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FIVE

My Life in a Seminary

I sang Dies Irae, Dies Illa,

accented finely

in its sombre metre.

Gone were beads worn smooth;

indulgences stacked like chips on a poker table.

I longed for November’s bleakness,

tiny hands warmed over candles,

flickering before a terrible wrath.

I imagined souls calling to me,

locked in their emptiness.

It was before I learned to sing

Pie Jesu Domine,

dona eis requiem.

A MONTFORT REQUIEM – Martin Dillon

To this day, I am not sure why I chose to study in a seminary run by the Montfort Fathers in historic Romsey in Hampshire, England. Perhaps, I was taken with a brochure someone had given my mother, displaying the college grounds with boys in uniform, football fields and tennis courts. Where the brochure came from remains a mystery, but for me it depicted a magical setting. As a child in the drab streets of the Lower Falls, Montfort College resembled a wonderland. On the other hand, it would be disingenuous to attribute my priestly enthusiasm just to escapism. I was deeply attached to my religion and, unlike my twin brother, spent a lot of time in the company of my great-aunts whose days were devoted to quietly repeating decades of the rosary. I was also emotionally attached to St Peter’s where I was willing to serve as an altar boy whenever the church needed me, even if it meant participating in several Masses a day.

I was eleven years old when I made the decision to become a seminarian, and one might wonder how someone so young could be permitted to make such a life-changing decision without full knowledge of its implications. Of course, seminaries existed throughout history and into modern times. The Catholic Church promoted them on the oft-quoted Jesuitical principle, ‘give me the boy and I will give you the man’.

Montfort College was established in 1910 when priests and brothers of the Mission of Montfort Fathers and the Daughters of Wisdom sought asylum in England. Together, they built the seminary in a rural setting, and it quickly became self-sufficient. The new Montfort Mission began farming and made cider from an apple orchard. From the outset, the priests taught pupils, the brothers farmed and performed other jobs, and the sisters cooked and ran the laundry.

The moment I decided on Montfort, I entered a whirlwind of activity since I would be leaving to become a seminarian three months after my twelfth birthday. Family, friends and neighbours were excited, and everyone wanted to help as though I were about to relocate to a far-off land. Like boys going to English public schools, I had to have two uniforms, each with a jacket and short pants. The college provided a list of necessities, and my poor mother and father, with a large family to feed, had to rely on Uncle Joe for financial help. My mother’s brother, WJ, offered to make my uniforms and my large bosomed Aunt Vera promised to buy me football boots or a tennis racquet. Years later, I felt guilty I had placed so much pressure on my family, especially when I learned my parents paid a monthly fee to the college.

I also felt I betrayed my twin because we had been inseparable, yet I left him behind. He has never commented on that aspect of my past, but I can only imagine how hard it must have been for him to watch me in the limelight, while he was confined to the shadows. At the time, I had no guilt in my heart as I readied to leave home. I was about to devote my life to the Church, believing I would return to St Peter’s someday to preach like the famed missionaries who visited the parish each winter.

Leaving home, on an early September evening in 1961, remains one of the most traumatic moments of my life. I had never been away from my parents, and standing at the rail of the Belfast-Liverpool ferry I was lost and sad when I saw my mother crying and my father consoling her. My twin brother had decided not to see me off and that hurt. As the boat pulled out of the harbour, seagulls rose on air currents in its wake like fans leaving Casement Park after a match. I looked back at the mountains and the Cave Hill and felt a sudden pain in my heart. For the first time, I was being embraced by my native city. I could see where the Falls and Shankill areas intersected, and my thoughts went back to the days spent with my family and friends.

The journey to Liverpool should have been an adventure but rough seas made me sick and depressed. During the night, I wrapped my arms round a metal pillar to steady myself as the boat pitched and rolled. The next morning, I joined several dozen Montfort seminarians on a coach journey to Hampshire. As the coach neared the college gates, an older boy shouted, ‘Let’s all take a deep breath!’ Most did.

On my first night, they gave me a bed in the dormitory reserved for first and second year students, and a cupboard space to store my clothes, which were to be neatly folded at all times. The rules insisted on silence when dormitory lights were switched to night lights. Studying under the bedclothes with torches and wandering around at night, unless one needed to go to the toilets, were forbidden.

Coming as I did from a part of the United Kingdom where the accent had a hard edge, adjusting to Montfort was made tougher because my accent set me apart from English pupils. Fellow students subjected me to the usual questions about whether the Irish kept pigs in their kitchens.

