Seminary Boy: A Memoir [Hardcover]

John Cornwell (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 13, 2006

John Cornwell evokes a vanished time and way of life in this moving and, at times, troubling memoir of an adolescence spent in the isolated all-male world of the seminary.

Born into a destitute family with a dominating Irish-Catholic mother and an absconding father during World War II in London, John Cornwell's childhood was deeply dysfunctional. When he was thirteen years old he was sent to Cotton College, a remote seminary for boys in the West Midlands countryside. For the next five years Cornwell lived under an austere monastic regime as he wrestled with his emotional and spiritual demons. In the hothouse atmosphere of the seminary he strove to find stable, loving friendships among his fellows and fatherly support from the priests, one of whom proved to be a sexual predator.

The wild countryside around the seminary, the moving power of church ritual and music, and a charismatic priest enabled him to persevere. But while normal teenagers were being swept up by the rock ’n’ roll era, Cornwell and his fellow seminarians continued to be emotionally and socially repressed. Secret romantic attachments between seminarians were not uncommon; on visits home they were overwhelmed by the powerful attractions of the emerging youth culture of the 1950s. But when they returned to Cotton College, the boys were once again governed by the age-old traditions and disciplines of seminary life. And like many young seminarians, Cornwell struggled with a natural adolescent rebelliousness, which in one crucial instance provoked a crisis that would eventually lead to his decision to abandon his dream of becoming a priest.

Written with tremendous warmth and humor, Seminary Boy is a truly unforgettable memoir and a penetrating glimpse into the hidden world of seminary life.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

By age 11, Cornwell had a well-deserved reputation as "an academic reject and troublemaker." Besides running with young thugs in London's East End, he had attacked a nun, a teacher at his school. But after a stranger molested him, he became a devout altar boy and, two years later, a priest-in-training at Cotton College. There he lost his Cockney accent, felt schoolboy crushes and constantly wrestled with an overzealous conscience, his scruples exacerbated by priest-teachers ranging from rigid to predatory. Helping him navigate stormy adolescence was the brilliant and sensible Father Armishaw, literature teacher and music lover, who cared for him as his own troubled father and volatile mother were never able to do. Readers who objected to Cornwell's controversial bestseller Hitler's Pope may not appreciate his portrayal of Catholics in the 1950s, and the memoir police may accuse him of erring on the side of invention, especially since he kept no diaries. Despite its occasional touch of narcissism—his culminating struggle is with "the embodiment of all those in my life who had failed to see my worth"—the book is a fine read. With a literary novelist's eye for detail and ear for dialogue, Cornwell has written a psychologically astute and often touching coming-of-age story. (June 13)
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From Booklist

The best-selling author of Hitler's Pope recounts his coming-of-age as a student at a seminary in post-World War II England. A throwaway child labeled as "an academic reject and troublemaker," Cornwell was sent to board at Cotton College at the age of 13. There he embarked upon an emotional, spiritual, and physical odyssey that encompassed both the best and the worst of the institutionalized Catholic Church. Although beset by a priest who was a sexual predator, the troubled youth was also befriended by Father Armishaw, the empathetic priest who introduced the impressionable Cockney youngster to new avenues of culture, inquisition, and independent thinking. Although often disturbing, Cornwell's experiences are recounted with disarmingly frank honesty, balancing both the positives and the negatives of his life and times at Cotton College. As an interesting sidebar, Cornwell contrasts his cloistered existence in the seminary with the youth-oriented pop culture emerging in 1950s-era England. A heartrending and heartfelt memoir from a gifted writer. Margaret Flanagan
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 336 pages
• Publisher: Doubleday Religion; First edition (June 13, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0385514867
• ISBN-13: 978-0385514866
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.3 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,884,071 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An Insider's View of Seminary Life, October 22, 2006

By 

R. Hardy "Rob Hardy" (Columbus, Mississippi USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Seminary Boy: A Memoir (Hardcover)

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.

10 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Memorable account of 1950s Catholic England, August 14, 2006

By 

John L Murphy "Fionnchú" (Los Angeles) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Seminary Boy: A Memoir (Hardcover)

Cornwell writes dependably intriguing and often controversial examinations of topics, many of which involve religious conflicts in the Church between its demands and those of competing power brokers or intellectual allegiances in recent times. While his powers of recall do seem to defy the abilities of even the most retentive writers, his introductory note does suggest that he is conscious of the need for re-creation of the past as best he can if at more length than conventional memory might offer, 50 years later. I had read his "The Hiding Places of God" many years ago and remember how he made an aside to his own seminary training and his subsequent if still youthful rejection of his faith, which he struggled to reclaim, as that book narrated in part, as an adult decades later.

