bed-wetting, anxiety states, and flight from home. The boarding-school type of seminary caters for this need, and so encourages emotionally disturbed boys to go on for the priesthood without any effort to solve their problems.
  • Rey recognizes that most if not all priests are very much influenced by their mothers, but not always to their advantage. A good mother wants her son to be a complete man, encourages him to face the unrest of the world, to accept the challenge of life, to busy himself with the practical, the political, and the seemingly impersonal problems of society. The positive influence of a priest's mother in his life is that of helping him face the general hardships of life as well as the particular difficulties of his special calling. Some mothers, however, are both rejecting and over-protective in an inconsistent way. A negative maternal influence provokes a crisis of vocation and disturbs the son's personality growth.
  • The boy with a defective image of his parents is likely to lack a normal capacity for friendship with girls. His social education is lacking or, at least, a very difficult undertaking, and he may fail to develop an adequate sense of personal independence and responsibility. It is a very definite, although an unfortunate, fact that seminary life has sometimes been organized in such a way as to encourage the perpetuation and enlargement of these undesirable characteristics.
  • Since the ideal image of the priest seems, in general, to have been that of the religious father-substitute, Rey feels that this sort of maternally orientated bias and general imbalance among priests and candidates for the priesthood threatens not only their own personal interior life, but also the effectiveness of their pastoral ministry in the present institutional structures. This may be a point in favour of some priests being married, and of candidates being selected and prepared along very different lines from those followed in the past.
  • Because the mother obviously occupies an important place in the early life of any average child, Rey concedes that it would be quite naïve to suppose without evidence that the mother-complex is uniquely significant for our understanding of the celibate priesthood, or that it would not also shed light on the way of life of persons involved in quite different walks of life.
  • He concludes that ideally the celibate priest will derive from the strong primary bond with his mother a capacity to face the challenge of life without too much anxiety. He will know solitude, but not loneliness. His course will resemble neither the cloudy flight of the astronaut nor the underwater retreat of the submarine navigator, but the steady progress of the yachtsman whose boat is at home in the midst of the waters of life while its sails are unfurled in the air and directed by heavenly inspiration.
  • I have mentioned Rey's investigations into the mother-complex of Catholic priests because I find them interesting and feel they deserve to be more widely known. They shed light on my own situation in life, but they also miss its paradoxical complexity, since my mother was Catholic, while my father was more deeply religious.
  • Just as I used reading as a comfort in times of loneliness and as a source of ammunition with which to keep people at a distance, so I had recourse to prayer as a refuge of peace from the conflicts of human communications within and without the family, and hoped that a solidly intellectual education would shelter me from the threat of sexual disaster.
  • One morning in 1947, after I had served his Mass upstairs in the barn of the Chadbury fruit-farm, which housed the school-camp, my headmaster, Father John Wiseman, asked me whether I had ever thought of becoming a priest. I said I would think it over. later that day, as I was cycling along the road to Evesham, I told myself that if, when I reached the post-box near the junction, the Sun was to one side of a certain tree, I would become a priest, while if it was to the other side, I would not. And so, I suppose, the matter was decided. I forgot this incident soon enough, and continued with life as a school-boy at Thornleigh until I was eighteen, but already a decision had been made.


  • THE FORGING OF A PRIEST
  • I have called this chapter “The Forging of a Priest” for three reasons. Because like the lucky horse-shoe forged with fire on the anvil in the smithy I have been hammered into a priestly sort of person in every part of my being; because like my father's faithful horse Drummer, I have struggled to forge ahead in life despite any personal hardships and difficulties; and because like the paper-and-cardboard lucky horseshoe found on the top of wedding-cakes my priesthood at the human level has too often been only a good imitation, a forgery, and not always the genuine article.
  • In talking about my past, I am not speaking about other priests' experience of life. That I assume to have been vastly different from my own. Many priests have lived longer, and all have had their private dreams, their shared ideals, their particular achievements and frustrations. I am speaking for myself alone.
  • The summer of 1952 brought with it the need for me to find a new way of occupying my time. My schooldays were over. My boyhood Catholic pastimes had had their day. I could no longer evade the problems of my emotional reality in the old familiar ways. What actually happened was that I left home and went for one year to the Salesian novitiate at Burwash in Sussex. In this way I was able to put a safe distance between me and my parents, while living in a way that was the natural development and continuation of all that had gone before.
  • I spent the period from 27 August 1952 until 12 September 1953 learning all the details of the Salesian way of life. How to set and serve at table. The rules of etiquette, as described in a manual based on Christian principles and on Cardinal Newman's ideal of a gentleman. How to prepare and cook meat and vegetables and how to make a dessert. How to keep a church and church furnishings and vestments in order. I learned off by heart the 203 articles of the Salesian rules or Constitutions, studied Italian because it was the language of the founder of the Order, Saint John Bosco, brought my own English pronunciation more into line with standard English, so as to be a citizen of the world and not just a local nobody, and developed greater skills in labelling and enumerating my own various ‘good’ and ‘bad’ acts of gluttony, self-sacrifice, disobedience, patience, joy, forgiveness, cowardice, and so forth.