Another troubling experience came with discovering the college possessed the De La Salle Brothers’ love of corporal punishment. At the end of my first week, I learned I had been ‘written up’ by a prefect for talking twice while waiting in line to go to the study/library. I was summoned with other boys, mostly newcomers unfamiliar with the rules, to Fr Mc Keever’s personal den. He was a tall, dark, thin man with a five-o’clock shadow, reputed to have a stomach ulcer that made him irritable. When he spoke, I detected a hint of a long-lost Belfast accent. He stood in the centre of his room armed with a leather strap, and his stance reminded me of my days with the De La Salle Brothers. Ready for action, he slapped the strap against one of his hands, anxious to get on with teaching me a lesson. I winced each time the strap made contact with my hands. Fr Clement Marshall, another Belfast priest, assumed Mc Keever’s punishment duties a year later. He would sometimes adjust the angle of a student’s hands to better meet the downward motion of the strap. I decided the two priests mimicked the punishment techniques they experienced in Belfast primary schools decades earlier. Of the two priests, I liked Fr Marshall because he had a sense of humour, was a fine teacher and took a genuine interest in my well-being.

Sport was a big part of the school curriculum, but I was not a natural footballer or cricketer. I enjoyed cricket but lacked the skills to be a competent bowler or batsman. To my surprise, I excelled at tennis and was happy when the nets went up on the playground at Easter.

Academically, I performed well due to my love of literature and reading. I became the go-to person for the youngest students wishing to know which books to borrow from the library. Some boys often inquired if I knew of any ‘risqué’ novels, but the priests had cleansed the library of anything unsuitable for young seminarians. I remember a friend fell in love with Botticelli nudes in a book about European art and spent hours upon hours gazing at them. This hardly surprised me since the only time we ever saw the opposite sex, aside from nuns, was when a small number of locals, one of them an attractive young lady, attended our Sunday Mass to hear us singing Plain Chant or visited our small chapel when we sang monthly Compline and Vespers. I joined the choir when Fr O’Haire took charge because he made choir practice entertaining. He was a tall, lively man with a wonderful bass voice and an ability to draw others into his love of religious music. Sadly, he died of kidney failure in 1998.

One of the things I had to overcome was making my weekly confession face-to-face with a priest I might later see in the classroom and playground. I was uncomfortable going to the priest’s room. I had only known the confession boxes in St Peter’s and Clonard Monastery where wire mesh and darkness separated me from the priests. After some investigation at Montfort, I settled on my literature teacher, Fr Mackrell, who was gentle and eccentric. He spent most of my confessions discussing the literature assignments he set for me. Nevertheless, the days prior to my weekly confession were often laden with inner conflict. Should I confess the sin of masturbation or should I not, I wondered. I didn’t doubt my contemporaries faced the same dilemma, but it was something we never discussed. I soon found creative ways to describe my transgressions by admitting I had ‘impure thoughts’. This generalization covered a host of venial sins of a sexual nature. Fr Mackrell recognised the deception and saved me embarrassment by never reverting to follow-up questions of the type one might get in St Peter’s or Clonard.

During my first year, my grandmother, Margaret Clarke died and so too did Uncle Joe. I was unable to attend their funerals because my parents could not afford to pay my travel costs. Joe died alone of heart failure as he had always feared. Aunt Molly took his little Dachshund, Heine, to live with her and her many cats in London. Uncle Joe’s death had a profound impact on his brother, Gerard, who feared he, too, was destined to die young. In memory of Joe, he painted a work entitled, And the Time Passes to memorialise their closeness. It depicted two masked Pierrots, one in a striped costume and the other in a ghostly white outfit. The Pierrot in the striped costume was waving goodbye to the one in white departing. He placed both figures on a shoreline with a backdrop of sea and sky. The surrealistic images conveyed sadness and gentleness but were also reminders of the pain of mortality.

I saw Uncle Gerard briefly after his brother died, and we talked about Joe’s passing. During our conversation, Uncle Gerard showed an intense interest in my life at Montfort. It amused him to hear about the two Belfast-born priests who dispensed justice. He noted they were definitely admirers of the Irish Catholic teaching method of ‘beating into you what you were unwilling to learn’. When he asked if I was happy living in a seminary, I was somewhat baffled because I had never associated becoming a priest with happiness. Seeing confusion in my silence, he patted me on the shoulder and assured me Montfort was a fine academic place for me to learn the classics.