Seminary Boy

An Insider's View of Seminary Life:
There are few spiritual biographies written now, though the form used to be very popular, with classics like _The Confessions of St. Augustine_ for the Catholics and John Bunyan's _Grace Abounding_ for the Protestants. They tell of youthful enthusiasms and temptations, and a struggle between the ways of the world and the ways of heaven, with the latter triumphant. _Seminary Boy: A Memoir_ (Doubleday) by John Cornwell is a modern entry into the genre, and true to our times, any triumph of heaven is distinctly muted and is included in the book almost as an afterthought. Cornwell has charted an education that no one gets now, in a British Catholic school for boys who would be educated to become priests. A decade or two after he left school, youth culture and then the reforms of the Second Vatican Council led to the end of such minor seminaries as the one he attended. His book is a heartfelt, introspective, and gripping memoir, generous to all the erring souls described in its pages. Cornwell had a traditional Catholic upbringing, but was an underage thug. His life changed when he was sent to a parish priest and began helping the priest at the altar. He gained self respect and a fascination for the rituals of the sanctuary. At thirteen (a little late) he was nominated for education within a minor seminary, a boarding college for boys who would continue training into the priesthood. Funds were found to send him to Cotton College, a seminary within a country mansion in the hills of north Staffordshire, and so he left his hardscrabble family life. The buildings were handsome but the establishment was grim, intent on subduing the flesh, which still broke out. The priests did pretty well, in comfortable rooms, with all the cigarettes, pipes, and wine they could handle. There were sadistic staff, as well as sympathetic ones, and Cornwell sometimes had trouble sorting them out. Cornwell did well within the system, and was seen even as a candidate for further training in Rome itself, but all changed in an incident while he was "public man", a sort of school captain, in his last year at Cotton. A schoolmaster with whom he had clashed before reproved him for entering the teachers' common room without permission (he hadn't), and Cornwell in a threatening rage told the man off. ("The years of discipline at Cotton had been a poor antidote to my hotheaded maternal role model.") He was refusing acquiescence in the face of humiliation, and the incident changed his life. He was to go, not to Rome, but briefly to a senior seminary and then to his true calling within Oxford. He became an agnostic, but eventually regained his faith: "After many years' absence, my journey back to the faith of my fathers has not been easy," he writes, but he does not give details, at least in this book, implying that another narrative may follow. The unease is probably good; Cornwell has gone on to write an uncomplimentary biography of Pope John Paul II and _Hitler's Pope_, a devastating critique of Pope Pius XII's cooperation with the Nazis. He has in his current book been equally unsparing on himself, retelling embarrassing and private incidents that others would attempt to forget, much less write down for publication. This is not another tale of child abuse at Catholic hands, but a thoughtful and moving look backwards at the upbringing of a trenchant critic of the church from within.