  • Saint Joseph's novitiate house was situated in a deep valley between Burwash village and Stonegate, and comprised a beautiful, red-brick, soaring Church, in which the well-known author Monsignor Benson is said to have received the grace of conversion to the Catholic faith, and the adjoining converted boys' prep-school. I and my twenty-six fellow novices divided our time between prayer, instruction, manual work, and recreation. Silence was obligatory from 9.00 p.m. until 8.15 a.m., and at all times when we were engaged in study or in manual work indoors. We were also forbidden to speak in the refectory prior to the signal for conversation, and on one day each month had to preserve silence for most of the day. All this was meant to make it easier for us to cultivate a spirit of prayer and consider carefully the nature of our religious vocation.
  • Our novice-master was Father James Simonetti, SDB, an Italian priest who was novice-master for fifty-four years, a much longer period in office than any other master of novices in the two thousand years' history of the Roman Catholic Church. It was his duty to preside over our spiritual development and to make us familiar with the Salesian way of life.
  • The Salesians are a Roman Catholic religious order started by Saint John Bosco, a Piedmontese priest, more than a hundred years ago. John Bosco was born on 16 August 1815 in a small hamlet called Becchi, near Turin. When he was nine years old he had a dream, which Father Simonetti loved to tell us about in Don Bosco's own words:
  • “It seemed to me that I was near our house in a spacious courtyard. A group of children were enjoying themselves in it. Some laughed, others played, many blasphemed. When I heard these blasphemies, I at once flew into the middle of them. At that moment there appeared to me a majestic man, in the prime of life and magnificently clad. A white cloak enfolded him and his face shone so brightly that I could not look at it. He called me by my name and asked me to put myself at the head of these children. Then he added: ‘It is not by blows, but by gentleness and love that you will make friends. Therefore begin at once to instruct them about the ugliness of sin and the excellence of virtue.’
  • I was confused and frightened, and pointed out that I was only a poor ignorant lad, unable to talk about religion to these youngsters.
  • Then the urchins, stopping their quarrelling, shouting and blaspheming, all gathered round the man who was speaking. Taking no notice of what he said to me, I added: ‘But who are you to ask me to do the impossible?’
  • ‘It is just because these things seem impossible to you that you must make them possible by learning from others and acquiring the knowledge you need.’
  • ‘Where and by what means can I acquire this knowledge?’
  • ‘I shall give you a mistress who will make you obtain this wisdom, without whom all wisdom becomes folly.’
  • ‘But who are you to talk to me in this way?’
  • ‘I am the son of her to whom your mother has taught you to pray three times a day.’
  • ‘My mother also told me not to mix with people I don't know without her approval. So tell me your name.’
  • ‘Ask your mother what my name is.’
  • At that moment I saw beside him a lady of majestic aspect, clad in a garment of such brilliance that it might have been covered with stars. Perceiving that I was becoming more and more embarrassed by this conversation, she signalled me to approach and took me kindly by the hand. ‘Look,’ she said.
  • I looked and I saw that all the children had run away. In their place I saw a multitude of goats, cats, dogs, bears and all sorts of animals.
  • ‘That is your field of activity,’ she said. ‘That is where you must work; practise humility, courage and firmness. And you must repeat in the midst of my children what is going to happen to these animals.’
  • Then I looked away from her and saw the same number of harmless lambs instead of those terrifying beasts. They gambolled on all sides and ran about bleating as if to welcome the man and the woman. At this moment, still dreaming, I began to cry and asked if they would be good enough to talk to me in a way I could understand, for I understood nothing of all that.
  • Then she put her hand on my head and said, ‘You will understand all that in due course.’ With these last words, there was a loud noise that woke me up and everything disappeared.”
  •  
  • The novice-master told us that this dream had been realized by Don Bosco's founding of the Salesian Congregation and of the Institute of the Daughters of Mary, Help of Christians, and by the subsequent phenomenal expansion of both these religious orders for the education of the young.
  • John Bosco was ordained a priest, and assumed the title Don Bosco on 5 June 1841. He began his special work for the education of young Christians on December 8 the same year. On that day he met an orphan boy, Bartholomew Garelli, and taught him the catechism within the context of a relationship of mutual friendship. This was new to the boy, and he spoke of John Bosco to others. By 1853 things had so far developed that John Bosco opened his own workshop to teach young lads a trade and started to publish his own magazine, called Catholic Readings, to provide them with reading matter they could understand. On 18 December 1859 he founded the Salesian Congregation in order to extend and perpetuate his work for the young. He obtained Vatican support for this project, although not all at once and not without difficulty. Salesians were allowed to make their first public vows on 14 May 1862, a Papal decree of approval was issued on 1 July 1869, and the Salesian rule of life was definitively approved by the Holy See on 13 April 1874. Meanwhile, the work of expansion had continued. The first Salesian house had grown up around the original workshops in the Valdocco quarter of Turin. A second house was opened at Mirabello in 1863. On 9 June 1868 came the consecration of the Salesian mother-church, a huge basilica dedicated to Mary, Help of Christians (mcpake.jpg). During this time Don Bosco, in collaboration with another Piedmontese Saint, Maria Domenica Mazzarello, also founded the Institute of the Daughters of Mary, Help of Christians, a companion order of nuns to do for girls what the Salesians were doing for boys. At that time, co-education still lay in the future, and even today there is no uni-sex Roman Catholic religious order.
