Chris geraghty's new book, another review. (Main Forum)

Dancing with the Devil: another review of Chris Geraghty’s new book.

There is a long list of books on Catholicism in Australia. Eris O’Brien wrote the story of John Joseph Therry. Then in the 1960s Ronald Fogarty, James Murtagh, Patrick O’Farrell and John Moloney wrote histories that made claims about what we were like. O’Farrell said we were Irish. Moloney said that we were formed in a Roman mould. He meant that our bishops were mostly Roman trained and so subservient to Rome. I haven’t read him for ages but I think it was he who pointed out that most of our bishops have been canon lawyers. And you know all the jokes about lawyers (canon and civil): they lack imagination, scruple, decency and most of the virtues. Moloney didn’t say all this of course but he might have. We have had some very ordinary bishops!

Then there were the novels. Keneally’s A Place at Whitton, Three Cheers for the Paraclete and the films, Schepisi’s The Devil’s Playground, and the plays, Ron Blair’s The Christian Brother, and the ABC’s Brides of Christ. Then there were the memoirs, Rockchoppers by Ed Campion and the 'why I left the priesthood' stories. Michael Parer who writes here was one of, maybe the first.

‘Growing up Catholic in Australia’ and ‘Why I left the Church’ became genres in Australian writing. Around the same time feminists who had been educated in Catholic girls’ schools and a few feminists who had been or still were nuns wrote books or founded journals that questioned the Church on any number of fronts.

Eris O’Brien, Ronald Fogarty, James Murtagh and Patrick O’Farrell wrote basically celebratory books. They wanted to record what Catholics had accomplished in Australia. Moloney was not so sure. He had suffered at the hands of bishops (both real ones and proxy ones – read ‘B. A. Santamaria’ - and monsignors) and he was blowing the whistle.

Like a state of origin football match the whistle has blown loudly and often ever since.

Until about 1970 Catholics in Australia were mostly Irish descended working class Catholic school educated obedient folk. We were part of an ideology that taught us what to think and how to behave. Children, boys much more than girls entered seminaries and juniorates aged twelve or thirteen. The girls entered novitiates but usually they waited a bit and were more mature for the experience. The boys entered in significant numbers and they were pre-pubescent and innocent. There they were trained by people who had lived a similar lifestyle. Some were sadly still pre-pubescent even though mature aged.

They all lived in a Church that for more than a hundred years had been turned inward. Like George W Bush’s ‘War on Terror’ they were part of an organisation at war with a concept. The Church was at war with ‘modernism’. Modernism is extremely hard to define, as terrorism is. The advantage of being at war with a concept is that the generals can include in the list of enemies anyone who disagrees with them.

Leaders in this situation teach people what to think never how to think. Children who enter novitiates and seminaries in this kind of regime are particularly disadvantaged. They enter in innocence and believe most of what they are told. When the punishment for disobedience is eternal damnation they are especially trapped. These kinds of regimes encourage and reward bullies and bullies rise to the top of them. Bullies who claim to have a direct line to God are especially lethal.

That the Church in Australia was of Irish descent did not help here. The Irish were oppressed for centuries. As in many oppressed societies violence and bullying were part of their modus operandi. Not all the Irish were violent of course but there was violence in the Church.

It was also the case that for some poor Irish entering the clergy was a step up in class. Poor farm boys not well educated and with no depth of culture often entered the seminary and often did well. Many of them migrated to Australia where they passed on their clerical culture. Some of them also took on some of the worst aspects of Australian macho culture.

The Australian Catholic clergy were not on the whole well educated. They built big but not beautiful, it’s an Irish thing and they are still doing it there. They wrote nothing of consequence. They taught nothing imaginative or unusual. They were pope’s men. They were men’s men, often kind but seldom thought provoking. They lived in an alien world but while their flocks were also uneducated, poor and second class they maintained their power.

