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Seminary Boy: A Memoir

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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.

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.

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.

I would imagine Catholics and lapsed Catholics will find SEMINARY BOY more compelling than others because of the young boy's obsession with sin and confession. Also, those who loved ANGELA'S ASHES will find similarities.

At the beginning of the book, John Cornwell is a pretty hard case for a pre adolescent. At one point he assaults a nun with a T-square after she drags him in off the playground for a "minor" offense. But he's also an altar boy and his priest recommends him for the seminary.

He is sent to Cotton College in the West Midlands. At thirteen he's getting a late start in the seminary and must catch up with his Latin. He is also inundated with temptation. When he has a nocturnal emission, he thinks he's truly evil. He gets conflicting advice from the priests and faculty members. One tells him it's not a sin as long as he doesn't take pleasure in it; another, to his credit, tells John that masturbation is perfectly normal. But this is just the beginning of John's torment. He falls in love with another boy. Although he was sexually assaulted prior to coming to Cotton, he doesn't realize the full implications of a relationship with another boy. Once again he is tormented by his foul nature.

The priests at Cotton College run the gamut from Father Armishaw, a truly inspiring English instructor who owns a motorcycle, to an openly gay priest who tries to seduce young John. Interweaved within the story of the young boy trying to grow up in an alien world, we get a smidgeon of English Catholic history. After the Reformation, for instance, Catholic priests who wouldn't take the loyalty oath were persecuted and had to hide in "priest holes." One of these priests wrote the inspiring hymn "Faith of Our Fathers" about this time in English history.

John Cornwell spends holidays and summer vacations with his family in a poor area of London. When his father leaves the family, his mother must scrap to make ends meet. She has a sort of love/hate relationship with John. She resents his arrogance but she's also proud of her young seminarian and manages to scrape together the money to send him to Cotton.

SEMINARY BOY is a memoir that reads like a novel. I never went though the hell John Cornwell did in the seminary, but I can certainly relate to his dread of the confession box.

I've been reading John Cornwell for a long time. As a Catholic historian (as a historian, period), he is unrivaled. In his best books, papal histories like Hitler's Pope, A Thief in the Night, and The Pontiff in Winter, one encounters a writer fully aware of the humanity lurking behind the machinery of the Roman church, with its capacity for great generosities alongside great shortsightednesses and even evil.

Here, in Seminary Boy, we learn Cornwell's own story, and it is a story not unlike those we read in his histories, except on the much smaller (and therefore somehow more consequential?) scale of one person's childhood.

There are eerie premonitions in this book of the things the Catholic church is right now reckoning with: child molestation at the hands of clery; the class tension among the wealthy, the impoverished, and the priestly orders that alternately serve and exploit them; what faith will become in the presence of an imperfect church; what virtues that church continues to offer amidst it all.

Much is told rather than shown in this memoir, but not unpleasingly. There is a stately, measured tone employed throughout, reminiscent of Tobias Wolff's memoirs (and Wolff, notably, blurbs the book on the front cover.)

Seminary Boy is a pleasure to read, and I think it is as important a book as those works of history Cornwell is wont to write. I hope it will find the wide audience it deserves.

John Cornwell is an Englishman of Irish heritage who writes extensively on historical subjects, and in this case he has chosen to write his own history.

Raised in ugly unrelieved poverty, John was torn between loyalty to his impish but mendacious, unreliable father and his grasping passive-aggressive mother. With five children, the couple was constantly stretched to keep mouths fed, and there was little joy in Cornwell's childhood. No surprise then that as an intelligent, sensitive boy, he found solace within the stalwart, buttressed walls of the Catholic Church. A few brief retreats to a monastery in Kent, presenting such a contrast to the raucous, often violent scenes at home, convinced him he had a special relationship with Jesus and a calling to the priesthood.

As an early adolescent he was sent to a Catholic boy's school called Cotton. There he was strictly disciplined, academically pushed, and ultimately became a successful scholar. He was awarded the high honor of being House Captain at Cotton his senior year and later secured a place at Oxford.

