There was an archdeacon in charge, and below him Sydney, who had the marvellously puritan title of ‘lecturer’. There are only six church lecturers in England. The posts were created by Cromwell and the lecturer’s job was to stand in the market squares of his certain towns and preach a puritanical Protestant sermon once a year. That, and to correct heresy. Bolton was one of the original six towns to have a lecturer assigned to it.
Sydney Leigh Clayton was an academic and treated the traditional duty that went with his title as something of a joke, though it did have an income attached to it.
The similarities between Stanley and Sydney were remarkable. The first had proved an angel at Knowl View, and had looked after me when I was lost and abandoned as a teenager. Now, when I was feeling spiritually lost in Bolton and not certain of my future, there was Sydney Clayton.
He was a very holy person. Gentle, erudite and precise and very friendly, he worked as an examiner for the University of London’s BA degree in Divinity. He also marked O- and A-Level papers.
When I first met Sydney Clayton, he was in his mid-thirties and had sparse, swept-back hair and very white skin. Even though it was the 1970s, he always dressed in very correct Edwardian style and wore a full white-cotton dog collar. He had been educated at Lincoln Theological College, which has a Low Church, broad-minded evangelical tradition, and was a Pembroke College, Oxford classical scholar, an expert in Greek, Hebrew and Latin. A serious academic, but one of the least pretentious people I have ever met.
Following our first meeting, Sydney Clayton invited me to his residence and again I was asked to recount the whole of my religious background. Afterwards, he told me, ‘Don’t worry about anything. The job of the Church is to be welcoming. It’s for everybody. But in a funny way perhaps Colin Craston could be right. The Catholics are wonderful people, you know. Maybe it is correct for you to become a Catholic.’
‘Maybe,’ I replied. ‘But I have this strong urge to join a community – perhaps because I haven’t had a proper family in my life. I’d like to become a monk.’
He didn’t know much about monks at all, he said. ‘They are a kind of strange group in the Church of England, and there are not many of them. They are tiny and slightly freaky,’ he said. I think he was amused by them in a kindly way. ‘They’ll probably rename you Brother Fred,’ he laughed. ‘But by all means write to them.’
He gave me a list of addresses and I wrote to them all, and they all replied. But only one group asked me to visit, and none of them said I could enter. They all felt that at 17 I was too young to make such a commitment.
In response to their letter, I went by coach to Ewell Monastery in Kent, an Anglican Cistercian brotherhood which had been founded in 1966 on a six-acre site close to the village of West Malling. It was all worship and prayer, work and study, and they lived under a very strict regime, almost like silent monks. If I was interested in joining them, I was told, I should get back in touch when I was three years older.
I wasn’t.
‘Well,’ said Sydney Clayton, ‘perhaps it’s time to think again about going back to the Catholic Church. Everything is much more friendly between us these days. We get on very well with one another now. And there is a lot more variety and expression of the kind of thing you are looking for in the Catholic Church. That is where nearly all the religious orders come from. St Francis and St Benedict and the like are all Catholic. I think it’s time you gave the Catholics another chance.’
It was the push I needed.
My first Mass as an adult was in a church next door to a pub, in a very Irish part of Bolton. I went on a Saturday evening and my first impression was that it reeked of alcohol. At six o’clock, they all appeared to be drunk – and happy. The Catholics clearly welcomed sinners as well as saints – and that made it perfect for me.
The priest preached only briefly and was dull and boring, and looked a bit of an old grump, but I enjoyed the silent bits and the mystery. And by the end of that service I felt strongly that I had to talk to a Catholic priest. God, I believed, had led me to Sydney Clayton, and he, in turn, had guided me to this place.
I must have stood on his doorstep for several minutes working up enough courage to ring the bell, but eventually I did, and moments later Father John Ashworth opened the door.
I immediately launched into the story of my life and he held up both hands, palms towards me, in a calming gesture. ‘Listen to me,’ he said. ‘Whoever you are, I think you need a drink.’