  • Having started two religious orders in an age of intense anti-clericalism, and that with the positive encouragement of such architects of the Risorgimento as Cavour and Rattazzi, Don Bosco threw all his energies into the work of expansion. He linked his past pupils together and held their first reunion in Valdocco on 24 June 1870. On 9 November 1875 he opened a Salesian house at Nice in France. Two days later he witnessed the departure of the first group of Salesian missionaries for South America. He organised his benefactors into the Papally approved Pious Union of Salesian Co-operators with a Brief of Pius IX of 9 May 1876. The first plenary assembly or General Chapter of the Salesians to discuss overall problems of the Congregation was held from 5 September to 5 October 1877. The first departure of Salesian Sisters for the South American missions took place that November. The monthly periodical The Salesian Bulletin appeared for the first time in January 1878, a development out of the Catholic Book-lover which Don Bosco had been publishing since 1875. In 1879 the Saint sent missionaries to the unexplored regions of Patagonia. In 1884 he secured from the Holy See for the Salesians very many favours and privileges enjoyed by some of the older religious orders, such as to make them relatively independent of the authority of local bishops and more free to develop their own spirit. When John Bosco died on 31 January 1888, there were 774 Salesians working in 57 different centres, and 313 Salesian Sisters in 50 centres.
  • On 11 February 1888 Father Michael Rua, his one-time pupil, was elected to succeed Don Bosco as Superior General or Rector Major of the Salesians (rinaldi.jpg). When he died in 1910 the Salesians numbered 4,001, of whom 303 were missionaries. The Salesians went to Oran in North Africa in 1891. A Congress of Salesian Co-operators was held in Bologna in 1895, and on November 6 that year the Salesian Bishop Luigi Lasagna was martyred in Brazil. The entry of the Salesians into Paraguay in 1896 signalled their effective presence in all the countries of South America. In 1897 they established their first houses in the United States, in San Francisco, while 1898 saw the beginning of the publication of the twenty volumes of the Biographical Memoirs of Father John Bosco, completed in 1948, by J.-B. Lemoyne (vols. I-IX), A. Amadei (vol. X), E. Ceria (vols. XI-XIX) and E. Foglio (Index volume), a work of which a complete English translation has been published in the United States. Cfr FRANCIS DESRAMAUT, "The methods adopted by the authors of the Memorie Biografiche", in PATRICK EGAN & MARIO MIDALI, editors, Don Bosco's Place in History (Roma: Libreria Ateneo Salesiano, 1993, pp. 39-68) for valuable remarks about the true meaning of "this Salesian bible... The problems posed are at times as complex as those of the synoptic gospels."
  • When the Congress of Salesian Co-operators was held in Buenos Aires in 1900, there had been 2,723 Salesians (205 of them missionaries) working in 248 centres. Their tenth General Chapter was held in 1904. They established their first house in Macao in 1906, and their first house in Tanjore the same year. On April 1 of that year, which also saw the codification of the Salesian Regulations, the Daughters of Mary, Help of Christians secured from the Holy See new Constitutions making them fully autonomous.
  • On 16 August 1910 another of Don Bosco's pupils, Paul Albera, succeeded Michael Rua as Rector Major. He died in October 1921 and was succeeded by Philip Rinaldi on 24 May 1922, after whose death in December 1951 Peter Ricaldone became Rector Major on 17 May 1932, holding office until November 1951. His successor, Renato Ziggiotti, elected 1 August 1952, became Superior General just before I commenced my noviciate at Burwash.
  • Saint John Bosco himself was declared Venerable in 1907, beatified in 1929, and made a canonized saint on 1 April 1934, shortly before I was born. From 8 to 10 September 1911 the first international Congress of Salesian Past Pupils was held in Turin. On November 12 that year the Salesians started their work in Katanga. John Cagliero became the first Salesian Cardinal on 6 December 1915, the year of the Salesian Co-operators' Congress in São Paulo. On 19 June 1917 Salesian Rector Majors were empowered henceforth to function as Apostolic Delegates to the Salesian Sisters, a faculty which increased the latter's autonomy with respect to the local bishops. The official Acts of the Superior Council of the Salesians began publication in 1920. The Salesians went to Australia in 1922, and then to Japan in 1925. Their Regulations were revised in 1924. In 1926 there were 7,156 Salesians and 5,392 Salesian Sisters with a total of 1,158 foundations, including 28 missions with 858 Salesians and 405 Salesian Sisters.
  • Many Salesians were massacred or imprisoned in the Spanish Civil War which began in 1936; others suffered during the Nazi persecution in Poland in 1939. One Polish Salesian, for instance, Joseph Kowalski, died a heroic death in Auschwitz in 1941. Two Salesian houses in Pekin were occupied by the Communists in 1948. In 1950 three hundred Czechoslovakian Salesians were interned, while 1951 brought the gradual paralysis of the Salesian work in Communist China. Mgr Arduino, the Salesian Bishop of Shiu-Chow, was arrested, and, throughout the world, about 1,900 Salesians were deported, exiled or imprisoned. A young Salesian student for the priesthood, Peter Yeh, died in prison in June 1952, and the presence in Burwash during my noviciate of a refugee Italian missionary and a Chinese priest whom the Communist authorities had wished to appoint Minister of Education made the disappearance from Communist China of the Salesian work by 1954 seem a very real and especially tragic event. It brought home to me the Salesians' degree of involvement in the passion and death of Jesus Christ for the salvation of mankind.