There is a truism in academia that says, “The reason academics fight so viciously about what seem trivial matters is that there is so little to fight about and the rewards are so paltry.” People with small ambitions often fight fiercely to attain them. Without picking on anyone, being bishop of Wilcannia Forbes is hardly a big ambition. Being parish priest at Koorawatha is not a big job though it might sound so to a little Irish mother in County Clare. But in a small system you’d be surprised how people will fight to get such jobs.

Chris Geraghty’s new book Dancing with the Devil needs to be seen in the context of what has gone before and in the light of his two earlier books Cassocks in the Wilderness and The Priest Factory.

First a few technical things about Dancing with the Devil. It might have been better edited. There are typos, and repetition. The tone is not consistent. He is sometimes scholarly sometimes crude though mostly he is a good story teller. The inconsistency could easily have been ironed out. The links between topics and chapters are not always smooth. Occasionally Geraghty is sarcastic and sarcasm is never good writing.

These complaints aside I found the book hard to put down. The anger that is more evident in the first two books has dissipated. This is a good thing. There is no point getting angry it just gets in the way of your grieving lost opportunities and then getting on with your life.

I know or knew many of the people he mentions. I stopped going to Mass at Eastwood because of Jack Hasler’s ockerism and shallowness. He died spectacularly though. For his seventieth birthday he asked for and was given a sailboard. He was out on the waves with it, had a heart attack and was dead when they brought him in. Our son who was sixteen at the time was very impressed.

At least once I attended a Mass Geraghty celebrated and he was very good at it. Though I was a brother not a priest his story is much like my own though fortunately I did not meet the bullies and main- chancers he did. Brothers had community life and for all their toughness could be gentle and supportive. I did meet people who didn’t want us to think and others who played political games but as I was ‘only a teacher’ or ‘only a brother’ I was no threat to them.

I had a contact with Frank Mecham once or twice. I once attended a school where Mecham was parish priest. He perplexed the school principal the day before a school Mass by telling her that she was to tell the girls that unless they had been to Mass on the preceding Sunday they were not to go to communion at the school Mass. “I do not want girls in mortal sin coming to communion,” he said.

In 1964 I was the young brother in a community where one of the old brothers loved to attend speech nights of Christian Brothers’ schools. He would not go alone and no one else would go with him so I attended every speech night in Sydney and at nearly all of them then Bishop James Freeman gave the address. He was a Christian Brothers’ old boy. At every one he told the same story. During the Roman persecutions (he meant Nero persecuting the Christians not the CDF persecuting theologians!) Polycarp was a deacon who was being marched out to be eaten by the lions. As he was marched through the streets he began to have second thoughts. He was shaking with fear. But one of the other Christians said to him, “Bear up Polycarp and play the man.” Polycarp died bravely as a result. Christian Brothers’ boys were encouraged to do the same. As well as boxing at Sydney Stadium James freeman also liked watching Easts play rugby league at the Sports Ground.

When I was a child all the priests I knew were Irish. They were remote men who lacked humour and as far as I know never visited the poor or the ordinary folk in the town. They were good men I presume but I felt alienated by them. I cannot remember a friendly word or ever learning anything from them except how to serve at Mass (and then it was often a rude complaint when we got it wrong). I had not the slightest urge to join them. This was a similar experience when I first began teaching in Sydney.

Luckily I then went to Canberra where people like the young Pat Power, Laurie Blake, Denis Nickle and many others turned out to be good men who were priests rather than ‘priests’. I worked with these men in YCS and other projects and am deeply grateful. I also came across the MSC priests. They were a bit outrageous, a law unto themselves. They seemed to be often in trouble with the Archbishop Thomas Cahill but it didn’t seem to worry them. I learnt from several of them and found them encouraging though some of them were not especially good school men.