He led me through to a little parlour and told me to sit down while he poured me a glass of what I later learned was sweet white Vermouth. It had a very odd taste, but in those days I was virtually a stranger to alcohol of any description and had no idea what anything should taste like. Occasionally I had sipped a little white wine with Mr Thomas, but that was the full extent of my drinking experience.
Once he was satisfied that I was settled, Father John invited me to tell my story. He nodded gently from time to time and when I had finished he smiled at me and said, ‘I think we can sort you out. There is nothing really to talk about. You’re a Catholic. It’s as simple as that, and I’ll show you why.’
He reached into a drawer and brought out a copy of the Penny Catechism, a catechism being a set of questions and answers on religious doctrine. The Penny Catechism contains a hundred or more questions and answers and is very ancient. It is a childlike document but very popular, and Catholics all over the world have been raised on it. There is nothing like it, though a sign of the changing times is that the Penny Catechism now costs £3.
The first question is:‘Who made me?’
Answer:‘God made me.’
Question:‘Why did He make me?’
Answer: ‘To know Him, love Him and serve Him.’
We went through every question and in the end Father John asked me, ‘Is there anything there you disagree with, or have a problem with?’
I shook my head. As we had worked our way through the catechism, I had started to remember it from my childhood at St Osmund’s Primary School. We had learned a lot of it by rote, and now it came flooding back.
Father John became a good friend and counsellor. He was a typical, no-nonsense, old-fashioned Lancashire Catholic priest.
After a couple more sessions in his parlour, with the white Vermouth, he said to me, ‘Michael, all I have to do with you now is to hear your confession. I know you’ve done that as a child but we need to do it again now to restore you fully to Mother Church.’
I thought he would hear my confession there and then, in his parlour, but he said, ‘No.’
He put on his full robes and adornments and led me to the church, which he had to unlock, switched on the lights and took his place inside the little confession box.
I had to kneel down on the other side of the screen, as though I didn’t know who he was, and make my confession.
Afterwards, we turned off the lights, locked the church and returned to his parlour.
I learned later that this was so typical of Father John. He was so wonderfully formal. Very orthodox. Very traditional. Very proper. He didn’t like anything liberal.
We got on very well.
My re-embracing of the Catholic faith officially ended my membership of the Anglican Church, which had lasted exactly three months, and, though I continued my friendship with Sydney Clayton, I never again spoke to Canon Craston. He was a man highly respected in evangelical circles but, because of his uncompromising attitude, was not always popular with his parishioners.
During our regular chats, I had told Father John of my thoughts of becoming a priest or a monk. Like Sydney Clayton, he did not relate too well to monks, but he urged me to seriously consider becoming a priest. They needed priests in the diocese, he said.
I was very happy with his guidance and decided to telephone the Salford diocesan recruiter to arrange a meeting.
There was a local Catholic Directory in the nursing home, which the goldfish-eating rag-and-bone man had br
ought back from one of his daily scavenges, and I searched in there for the number I needed. I wanted the Diocesan Director of Vocations to the priesthood. Inevitably, being me, I picked out the wrong number and found myself speaking to Father Tony Grimshaw, the Diocesan Director of Missions, who arranged to come round and see me.
We met in Nanny’s house, and it says a lot for Father Tony’s charm and personality that she actually offered him refreshments while he was there. She had been disgusted by my switch to the Anglicans and almost speechless when I announced my return to the despised Catholics, and for her to welcome one of the ‘enemy’ into her home was a rare favour.
Father Tony, it turned out, was a Diocesan priest in Manchester who was on loan to the African missions by the Bishop of Salford. He was in his mid-thirties but looked to be still in his early twenties, dashing, energetic and full of enthusiasm. He was a truly dynamic character, very good-looking and with longish, blond hair. His uncle was the Archbishop of Birmingham.