  • It was heartening to know that the Salesians were still expanding. By 1940 there were 12,055 Salesians with 851 foundations. In 1950 there were 14,754 Salesians with 1,091 houses, and 12,437 Salesian Sisters with 1,046 houses. The first three Faculties of the Pontifical Salesian University had been approved on 3 May 1940, and its Higher Institute of Education had been established on 2 July 1940. In September 1952, as I was starting my noviciate, Pius XII in a special allocution was providing detailed guide-lines for the renewal of the spirit of the Union of Salesian Co-operators.
  • In Britain, too, there was growth. The Salesians already had their novitiate at Burwash, the Provincial house in Battersea, grammar-schools in Battersea, Chertsey, Farnborough, Cowley and Bolton, an unused earlier novitiate house in Beckford in course of redevelopment, a trade-and-agriculture school in Blaisdon, and centres in Ireland at Pallaskenry and Warrenstown. Father Hall, the new Provincial, established an approved school at Aberdour in Scotland, opened a new Salesian centre in Dublin, and set up a House of Philosophy near Bollington in Cheshire. Existing works were also undergoing considerable transformation and expansion. I was very much impressed by the concrete reality of the Salesian story.
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  • Because my mother never attended a secondary school, she was never educated out of her primitive appreciation of symbolic language by a premature imposition of rationalistic speech-patterns, and my own mode of being and feeling owes a great deal to her influence. She would rejoice in the sight of black cats, avoid walking under ladders, look carefully at tea-leaves, and touch wood if misfortune was mentioned in a conversation. She loved fairy stories and ancient myths. She was at home in the woods and the fields, and in love with the flowers and the sunshine. Little wonder, then, that I enjoyed the country air of Burwash, and was enthralled by the recital of Don Bosco's first dream and by the novice-master's explanation of how it had all come true.
  • As we grow up, we learn to distinguish between fact and fiction, history and legend, mystery and myth, the real and the imaginary. Many people conclude that the true assessment of the fictitious, the legendary, the mythical and the imaginary is that their only reality is that of a bright idea inside someone's head. It is sometimes inferred from this that the true account of the factual, the historical, the mysterious and the real is, on the other hand, that they enjoy a certain reality quite independently of a bright idea in anyone's head.
  • But this is a gratuitous and unwarranted assumption. By definition, all man's experience is man's experience - no more, no less. We cannot get outside our own thoughts and feelings. Considered psychologically, the religious life is an illusion created by man; in other words, it is a dream. Often enough, the religious dream is motivated by a desire to escape the responsibilities of life.
  • It was partly because I had felt myself to be sexually and emotionally out of order, and unable to shoot any arrows of love into Eve's temptingly sweet apple, that I ran away from home to hide in the monastery garden of Burwash, and to say prayers there, making believe I was on terms of intimacy with a very special and important person, G-d himself! My religious observance, meditation, Holy Mass and other prayers were, among other things (because I have never doubted their intrinsic value), a compensation for my continuing sense of sexual frustration.
  • On the other hand, of course, those who dream of human self-sufficiency are often enough motivated by a desire to evade the task of justifying their own moral choices in the light of the demands of Unconditional Truth.
  • It is obvious enough that the notion of G-d was for the Old Testament Jews a psychological projection to guarantee the meaning of the Exodus event. It is equally obvious that John Bosco's and my own Catholic belief in the supernatural, in the sacramental presence of Jesus Christ in the cosmos, and, in a special way, in the Holy Eucharist, is a psychological projection that makes Christian living meaningful.
  • As long as, and only so long as, we agree to behave and speak in our Western-educated way, we know the objective truth, relatively to ourselves: that the world of promise and anxiety opened up for us by the contemporary sophisticated media of communication is real. Outside this objective experience, nothing has any meaning.
  • As long as, and only so long as, atheist humanists regard religious belief not just as a psychological projection, which it certainly is, but as being in addition a belief without any Absolute trans-cosmic and trans-human content, they will know the objective truth, relatively to them: that the world of interests and challenges opened up for them by their experimental method of living is real. They will have to try the experiment of death before they can find out whether or not G-d exists.
  • Equally, so long as, and only so long as, Christians, strengthened by divine grace, hold on to their belief that their own particular psychological projection of G-d happens to have as its metaphysical ground Absolute Joy, they will not know, but they may believe and hope, that the world which is for the time being the playground of their dreams and projects, and of the alternative dreams and projects of others, is the prelude to better things. And this hope may so remove some of their human anxieties, as to allow them to trust other people more, instead of experimenting with them or trying to manipulate them.
  • Saint John Bosco, like Abraham and so many others before him, though it sometimes seemed his hope could not be fulfilled, hoped and believed, and through doing so he did become the father of many nations, exactly as he had been promised.