This new memoir conveys the aftermath of his adolescent decision to enter a minor seminary at thirteen in rural Britain in the 1950s. He will be one of the last to record such experiences firsthand--see also Paul Hendrickson's "Seminary" for a similar narrative from nearly the same time in the U.S. South. For another contemporary account, from a slightly older Jesuit scholastic, see F.E. Peters' "Óurs." Hard to believe from our vantage point that such immersion into a quasi-monastic state at such a young age existed for so long into our own era. Now, there are no more minor and far fewer major seminaries, and the separation from the world enjoined upon those boys considering the priesthood from as young a beginning as eleven has vanished as with so much of pre-conciliar forms of Catholic practice.

Since the longer review earlier posted here before mine covers much of the book's main events, I will limit myself to a few impressions. The tension between following rules--which the rebellious Cornwell near graduation sees as slavish devotion to things--clashes with the humanistic tendencies cultivated especially by Fr Armishaw's English literature course. Cornwell waits until quite late in his account to provide the showdown, but he argues well that to him, the priesthood's unstinting demands for obedience and conformity could not satisfy his increasing longing for a way of living that allowed and encouraged individual control and freedom of one's responses to life and love as shared with others rather than closed off behind cloistered walls and burdensome vows. He does not criticize those who take vows, but he also does not idealize their decision to try to remove themselves from a world often harsher and less pampered for those whose labors support the clergy in their cosseted state of genteel, sacralized sacrifice.

Cornwell, as far as he can from half a century later, carefully lets each side in the debate have its say--and that of submission certainly has dominated the previous 4/5 of the narrative. He lets the humanistic vision gradually infuse the previously repressed nature that he has tried to subdue. Yet, you read of his decision to take the side of independence rather than allegiance without feeling that in hindsight he has unfairly disparaged those who for half a dozen years of his formation urged him to overcome his own desires and preferences. Cornwell recognizes, and respects even if he did and does not condone, the regimen that demanded subordination of one's will to that of one's clerical superiors--this was simply the status quo for anyone called to a religious vocation in pre-Vatican II England, or for that matter anywhere else faithful to the Church.

A factor that receives less attention than it could have is the role of Irish culture and personality conventions in those who, like himself, were first-generation Irish British. So many were offspring of one Irish emigrant and one native English parent, but the expected friction and how the two influences battled it out to shape the English Catholic ethos in Cornweel's generation seems overlooked. He never seems to understand his admittedly challenging mother, who is perhaps harder to place within a recognizable type than is his feckless father, a character unfortunately more familiar to readers of such memoirs!

One aspect, common to many stories of one's entrance into a drastically altered reality from one's daily routine, is that the initial encounters take up over half of the total pages. This background and establishing content is essential, but perhaps editing could have balanced the narrative so the later tensions are not compressed into only about a fifth of the book. They are not rushed, but the later events carry as much weight as those preceding them. Here, they do seem to be skimmed more than scoured--in contrast with the earlier coming-of-age saga.

This account has its disturbing moments; I kept expecting the intimations of pubescent same-sex desire to result in graphic detail, but Cornwell commendably keeps control of the events he describes and remains scrupulously (key word here!) honest. Yes, there is the predatory pedophile priest, finally exposed, but there is also the courageous, if rather broken, colleague who remains loyal to his calling, although the cost to us from our different perspective may not seem to have been worth the pain. He treats this priest, and how as an elderly man he grew closer--to a stolid degree only, nonetheless-- to after Cornwell left the seminary. Cornwell's depiction of this priest's deathbed demeanor moved me greatly. He controls the emotions raised in his recollections commendably. He eschews false sentiment and facile snobbery. Cornwell does not indulge in easy smugness towards a mentality quite different in mid 20c Catholicism, and he takes care to show how and why such demands were made upon clergy and those who sought to be called to the clerical life.

After reading his account, you may probably not agree with the methods once used to exact adherence to the rules once enforced by the Church. But, you respect those who--only human as much as we are--tried to reconcile wayward human frailty with the urge to surrender one's self for a higher, less materialistic, less physical, cause. It's a recommendation for Cornwell's consideration of this battle within in his own formative years that he remembers how he succeeded and how he failed, and in both his obedience and his rebellion we sympathize with not only himself at each moment, but with those around him who made a different choice.

8 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Burning at the Stake is Nothing: It Only Takes a Few Minutes, January 14, 2007

By 

Kevin Killian (San Francisco, CA United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Seminary Boy: A Memoir (Hardcover)

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.