Father Tony explained that he had just come back from a mission in Africa and that they were in urgent need of priests out there.
‘What about priests here?’ I asked.
‘We have plenty of priests here,’ he assured me. ‘What we really need are priests in Africa. That’s what you should think about.’
I hit it off with Father Tony from the outset, and he introduced me to a special Sunday-evening prayer meeting for priests which took place at about eight o’clock, after the usual services, in a church in Bolton run by an enormous man called Monsignor John O’Connor.
There were about 15 priests and me and we would have extemporaneous prayers and sing a few songs. It was not typically Catholic, for we were what is called ‘charismatic’. This was a style which originated in the Pentecostal churches. Happy-clappy, they call it now, and it is very like the black churches in America. This charismatic movement had come into the Catholic Church in the late 1960s.
I had gone from not knowing any Catholic priests to being part of a regular prayer meeting with a whole group of them. After prayers, we would have something to eat and drink and chat to one another. I was extremely happy to be one of them and found I was gradually, and contentedly, becoming more and more deeply immersed in my newly rediscovered religion.
Towards the end of that summer of 1975, shortly after I had turned 18, Tony introduced me to the vocational director, or recruiter, for a French religious order called the Society of African Missions (Sociètè des Missionnaires d’Afrique). In Britain, the SMA’s members were nearly all Irish priests and the recruiter, Father Denis O’Driscoll SMA, came from Cork.
We met in a Bolton pub and, amazingly, he accepted me on the spot.
‘I’m sure you’ll be fine,’ he said. ‘But you have only just become a Catholic and I want to make absolutely certain this is right for you. We’ll try you out in Manchester at the centre for the homeless and the very needy and see how you get on. Our British headquarters is almost next door, so we’ll be able to stay in touch and keep an eye on you. Consider this a sort of preparation.’
So that is how I came to leave my job at the nursing home and join the Morning Star Hostel in Manchester.
Things were moving fast. Too fast perhaps. I was a bit nervous of ending up defenceless in the centre of Africa, surrounded by savagery, snakes and man-eating wild animals.
For my peace of mind, I telephoned the man I had intended to call at the outset, Father Kevin Kenny, Director of Vocations for the Diocese of Salford.
Father Kevin, a traditional priest who always wore a full cassock, was secretary to, and lived in the residence of, the Bishop of Salford, the same one who had confirmed me as a child. I visited Father Kevin there in the Bishop’s House, Wardley Hall, a beautiful Tudor house, and he agreed to help and counsel me if ever I felt the need.
Confident of his support if needed, and encouraged by my prayer-meeting priests in Bolton, I entered the Morning Star Hostel in Nelson Street, Manchester, just a few yards away from the Holy Name Church, where my real mother had taken me to be baptised. Now I found myself going there every Sunday for Mass. It was very odd, almost déja vu. Why, of all places in the world, should I find myself going there for Mass?
It was in Manchester that I met, for the first time, other young men who were about to train for the priesthood. Two young Jesuits were also working in the hostel and we became good friends.
The hostel was a desperate place, run by a lay Catholic movement called the Legion of Mary. They operate nationwide, wherever you find the most vulnerable, the needy and the poorest people. The Legion take collections for them and support them, and in some cases, such as the Morning Star Hostel, provided a shelter run by legionnaires.
It was my first introduction to a formal life. The day would begin at six o’clock with special prayers, followed by meditation and Mass and then breakfast. Some of the homeless would join us for one or more of these sessions.
Then came the work. I helped in the kitchen preparing food or washing up, then in the laundry or changing beds, setting tables, mopping floors or cleaning toilets. I had to be ready to turn my hand to whatever was needed.
There was a big dormitory for the homeless and a large dining hall and everywhere was kept immaculately clean. It was very hard work but somehow we managed to keep the hostel and the residents looking spotless.