  • With President John F. Kennedy he might have said: “I do not shrink from responsibility, I welcome it. Some people see things and say ‘Why?’ but I dream things that never were and I say ‘Why not?’ ”
  • His quest, like Don Quixote's, was to dream the impossible dream, to fight the unbeatable foe, to bear with unbearable sorrow, to run where the brave dare not go, to right the unrightable wrong. He knew he was only tilting at windmills, and felt in his bones that no dream was impossible, no foe unbeatable, no sorrow udnbearable. There was no wrong that could not be set right, no place where he could not go. He was not prepared to admit that the sky was the limit, nor that any star was beyond his reach. He believed human beings could always be better far than they are. Hence, he was the greatest miracle-worker of the nineteenth century.
  • More than his phenomenal organizing ability, it was the charismatic element in Saint John Bosco that attracted me to the Salesians. As Father Simonetti talked about him, Don Bosco's view of life seemed even better than that of any circus clown. As well as being a priest, a saint, and a dreamer of dreams, he was a teller of fascinating stories. He was full of jokes, a swift runner, an agile climber, and as strong as an ox. He could crack a walnut between his thumb and his first finger. He could walk along a tightrope, balance on his head, and hold a stick on the end of his nose. Later in his life he gave signs of his miraculous powers, predicting future events, describing distant places, being in two places at once, multiplying loaves of bread, or nuts, or the consecrated hosts in the ciborium for the communion of his boys, calling a dead person back to life. There were also stories of his struggles with the powers of darkness, and of the hardly less terrifying attempts on his life by his political, social or religious opponents. There were, too, the efforts of his bewildered friends to have him certified insane on account of his bold behaviour, a fact from which I myself have sometimes needed to draw comfort. As a boy of nineteen I heard and believed all these things about John Bosco, and this strengthened my desire to become a Salesian.
  • Some may say that dreams are built up out of everyday events, and yet I prefer to see everyday events as the projection of some of the possibilities suggested by a small selection of our dreams. I agree with Raymond de Becker that “the future seems to call for an art in which the dream will no longer be considered as subordinate and accessory to the real, but as its double, its transparency and its depth. Dream experience must of necessity find its outlet in an art capable of expressing the relativity of daily life, and this relativity has no need of fantastic accessories to be perceived. The real is fantastic in itself; that is the ultimate vision of the dreamer.” (Raymond de Becker, The Understanding of Dreams, London: Allen & Unwin 1968.)
  • The Catholic tradition has always acknowledged the need for both reason and imagination. Jesus Christ himself spoke in parables and lived a simple life with his apostles in close contact with nature. Saint Benedict, the father of Western Monasticism and, we might say, of Europe, established the traditions of the religious life within the matrix of a much more sophisticated culture in such a way as to foster the growth of both understanding and feeling, combining interest in agriculture with the pursuit of the fine arts, and liturgical other-worldliness with diplomatic finesse. His humanism was authentic, and I was immediately drawn when Father Simonetti proposed him to us as a model.
  • The novice-master laid even more stress on the spirit of Saint Francis of Sales, who both in his life and in his writings - his Letters, his Spiritual Conferences, his Introduction to the Devout Life and his Treatise on the Love of God - had inculcated a style of living that identified the love of God with the fully human love of one's fellow-men. We learned that the Salesians were called after this Doctor of the Church and gentle Bishop of Geneva.
  • John Bosco's considerable, if not entirely successful, attempt to break away from nineteenth-century Piedmontese traditions of Jansenism was inspired very largely by the example of Francis of Sales, and also by the gentle spirit of Saints Philip Neri and Vincent de Paul, as well as by his own meditations on the gospel. Don Bosco's many dreams, and not only his first one, made a notable contribution towards the realization of his lifetime projects, helping him to seek out, encourage and organize his own particular Christian and social vocation, which marks him out as one of the most effective social workers of the nineteenth century in Italy. His recounting of his dreams in detail to others shows his appreciation of the fact that a dream, like a picture, contains its own interpretation, and can portray instantly what a book might fail to say in even a hundred pages.
  • Although John Bosco never quite escaped the influence of the patriarchal model of the family, he made notable contributions towards the emergence of more mature forms of interpersonal relationships. As a student for the priesthood he founded a society for mutual help called the Company of Joy to bring the students together more. As a priest he encouraged the boys in his schools to join in Sodalities or free associations for mutual encouragement and participation in the general life of the school community, including the decision-making process itself. With the passage of time these Sodalities had dwindled in importance to little more than groups of religiously-minded lads who voluntarily listened to a supplementary mid-week sermon given by their spiritual director.
  • When I was a novice in Burwash, Father T. W. Hall, SDB, the then Salesian Provincial Superior of the Anglo-Irish Province, was doing his best to promote a revival of the original concept of the Salesian Sodality. We had three Sodalities in the novitiate-house, and each novice was a member of one of them. Meetings were held weekly for discussion of the novice-master's teachings, especially with a view to finding ways of putting them into practice more personally and effectively. We also formed groups of two and three to criticize each other constructively, and to help ourselves grow in the practice of religious perfection. In this way I learned to close doors quietly, to genuflect with a straight back, to make the sign of the cross more elegantly, and not to gurgle over my soup. Even more than the novice-master, who had a patriarchal turn of mind and liked his own way, the Provincial emphasized that the Salesian Congregation - with its world-wide network of schools, colleges, technical schools, training colleges, universities, hostels, agricultural colleges, leper colonies, printing presses, orphanages and mission stations - had always been officially committed to what he called the Family Spirit of close human bonds of affection and understanding between all the members, independently of differences in age, nationality, political outlook, occupation and rank. The rôle of the Salesian door-keeper was not that of a Salesian Cardinal, but their status is professedly, and, I may add, in practice, usually the same.
