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COPYRIGHT 2002 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
When I was a young candidate for the priesthood at St. Patrick's College in Sydney, Australia, our family doctor said to my mother, "Tom has idealized the Church. It's going to be a great shock to him when he finds out that priests are human."
I was as romantic a seminarian as any the world over. My desire to become a priest was influenced by the fact that a pretty girl in my neighborhood, whom I had incoherently desired, had chosen to become a Dominican nun. I had some grandiose idea, perhaps, of being St. Francis to her St. Clare. Like most of my fellow-seminarians, I also had a naive piety and considerable generosity of spirit.
There were certainly elements of vanity at work, too. Australia, in the early nineteen-fifties, was a banal, suburban place, and to be at the center of the solemn liturgies of the Roman Catholic Church was to be connected to the universal Church of all times and all places. I had learned to sing "Faith of Our Fathers" from an Irish nun in the midst of a withering Australian drought; others had learned to sing it in the snows of Minnesota and the gales of Ireland. Moreover, it was exhilarating for an Australian kid from a plain suburb to look forward to being entrusted by Christ with the power to "bind and loose" sins.
My parents were observant Catholics, but they accepted my decision with resignation and perhaps with some uneasiness about my immaturity and flights of imagination. Unlike raunchier young Australians, I was full of what could be called sexual wonderings rather than any direct sexual experience, and the sacrifice involved in undertaking priestly celibacy seemed a minor issue, particularly since I would be surrounded by other men to whom sexual abstinence was the heroic norm. In strange ways, I resembled the squeamish gangster Pinkie in Graham Greene's "Brighton Rock." To Pinkie and me, sex seemed a grasping, howling, animal thing. Had there been an independent secular counsellor to assess my case, he would have advised me to enroll at the University of Sydney and meet as many genial Protestant girls as I could.
The crisis of doubt, which came to me six years later, when I was about to be ordained, had little to do with discovering that certain priests were odd or capable of cruelty. A week in the seminary taught me that much. The crisis came from my realization that, behind the compelling mystery of Catholicism, with its foundation in the message of "Caritas Christi" (words engraved on a stone wall at St. Patrick's), lay a cold and largely self-interested corporate institution.
St. Patrick's was situated on a beautiful headland above the Pacific in several faux-Gothic buildings whose Jansenist gloom belonged more to the great Irish seminary of Maynooth than to the antipodean subtropics. The main building was drafty and unheated, and tuberculosis, which had almost been vanquished among the general population, still broke out occasionally. The government required all citizens to have annual chest X-rays, but, because of the unhealthy nature of the building, had sought the rector's approval to check the seminarians biannually. The rector, a monsignor, refused. His concern was not that we might be overexposed to roentgens but that every time the X-ray trailer, with its crew of young nurses, visited the seminary there would be an increase in the number of seminarians departing for "the world."
When two of my friends contracted t.b. and needed lung surgery, the rector and the archdiocesan authorities took no responsibility. My friends' parents bore all the medical expenses, including those for long recuperations in a sanatorium. The young men were welcome to return if they recovered, but they received no gesture of sympathy, no gift, no visits from the staff of the seminary. Young men who left for reasons of mental ill health, a not uncommon occurrence, also received no help.
In time, I began to question whether my increasingly irrepressible desire for women was a sin. And what was I to make of the fact that the novels of Greene and the poetry of Auden awakened both a sense of the wider world and an increasing skepticism about the world I was in? Weeks before my ordination, after my parents had hired caterers for the celebratory feast, I had what in those days was called a nervous breakdown. Sexuality was not the overt issue--at least not in the sense that I had fallen in love with someone. After all, seminaries exist to avert such calamities. But sexuality is always there--the more assiduously repressed, the more likely to cause psychic mayhem. Obviously, this sexual pressure had...
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