The Dark Box: A Secret History of Confession Read Free Page A

never discussed or explained. Following an intense on-off ‘special friendship’, one of our number left the seminary without warning and later threw himself under a train near Oxford.

    T HE WORD ‘SEMINARY’ derives from the Latin for ‘seed’: the image is of a protective environment, a greenhouse, where the seedbeds are being protected from the damaging environmentof the world outside. The seeds are being specially grown, forced artificially into clerical plants. The problem for those responsible for clerical training was that the world outside had been increasingly inimical to Catholic ideals of chastity and celibacy. Pius X knew this all too well when he tightened up the disciplines of clerical formation at the beginning of the century against the background of ‘Modernist’ thought, which included psychoanalysis alongside a host of other ‘heresies’. By the late 1950s and early 1960s, however, a tide of influence, carried through the media and known as the ‘sexual revolution’, was threatening traditional standards of Catholic chastity, not least within the clerical and religious estate.
    Despite the attempts of our superiors to make the seminary a media-free environment, and to control our reading and our egress into the world, the impact of the new sexual freedoms seeped into our world through every nook and cranny. We did, after all, go home for several weeks a year, where we were exposed to television and magazines, and went to the cinema. Most of us had brothers and sisters in their teens and twenties whose music and dress brought the new youth culture home to us.

    I N THE MEANTIME , and in stark contrast, our minds were being shaped and narrowed through the educational curriculum. The first two years involved the study of Scholastic philosophy, which was unrelentingly abstract and dogmatic.It was taught through dictated notes from the lecturer’s rostrum. There was a single textbook in Latin with numbered paragraphs, like a car maintenance manual. There was a campaign within the Church to maintain Latin as the required language of our lectures, which was to impel the new Pope John XXIII, even as he planned the reforming Second Vatican Council, to order the exclusive use of Latin in seminary courses. 3 There was variety in the study of the history of philosophy, but we were obliged to endure the dictated notes of the lecturer rather than be exposed to original texts. There were no classroom discussions, or even opportunities for discussions among ourselves. We had a well-stocked library, where the dust gathered on the rarely consulted volumes. The consequence, for those of us who digested the diet of spoonfed information, was the development of a didactic tone of voice: a dry, one-way, finger-wagging certitude. Despite the acquiescence, obedience, and humility required of us (or perhaps because of it), seminary was a school for authoritarians.
    There were occasional surprise events, which only served to demonstrate the institutional tedium. There was the student who appeared in chapel for night prayers on his first evening in the college wearing pyjamas and dressing gown instead of the cassock and collar. What was he thinking! That we were a relaxed, home-spun domestic fellowship? There were gales of nervous giggles, as if a wave of insanity had gripped the entire student body. Then there was the intensely devout student, older than the rest of us, who set his room on fire with the votive candles he kept blazing all night before astatue of the Virgin by his bed. More nervous tittering ensued in the choir stalls whenever he took his place in the days that followed. On another occasion, a small, intellectually rebellious group invited a Jesuit philosopher to meet and talk with them—he had not reckoned on being smuggled into the college clandestinely through a barred window, where he got stuck for twenty minutes. Such were our small diversions and rebellions.
    The courses in pastoral and moral