The Dark Box: A Secret History of Confession by John Cornwell Page A

would not make it as a celibate. Catching up with the world—music, dancing, girls, lay clothes, making my own decisions after years of seminary discipline—was not easy. My understanding tutor at Oxford, where I had arrived to study English literature, quipped one day: ‘My dear fellow, you need to learn in life how to take the smooth with the rough . . .’
    I became convinced that Catholicism, for me at least, was not an impetus for maturity and happiness. At the same time,I was finding it difficult to reconcile Christianity with an increasingly positivist, scientific view of the world. As a graduate student at Cambridge, I finally, consciously, abandoned my Catholicism. For the next twenty years I would hover between atheism and agnosticism. But time, my dream life, and a gradual appreciation of the difference between religious imagination and magic realism opened the way to at least consider the possibility of a God after atheism.
    Marriage to a devout Catholic who brought up our children in the faith, and nostalgia for the rhythms of Catholic liturgy, prompted a change of heart—not so much a return as a progression—although I remain circumspect. Notions of a vengeful God have been difficult to exorcise entirely. To this day, moreover, I have occasional, inchoate suspicions that these renewed quests for a once-rejected God mask a search for the lost abusers of one’s childhood. This book, however, while written from the inevitable perspective of an individual member of the Catholic faithful, draws on a wide range of historical sources and the personal testimonies of fellow Catholics past and present.

Eight
    The Making of a Confessor
    Total institutions disrupt or defile precisely those actions that in civil society have the role of attesting to the actor and those in his presence that he has some command over his world—that he is a person with ‘adult’ self-determination, autonomy, and freedom of action.
    —Erving Goffman, Asylums
    It is not surprising that men kept in short trousers for years should be incapable of authority and responsibility when thrust upon them as parish priests in middle age.
    —Charles Davis, A Question of Conscience
    S EMINARY LIFE FROM THE 1920S TO THE 1960S WAS largely a product of Pius X’s ‘restorations’ of the Church in the first decade of the century. The seminary training for Catholic priests, regulated centrally from the Vatican department known as Discipline of the Clergy, involved six years of full-time cloistered residence. Many seminarians had already spent between five and seven years in junior seminaries, which were similarly monastic. The aim was to create a ‘cleric’ whose characteristics included prompt obedience to authority in the vertical hierarchical structure, along with doctrinal acquiescence to Rome’s teaching, both in content and interpretation, especially on sexual and ‘life’ matters. As we have seen, Pius X’s seminary reforms emphasised segregation from the laity and especially from women. In theory, this was meant to produce dedication to celibacy and the disciplines of sexual continence. But the consequences also included a guarded, patriarchal attitude towards women; an expectation of deference from the lay faithful; and a tendency to close protective ranks against outsiders, involving instinctive secrecy.
    The seminary prepared its ordinands to be judges and healers of souls: the arbiters and exemplars of what constituted sin and virtue. The newly ordained priest was endowed with sacramental ‘faculties’ bestowing powers, sanctioned by his bishop, to administer or suspend absolution of sins.

    A RRIVING AT THE SENIOR SEMINARY for the Catholic archdiocese of Birmingham at the age of eighteen in 1958, I entered a red-brick neo-Gothic edifice with gables, turrets, and a cloister wide enough to drive two buses abreast. Situated north of the city of Birmingham, and bordered by two highways and a cemetery, Oscott College was screened by