Read the review by D J Taylor in The Tablet of the Radio interview on Radio 4 Between Ourselves, broadcast on 25 July, Inner turmoil of men of integrity
Listening to Olivia O’Leary’s cross-questioning of two men who had left the priesthood in Between Ourselves [Radio Four, 25 July] I found myself thinking of my old college chum, ‘Father Rick’. Father Rick – not, I should hastily add, his real name – opted to join the Society of Jesus a week after Finals, a decision greeted with rapture by his traditionally devout Catholic family. I last saw him twenty years ago when, on the way back from a party in South-West London and seated on a bench at East Putney tube station, he volunteered the rather startling information that ‘I’m in love.’ Presumably this problem got solved, as Father Rick continues to ornament his order with every outward sign of success.
Jerry and Alex, Ms O’Leary’s two guests, both looked as if they came from Father Rick territory. Each hailed from a pious and conventional Catholic home. Neither seemed to have had the slightest doubt about their original vocation. Gerry, who fetched up at a Fransciscan seminary on Anglesey in his late teens, characterised his younger self as ‘a super-Catholic…I wanted to give everything to God.’ Alex had heard the call at eleven. As for the commitment to celibacy tacked on to this enticing package, each admitted that it was a vow of such magnitude as to be largely incomprehensible. Alex thought that none of his fellow-seminarians ‘fully understood’ what they were taking on.
Unsurprisingly, Francisan friar and parish priest had pursued very different career paths. Alex, starting out as a school chaplain, quickly got involved with an eighteen year-old female member of the choir. When this relationship ended, with maximal trauma, he decamped to a new parish and a recrudescence of the original problem. Here, as so often in investigations of the religious life, you were struck by the gap between reality and the mediatized versions of it offered up by books and films. The Thorn Birds this plainly was not. Rather than fling himself happily into his beloved’s arms, Alex spent two years agonising about the implications. Wife-to-be was equally anxious not be demonised as the temptress who had dragged him away from the church. The breach having been made, Alex was summoned to a conclave involving his bishop, his former love, a representative of the Child Protection Office and a 14- page document accusing him of child abuse. He was later acquitted.
Now in his late sixties and substantially older than his fellow-guest, Jerry’s route to the altar was rather more circuitous: parish work in Manchester, the Central American missionary trail and a return to England to lecture at theological college, where doubts about his role and understanding coincided with the arrival into his life of ‘June’. As with his younger colleague, everything was infinitely complex and long drawn-out, and the end results full of personal humiliation. In a farewell meeting with his Provincial, Jerry wondered if there might be funds available to tide him over. The Provincial offered a slate-clearing cheque for £500. Forty years in the Fransciscans’ service carried no pension, it turned out.
Brooding over these complementary tales – their nuances teased out by Ms O’Leary’s sympathetic interview technique – you were conscious on the one hand of the terrible inner turmoil that both men had passed through and, on the other, of what had been lost to the church. Clearly, vast reservoirs of fervour and human sympathy that might now be enriching the communal life of some under-staffed diocese were now being more narrowly directed at hearth and home. Looking back on his ordination, Alex remembered that a bishop had told him that those who couldn’t subscribe to the celibacy vow had no genuine commitment to the priesthood: this he doubted. Sexual emotions, it was generally agreed, were always going to express themselves in some form, however twisted. The link between celibacy and child abuse hung ominously in the air. I am an Anglican, of course, to whom this prohibition is simply the bizarre denial of a natural instinct. All one could do was to admire some of the qualities on display and regret they had been so sorely tried, while reflecting that if any kind of mass-priesthood is to be sustained into the mid-twenty-first century, another way has to be found.
D.J. TAYLOR