Burning at the Stake is Nothing: It Only Takes a Few Minutes:
They called him "Fru," the way Truman Capote's relatives called him "Tru," but for a different reason, for when John Cornwell was a poor slum boy living in WWII London, bombs pouring down nightly and daily, his embattled mother found a way to send her boy far west to an outskirted country retreat far from any conflict, called "Cotton," where she would make him a priest with the help of a group of strange Catholic fathers. One of them had the habit of nicknaming all new boys, making new names by translating their old ones into Latin. "Cornwell, eh?" said this fellow, tousling John's hair, "In Latin, that would be FRUMENTUM BENE, but that's too long, we'll just call you "Fru." It sounds a little bit frou-frou, but everyone took to it, from his fellow seminarians, to the straight-edged and highly disciplined teachers who sergeanted him through the next five years of his life, to Charles House, the exquisite English rose, aristocratic, haughty, and passionate, who fell in love with young "Fru" for a season and taught him everything he could ever imagine about the subtext of Shakespeare's sonnets. Fru has an emotional investment in becoming a successful priest, and a domineering mother, a wonderful salt of the earth type like Angela's Ashes, who forces him into a vocation, and a father who just literally slips out of their lives like a piece of paper falling to the floor during a hushed High Mass. I found myself caught up in this whirlwind of spiritual confusion, his attempt to follow the pathways of St. Therese de Lisieux. At one point he thinks back to her willingness to have dirty water splashed in her face, if that's what God wanted, and tries to emulate her, but his native common sense rebels, and he throttles the boy who's tormenting him. His thesis is that the seminary "infantilized" all who came into its ken, both men and boys, and he repeats this perhaps four too many times for my taste, for I could not see how "infantilization" is any worse than the glimpses of dreary home life that he was living in otherwise, before and after his seminary period. There was also a predatory older man who laid on top of Fru, talked frankly of sex, read Evelyn Waugh, acted crazy. This was fascinating up to a point, but really how many memoirs have we read about failed seminarians? Just once I'd like to read a memoir of a guy who went to seminary and actually stayed the route and remains a contented priest! Are there any such books, or all of them written by what amounts to quitters? Maybe there's something in the vows of being a priest that when you sign you promise never to reveal anything about having gone to seminary, which if so is a shame and a Church policy which should be rethought because I for one could use a nice restful story about how going to a seminary and becoming a priest made me a better guy.

Vocations:
The author indicates that one reason that boys want to study for the priesthood is because they were daily Mass servers. After Vatican II most priests did not want to have Mass servers since the congregation could make the responses in the vernacular. As there are fewer opportunities to become daily Mass servers, boys will not have the opportunity to test a vocation to the priesthood through this avenue. Men loose their vocation to the priesthood through the abusive acts of seminary faculty. In the seminary, the author apparently was never taught balance in the spiritual life until one of the seminary faculty told him to stop going to confession every day and only go once a week and stop obsessing about every little thing especially sex. A common thread that seems to create a vocation is a broken home life. Getting out of the hot house of parents physically battering each other and screaming at each other seems to be a recurring theme in vocation memoirs. It is a joy and a relief to go to church at 6:00 a.m. every weekday morning to provide some stability and sanity to your life when your parents are acting like lunatics. As a person emotionally starved for affection at home, when another student takes an interest in the author, and is nice and kind to the author, the author develops a normal crush or "obsessive" interest in the other student. I think that is part of normal human development for teenage males as they break away from maternal bonds of affection (or enmeshment) and begin to place those emotions on to others (who ever is handy, male or female). An excellent read for any one who ever thought of studying for the priesthood. Kentucky, USA.

For non-questioning Christians only!:
The Buddha taught that you should accept his teachings only if they make sense to you. If they don't make sense, don't follow them. Christianity is quite the opposite. So if Christianity makes sense to you, not something you accept just on faith, then perhaps this book will be interesting to you. (Being Catholic will help even more.) But if Christianity doesn't make perfect sense to you, then this book is the memoir of a masochist of epic proportions and I recommend you don't waste your time on Cornwell's self-inflicted suffering.

A bit of this and a bit of that:
Writing about events and people not well known to the reader is always a task that proves itself to be difficult. The reader's interest has to be hooked, which is rendered even more intricate if the events are mundane and the characters are totally unknown to the reader. That is the difficulty that John Cornwell bravely faces. Unfortunately he doesn't emerge successful. The writing is simple and easy to read with some striking imagery (the reader can visualize life in post-WWII London and England). The description of life in a seminary is also exhaustive and evocative. The author deftly describes infatuations with members of the same and opposite sex as he grapples with his boyhood awakening of sexuality. The portrayal of the boy's confusion as he is given divergent advices from different `fathers' at the Seminary. However, for the reader the question that remains convincingly unanswered is `why did he join the priesthood?' The book is written too chronologically which appears to be a weakness but given that the reader doesn't know much about the places and characters, that is the only course of option left to the author. But that makes the book difficult to wade through.