On rare visits home the young Cornwell watched helplessly as the relationship between his parents deteriorated, and at times he was told it was his fault. There was no money and therefore no peace in the home because his clothing and uniforms for school cost so dearly. No matter where Cornwell looked, he found reasons for guilt: his unwanted erection on a somber Christmas morning, his schoolboy crush on another flirtatious rich boy, and even an old emotional scar: he'd been assaulted by a stranger in a train station after pinching money from his mother's purse to ride up to London on one of his many attempts to escape the chaos of home.

Through his life at Cotton, the tormented boy was both preyed upon by a homosexual priest and comforted by another priest/mentor whose distant kindness provided him an emotional sustenance he had never experienced with his family.

Cornwell knew his personal epiphany had struck like a bolt of lightning when, in his final year at Cotton, he was insulted by a priest for walking into a room without acknowledging his superior's presence. "I should have said: 'I'm sorry, sir, I really did think the room was empty.' Had I said something along these lines, events, and perhaps my whole life, might have turned out differently." But instead the "boy" who had become a man yelled back, and in doing so "I was saying an emphatic 'No!' to acquiescence in the face of humiliation." He was rejecting the way of passivity towards authority, the Cotton way, the Church's way. One result of his understandable outburst was that he never received the money always given to the House Captain at the end of the year. No explanation was ever offered for this oversight.

Later, after rebuilding a reasonable life of ordinary contentment and extraordinary distinctions, Cornwell reconciled with his bedridden father. But he couldn't reconcile himself to the Church's adamant refusal to acknowledge the sins of abusing priests, though he still maintained a connection with his one mentor from Cotton --- his surrogate father through the years --- until that man's sad demise.

Oddly enough, SEMINARY BOY has amusing moments alongside its poignant and sometimes disturbing vignettes of a boy's isolation in a system that is designed to break the will while claiming to free the spirit.

--- Reviewed by Barbara Bamberger Scott

Cornwell, a former juvenile delinquent, developed a religious calling and was sent off to a Catholic junior seminary when he was in his early teens.

This highly readable memoir reads like a novel. One really feels Cornwell's affection for the seminary that took him out of a tumultuous, poverty-stricken home life. Also palpable, painfully so, is young Cornwell's anguish and confusion as to what a junior seminarian is supposed to do about his budding sexuality.

Speaking of sex, yes, the book does contain stories of abuses perpetrated by Catholic priests. But these are not the point of the book, and they are presented with minimal details. The horror of such abuses is still felt, but any trace of sensationalism is mercifully absent.

I felt that the most interesting parts of the book dealt with the varied, sometimes conflicting pieces of advice Cornwell received from the priests who were his teachers at the seminary. Each priest had his own way of doing his job, and some of the priests seemed better at it than others. I was also struck by the different philosophies espoused in Cornwell's various readings (Therese of Lisieux's autobiography, a work by St. Francis de Sales, etc.) and how he attempts to put these into practice.

And, of course, Cornwell's spiritual and emotional journey -- the whole point of the book -- is moving and fascinating. I'd be interested to read some of his other books.

This is a beautifully written honest story of how a young man came out of terrible disadvantage and made the most of a Catholic minor seminary education before Vatican II. Escaping a terrible experience at Oscott, a major seminary, he left the Church for a time, went on to Oxford and Cambridge, and then went on to mature and returned to the Church. Cornwell has produced a series of excellent books about the Church. He is an A+ writer who does his best (very convincingly) to be fair. I couldnt put this book down until I had read it through. Highly recommended.

This was a book that grabbed me from page one and held on to the last page. I didn't want to put it down. And I don't think it was purely because I'm a former seminary boy myself. After all, I only lasted a single year in a minor seminary in the U.S. But, like Cornwell, I was only thirteen or fourteen when I went away to board at a seminary where my life was monitored 24-7 by priests. It was, in many ways, a cold and forbidding place, after my warm and loving home environment - too much so for my taste, certainly. I would have left after just a few weeks, but my parents believed you should start what you finish, so I lasted out the year. And even that one year left lasting marks - some good, some bad. John Cornwell knows how to write. I feel like I know Cornwell now; I wish I did know him. I would recommend this book highly to anyone who grew up Catholic, whether you were ever a seminarian or not. This is simply a superior read. P.S. My own seminary experience is recounted in my memoir, REED CITY BOY. - Tim Bazzett, author of the Reed City Boy trilogy and Love, War & Polio.

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.