  • The encouragement by the Provincial and the novice-master of our membership of the Salesian Sodalities, and of our entering into small, intimate groups for mutual help and correction, did not mean that they favoured particular friendships. Indeed, these were frowned on with horror as seed-beds of vice, and novices indulging in them were firmly required to leave and return to the world. Father Simonetti drew a clear distinction between religious life and the life of the world. To be a religious was to renounce the world and all it could promise, and that solely for the love of Our Lord Jesus Christ, to whom the religious was to consecrate his every thought, his every word and his every action for all the rest of his life.
  • In the Middle Ages priests and bishops lived at the heart of society and culture. Religion did not substitute for involvement in the growth of human civilization. Unfortunately, the decadent trends among intellectuals in the fourteenth century led eventually to the present long-standing divorce between culture and theology. With the Renaissance, the arts developed in ways ill-adapted to the then available expressions of the religious ideal, while the progress made in the natural sciences under the inspiration of Galileo and Newton increased confidence in human resources and lessened the need for neurotic forms of dependence on a distant and silent G-d. The coming into being of the independent nations of Europe, national pride, the democratic spirit, and a greater insight into economic cycles have all been ingredients in the new world that makes the Middle Ages almost the shadow of a dream.
  • As a boy John Bosco saw that priests and bishops generally seemed at home only at the altar or in the sacristy. They were seldom really and truly in touch with life. Like Moses they dwelt on a lofty mountain with their heads in the clouds; meanwhile, even Sunday church-goers were left to worship the golden calf. With priests safely out of the way on their pedestals, the rest could be more comfortable doing their own thing. It was his desire to remedy this state of affairs that led John Bosco to become a priest and to establish the Salesian way of life.
  • Nevertheless, he was influenced by those Christian spiritual writers who envied the so-called good fortune of those who “left the world before knowing it.” -
  • “The places, persons and things of the world are terrible snares to chastity. With all haste flee from them, and keep far removed from them, not in body only, but in mind and heart. I do not recall having read or heard of a religious who visited his native place and came away spiritually the better for it. To go home for a holiday or for some auspicious occasion is the same as saying: ‘I am going to let myself grow cold in matters of piety.’ This point is the root cause of defection from religious life. As far as convenient, journeys are not to be made on bank holidays, and never with persons of the other sex.”
  • Commenting on these words, Father Peter Ricaldone, who was the Rector Major or Superior General of the Salesians during the period of the Second World War, and, incidentally, the author of many volumes of spiritual wisdom widely read in Italian religious houses of men and women, had expressed the view that “the soul will be perfect in purity in proportion as she frees herself from each defiling element, even from the body which she informs.” He quoted the words of Saint Augustine: “By purity and habitual union with G-d, man although composed of brute matter becomes a creature of heaven.”
  • I welcomed Father Simonetti's directive that novices should not write home more than once a fortnight, and enthusiastically embraced his suggestion that we should get rid of any photographs or other mementoes of our lives in the world. I used his interpretation of chastity to rationalize my escapist cop-out from facing my emotional situation. All my parents got from me when I was in Burwash, and for a long time afterwards, was a dutiful “Hail Mary” each day, and a mention of their names inside my head while I was making my daily thanksgiving after receiving Holy Communion. I was blind enough to think that was perfect spiritual love. Perhaps it was, too, but in human terms it was a pretty poor show. I was becoming an increasingly sophisticated and efficient spiritual computer. I wasn't really living. Instead, I was disciplining myself to operate smoothly and efficiently in the vast Salesian machine, much more complex in 1953 than it had been at the time of Don Bosco's death.
  • Father Simonetti claimed that the secret of success was to pray as if everything depended on G-d and to work as if everything depended on human effort. I have been sometimes told that I overwork, and I can admit it is one of the ways in which I try to escape from my emotional problems. However, just as hard work was a household programme in my own family, so it was always regarded as a Salesian characteristic, and it was not difficult for me to see my overwork as fidelity to the Salesian tradition. Don Bosco offered his followers bread, work and heaven. Father Simonetti expected each Salesian to do the work of three Jesuits. He was fond of quoting the words of Saint Francis of Sales: “Ever forward,” and those of Don Bosco: “Ever more and ever better.”
  • Father Simonetti is dead now, and among my last memories of him is a letter he wrote to my sister, by that time Sister Dominic Savio, CP, on 20 April 1960, in which he said that I was a good Salesian from whom he and the superiors expected great things. I also remember his speaking calmly to us novices on the subject of Christian virtue for well over half an hour, with all the time a wasp poised on the tip of his nose. I recall with amusement how he put on rubber gloves before using his electric razor for fear of being electrocuted, and how he stood on a stool at nights to keep his feet out of the draught as he was cleaning his teeth before retiring to rest. He was quite a character.
  • On 8 September 1953, the day on which the Catholic Church celebrates the Virgin Mary's birthday, he allowed me to make my first triennial vows of poverty, chastity and obedience, and Father Hall, my Provincial, admitted me officially to membership of the Salesian Congregation of Saint John Bosco.