The University of Manchester was directly opposite the hostel and some of the undergraduates volunteered to help. One of my jobs was to explain to them what to do. I found myself mixing with a group of serious intellectuals and didn’t feel at all inadequate. Far from it. On some subjects, I even found I knew far more than them.
I would go to a special weekly Mass held in the chaplaincy of the University, presided over by some very trendy priests, and the students believed I was one of them. They saw no difference and I felt their equal. These were heady times for me.
They would talk of Descartes, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and Wittgenstein and I could converse on them all knowledgeably and often with far more understanding and a deeper interpretation of their philosophies.
I was also expected to know a great deal about the Catholic Church, which was difficult as I had only just become a member. I carried dozens of scribbled notes in my pockets and somehow I managed to get through. I am ashamed to say, though, that occasionally I made up the answers.
I was expected to say the Rosary every night, and I didn’t even know the Rosary. Some nights I was charged with reading the prayers and even had trouble with that. A rummage through my notes usually provided an answer of sorts.
That three-month period between September and Christmas was one of the happiest I can remember. The work was manual and didn’t involve any thinking and I had nothing at all to worry about.
My excitement at being told, early in December, that I had been accepted by the Society of African Missions as a candidate and would be starting on a pre-seminary course at college in January was also tinged with regret to be leaving such a happy environment as the Morning Star Hostel.
St Mary’s College was in Aberystwyth, halfway up the west coast of Wales on Cardigan Bay. It was run by Carmelite friars who wear the full habit with hood. Many of the Catholic orders and some of the dioceses send their students there if they feel they need a certain amount of preparation before entering a seminary. Some students were there for one or even two years, others for just a term or two.
The man in charge of the college was Father Prior Flanagan, an absolutely ferocious Irishman, known to everyone as ‘Spuds’, and I think he was wary of me from the start because he didn’t consider me a proper Catholic.
One of the first students I palled up with was Alan, a graduate who was enrolled for a year to do further studies. He was a former strict Welsh Baptist and as an ex-Baptist myself we hit it off tremendously and quickly became the best of friends.
Our friendship was soon noted by the Prior Flanagan and he summoned me to his office.
‘You are not to ass
ociate with Alan,’ he told me bluntly. ‘He is not a proper Catholic and you are not a proper Catholic, so you must not associate. You must only associate with proper Catholics who have been Catholics all their lives.’
If I disobeyed him, he said, he would throw me out.
It was an irresistible challenge to both Alan and I, and we continued to meet secretly in various parts of town. We shared an interest in other denominational churches and visited most of them in Aberystwyth. College rules insisted we wear cassocks most of the time, so it was virtually impossible to make ourselves invisible, even in a crowd.
Alan was slightly eccentric and suggested we leave little medals of Mary, called ‘Miraculous Medals’, in the fonts, pulpits and pews of all the churches we visited, partly as a calling card and partly in the slight hope that we might convert their congregations. It was wonderful, harmless fun.
We also used to enjoy a drink in the local pubs and would often be late back to college after the doors were locked. But even in our cassocks it was not difficult to climb in through one of the windows and we became very adept at sneaking in and out after dark.
Alan is now a highly respected monk and I am a friar, but in those days in 1976 we were just two silly young people doing the kind of silly things young people have done for centuries.
It was inevitable, of course, that someone from college would spot us together and report us to the Father Prior, and that is exactly what happened.
Father Flanagan was almost apoplectic with rage. He ranted and raved at me for a good 15 minutes and I felt like a little schoolboy back in primary school, expecting him at any moment to produce a cane and command me to bend over.
He did write a letter of complaint to the Mission directors in Manchester, but in their kind wisdom they chose to take no further action. I do believe, though, that they, and certainly Father Flanagan, did not approve of my dabbling with other orders.
During the Easter break at Aberystwyth, I arranged to stay with the Dominican friars in Oxford for a week. I had met a Dominican priest who was also residing at St Mary’s College and his stories had roused my interest in his order.
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