Fanaticism and brainwashing tend to be associated nowadays with other religions, not Christianity. John Cornwell’s memoir of his adolescence in a Catholic seminary in the 1950s may help to correct that...
...Cornwell’s earliest ambition was to be a priest, and he had a sound Catholic upbringing. At his east London primary school, run by nuns, his class teacher told the children that a V2 rocket that had landed on a nearby Anglican church, killing most of the congregation, had been sent by God to punish them for not being Catholics. Despite her pious guidance, little Cornwell went to the bad for a while, lobbing bricks through train windows with a gang of older youths, and attempting to derail an express. His Irish Catholic mother sent him to the parish priest, and he was recruited as an altar boy. It changed his life.
His new status gave him self-respect, and the elegant rituals of the sanctuary provided an escape from his cramped and violent lower-class home. From the age of 11, he cycled two miles every weekday morning, in all weathers, to serve at 7am mass. When he was 13, after an interview with the bishop, money was found to send him to Cotton College, a seminary housed in a country mansion among wooded hills in north Staffordshire.
It was like a POW camp, only with round-the-clock prayers. A wire grille separated the exercise area from the free countryside beyond. There were cold showers, freezing dormitories, iron beds, beatings and vile food, prepared by nuns who, in the masculine spirit of the place, were dubbed “witches”. No newspapers or radios were allowed. The recreations were compulsory cross-country runs and digging drainage ditches.
Inmates were under surveillance day and night, and were forbidden to speak from evening prayers until the next morning. The aim of these austerities was to subdue the flesh, but, in fact, the place simmered with furtive sex — crushes, flirtations and grotesque attempts to sublimate natural urges. “Has anyone ever told you that you have a beatific aura?” one of Cornwell’s friends inquired...
...By contrast the teaching staff (“profs”), all but one of them priests, enjoyed a comfortable lifestyle and ample diet. They boasted that Cotton was “the finest school in England”, but their pedagogic skills were limited. The chortling sadist who was Cornwell’s Latin master managed only to reduce him to helpless panic...
...As puberty advances “rocketing concupiscence” assails him. He takes to wearing a sweater next to his skin as a makeshift hair shirt, and twists wire round his arm so as to stick a spike in his flesh. At night he ties his hands to the bed head with pyjama cord to stop them wandering. He is terrified that, should he weaken, he will be plunged into Hell for all eternity. The haunted faces of boys queuing for confession each day assure him his problems are shared. In the event, it was not lust that undid him but rage. He was made school captain and, puffed up with grandeur, answered back angrily when one of the masters, who had always had a down on him, voiced a reproof. Too late he realised that he had offended against hierarchy, and that even if he were ordained it would never be forgotten. After a brief spell at a senior seminary, Oscott, he became an agnostic, abandoned his calling, and went to Oxford instead...
Having attended a Yeshiva high school from age 13 to 18, I am aghast that the so-called religion of 'law' rather than 'love' was downtrodden in comparison to what went on in shcools like this.
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