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  • Four days later I moved to the new Salesian House of Philosophy in Ingersley Vale, just outside Bollington, a small town near Macclesfield in Cheshire. I lived there for three years, dividing my time between the study of French, Italian, Latin, Greek, Science, Education, Logic and Philosophy, the practice of prayer, meditation and ritual worship, and active involvement in my secretarial duties in an organization providing Catholic boys and girls with spiritual counselling and guidance by correspondence. It was during this period that for the first time I explicitly acknowledged I had an emotional problem that I needed to tackle, and this realization motivated my energetic study of philosophy and psychology.
  • I devoted two years to a thorough assimilation of the precise framework, the myriad details and the sophisticated notions of scholastic logic, theory of knowledge, metaphysics, philosophy of nature, philosophical psychology and the philosophy of G-d, as clearly and rather arbitrarily presented by Father Charles Boyer, SJ, in two large Latin volumes, the contents of which were lucidly explained to me by Father John Corcoran, SDB.
  • I read the history of philosophy from the more humane pages of Father Frederick Copleston, SJ, under the auspices of a fellow Boltonian, Father Brian Jerstice, SDB (jerstice.jpg), who also had the happy knack of dreaming correctly the results of certain football matches before the games were actually played.
  • My thirst for objective knowledge of G-d was fired by the vision of Plato's Ideal World. My need for authenticity was inspired by his story of the Cave, and I longed to grow out of the darkness into the light. (However, only in the 1980s did I grow more fully to appreciate the great importance of the Ancient Egyptian and even earlier Sumerian wisdom, which Plato's achievements reflect.)
  • Right through this period I still went to confession weekly, and I made yearly and also half-yearly retreats. I meditated for thirty minutes each morning, and I examined my conscience three times each day. This was just a case of my following the normal pattern of living within the framework of a Roman Catholic religious order.
  • On a typical day we rose at 5.30 a.m., meditated from six until six-thirty, studied from then until half past seven, after which we returned to Chapel for Mass and morning prayers. Breakfast followed at eight-fifteen, lunch at twelve-thirty, tea at four and supper at 7.45 p.m. There were lectures from ten past nine until twenty-five past twelve, and from twenty-five past two until four o'clock. We had a general examination of conscience at twelve-twenty-five, spiritual reading in Chapel followed by Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament at five, and night prayers together with a short spiritual address from the Rector of the House at 9.00 p.m. with silence thereafter until breakfast time the following morning.
  • On Sundays and special days we rose half-an-hour later and attended two Masses and listened to two sermons. On other days, with special permission, we were allowed to rise at 5.00 a.m., in order to have an extra half-hour's study-time. I slept in a converted stable, and sometimes woke with ice on my blankets, formed out of my own condensed and subsequently frozen breath. In the mornings an empty petrol-can was filled with warm water from the main boiler and divided out among those who needed to shave. There was only one chair available for each person, and this had to be carried about from dormitory to study, to chapel, to refectory, to lecture-room, and so on. There were no luxuries, no newspapers, no radio. Once a week we might go out in threes for a two-hour walk, and there was football on four days each week, with cricket, or sometimes baseball, in the summer. There were no servants, and we did all our own cooking, building, gardening, cleaning, painting and general maintenance. Eventually we did get more chairs, and built a comfortable new dormitory, with black doors on the mirrors in the wash-places to remind us not to use them to excess!
  • While I was in Ingersley, the house was visited by the Superior General, who said the place reminded him of his days in the army, and encouraged us to look for the hidden presence of G-d in everything. Renato Ziggiotti, a very vigorous figure even in his seventies, stood well over six feet in his socks, was the first Rector Major to visit the Salesian houses all round the globe personally, and, incidentally, the first not to have been born in Piedmont. He came from Venice, was enthusiastic about the Salesian message that Christian joy should be the centre of man's ordinary body-life, and took a lively interest in recent scientific and technical developments. His visit to Ingersley and the other Salesian centres in England, which had been so carefully prepared and eagerly anticipated, gripped my imagination, and fired me with renewed enthusiasm for the Salesian way of life.
  • The Rector of the House of Philosophy was Father Terence O'Brien, SDB, and he introduced me to Jungian dynamic psychology. My religious superior and spiritual director was, in fact, a member of the Guild of Pastoral Psychology, deeply read in the field of analytical, educational and child psychology, and he shared that quest for a synthesis of Christian theology and depth psychology that characterized the life work of Father Victor White, OP, whose personal friendship with Jung contributed so much to bridging the gap between traditional Catholicism and contemporary psychology. My long and frequent conversations with him amounted in my view to a sort of baptized Jungian analysis, although he never called it this, since interest in depth psychology was viewed with suspicion by most of his fellow priests. At all events, he introduced me to the relevant literature, and since that time I have been deeply committed to seeking out some sort of personal synthesis of philosophical, theological and psychological experience.
  • In the summer of 1954 I became Father O'Brien's private secretary, and upon the completion of my philosophy course at the end of the following June, I remained at Ingersley as his full-time secretary until August 1956, finding time to give also a small number of classes to the students in French, Latin and History of Philosophy, while continuing my own studies privately.
  • During my four years in Burwash and Bollington I visited my parents only three times, which was as often as I was allowed, and our contact was on a very conventional social level, with myself demanding, and them paying me, the respect I felt I deserved as a person of higher caste than they in the Catholic pecking order. They found in me many things of value they admired but could not understand. They could not find, because it was not there, the emotional maturity they could have understood and longed to see.
  • Father O'Brien had a great devotion to Dominic Savio, who had died in his fifteenth year while still a boy at school with Don Bosco. As a result of following Don Bosco's advice, and of trying actively to help his companions at school to do the right thing in every circumstance, he had become a saint, and was canonized on 12 June 1954. Father O'Brien had established the Guild of Dominic Savio in 1952 to help other boys imitate Dominic Savio's example, and it was because of his work with the Guild that he needed a private secretary. The Guild claimed to promote personal, spiritual and emotional maturity.
  • Some Salesians looked with disfavour on the Guild, but Father Hall encouraged Father O'Brien's venture, and I remember his recommending us as students to imitate Dominic Savio in being hard with ourselves, loving and kind towards others, and exact in all things. The bit about being exact in all things was, presumably, a reference to the spirituality favoured by Saint Francis of Sales, who asks us not to do extraordinary things, but to do ordinary things extraordinarily well. The other bit, about hardness and love, was the sort of thing any Catholic preacher might easily say, but understood literally it just doesn't make sense. If I am hard with myself, so that my heart and my arms become cold stone instead of living flesh, and if after that I seek to embrace others in a spirit of loving kindness, all they will be able to feel will be my crushingly heavy, stone-cold arms. It won't be a nice experience - as cold as charity, when love should be warm!
  • As Terence O'Brien's secretary, I collaborated in the work of his translation and revision of Don Bosco's book of guidance, liturgical and private prayer for the young, (Terence O'Brien, SDB, The Companion of Youth, edited and adapted from the original of Saint John Bosco: Bollington, Macclesfield, Saint Dominic Savio House, 1961). This manual of piety, as edited by Father O'Brien, is wholly based on a rather schizoid and puritanical view of life, derived from an overemphasis, and perhaps a distortion, of certain features of the teachings of the apostle Saint Paul.
  • Thus, a passage in the book's opening section on living one's baptism reads: “When you are born you are a child of Adam and because you are such, your soul has original sin on it. When you are taken to church and the waters of baptism are poured on your head, you become a child of G-d. The original sin is taken away from your soul, but you still remain a child of Adam, you are not one but two. Left to yourself, the child of Adam, the old self will be master of you, leading and driving you into all sorts of horrors… What is necessary is that you rebel against the old self and refuse to be his slave any longer. When you do that you become free, with the freedom which is that of the child of G-d.”
  • Since meeting Father O'Brien, I have made every possible effort to construct for myself and others a philosophy of the spiritual life that would enable me to become first a child, and then a mature and adult friend of G-d, without subscribing to what I consider to be an erroneous reification, and even personification, of what are, after all, no more than human capacities for less than human achievement.
  • Like Cardinal Newman, I believe that “G-d has created me to do him some definite service; he has committed some work to me which he has not committed to another. I have my mission. He has not created me for nothing. He does nothing in vain. He knows what he is about.”
  • By the summer of 1956 the Guild of Dominic Savio had expanded sufficiently to make Father O'Brien feel it needed a house all to itself, and in August the House of Philosophy was transferred to Beckford in Worcestershire, with Father Thomas Swanzey, SDB, as Rector. Father O'Brien got another secretary at this time, and I went to Beckford for one year to teach French, Latin and History of Philosophy a little more than I had had time to do in Ingersely, to continue with my own studies privately, and to help with the general administration.
  • The Salesian House in Beckford is on a site that seems to have had some sort of building on it since the eighth century, and parts of the present structure go back to about 1123. In 1128 it was assigned by Rabellus, the chamberlain of Normandy, to the monastery of Saint Barbe-en-Auge. It remained a priory until 1414, when the alien priories were suppressed and it passed to the crown until 1443, when Henry VI granted it ot his new foundation of Eton College. In 1462 Edward IV revoked the grant, and added Beckford to the endowment of the collegiate church of Fotheringay. The double row of boxwood trees, 220 yards long and about 30 feet high, which stands next to the chapel in Beckford, is probably 700 years old at least. It helped my imagination feed itself upon the feelings of sacred and mystic continuity which the experience of attending Mass in a mediæval undercroft, 840 years old, aroused within me.
  • In places like Beckford I become very much aware that I am a traditionalist at heart. If I am in some ways also progressive, this is because my sense of tradition is a strong one. I cannot allow my memory to go back only so far as the Council of Trent. I believe in the oneness of all men in Christ. King Arthur, Merlin, Stonehenge, the Pyramids and the cave-paintings of Altamira arouse strange vibrations within me. I yearn, like Saint Pius X, to restore all things in Christ.
  • After a busy and idyllic year of Salesian activity and pastoral peace and happiness in Beckford, I moved, in September 1957, to the Salesian College, Cowley, Oxford, to teach mathematics and general science in the lower school. I was also to look after the College library, supervise the boarders in the principal dormitory, take what part I could in the boys' recreation, and help the Rector bring his filing system up-to-date. I enjoyed the proximity to Oxford and the opportunity it afforded me of familiarizing myself with the main aspects of the University.

   

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