I left home and joined the Brothers aged fifteen. Then the 1960s and 70s happened. There was a liturgical revival. I was lucky because in Strathfield at the Christian Brothers it was in full swing. I was also lucky because several of my teachers Columba Davy and Chris Harris especially broadened and opened my mind. They set me onto reading good literature and eventually good theology. When one day I said enthusiastically that the head brothers always seemed to get decisions right Chris Harris said to me, “You poor innocent boy!” The Imitation of Christ says that the habit does not make the monk. In my case long trousers did not make the man.

Strathfield was not Paris but when Geraghty talks of what he was learning in Paris I am envious but also feel the excitement of recognition. We were singing Gelineau too. Some of my training was insane but I would say of 1961-63 what Wordsworth said of his youth:

OH! pleasant exercise of hope and joy!
For mighty were the auxiliars which then stood
Upon our side, we who were strong in love!
Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
But to be young was very heaven!

But for us, as with Wordsworth the experience did not last. In Australia too many people had too much to lose and too many others, often in high positions in the Church did not have the first clue about what was going on but they still tried to stop it.

Eventually I worked in the Catholic Education Office. There I was perplexed by the official Church’s attitude to priests. Men ‘in the service’ were privileged. Some could get away with almost anything. Some were appointed to jobs in education, not because they could teach or because they knew about education but because they were priests. They seldom knew what they were doing and they did not have the confidence of the teachers and educators they supervised. I occasionally had to contact priests and was amazed at how bad mannered many of them were. I suspect now that they were threatened. Some were just mad. I was also surprised how uneducated some of them were, even men of quite high status.

I worked in the CEO at a time when many priests were leaving. We were at first forbidden to employ former priests as teachers. When Chris Geraghty applied to teach at Castle Hill Teachers’ College he had no chance (or as one of my old teachers used say, “You have two chances Son, Buckley’s and none”). As a former priest, even had he been the only applicant he would have not got the job. And then he would have been spun a yarn, as he was about ‘many applicants, some of them with books published by Oxford University Press’ etc.

Ironically one or two men were employed because they were priests (he’ll be able to help with Masses etc) rather than because they were the best qualified applicant and then left the priesthood leaving their employers in the lurch. Oh well!

Later ex priests were employed but could not be promoted. Finally the MSCs in Canberra employed one of their own former priests as Principal of Daramalan College but then they were always ahead of the game. We were told of one bishop who said we were not to employ ex priests, dispensation or not because he did not want them to get the idea they could leave the priesthood and easily pick up a job. I suppose the silly man thought that priests staying because they were frightened to leave were somehow a good idea.

And most Sydney trained priests had no tradable qualifications. As Geraghty shows much of their education from the seminary was useless anyway. It had not taught them to think or read or question. I knew ex priests who were doing menial jobs, some loving it even though earning a pittance because at least they were free, but mostly vastly underemployed yet not qualified to do anything else. These men were done a grave injustice.

In the earlier books in which Geraghty was angry it might not have helped his soul but he had plenty to be angry about.

Some things in the book are seriously disturbing. The innocent boy in me despite Chris Harris’ surprise so long ago still wants to believe that Church is a holy place where justice, goodness, prudence and love prevail. All my experience still does not make it easy to read of the depredations of Vince Kiss. Recently I looked through the list of miscreants named by Broken Rites and was surprised how many of them I know or knew or worked with at one time. I am still amazed t how many priests there are on the list.

I appreciate that Chris Geraghty felt stymied by what he found out about sexually abusive priests. We were innocents abroad and as Ted Kennedy observed so wisely they tried to keep us like that. I know old men who will not answer the phone and say “Christian Brothers”. They are too ashamed of what some of their men have done.

That some people in high positions knew and covered up makes their shame worse. They were lied to and it is hard when you no longer trust the people in authority.

There are things in the book I enjoyed too, not just because they reminded me of so much of my own history. His information on Ireneus prompts me to follow him up. His list of people he admires is largely like my own. His list of people he does not admire, likewise. I am tempted to read more of Congar and De Lubac. I am encouraged that others think of JPII, for example as I do.

I began by putting Geraghty’s book in a context of Catholic writing. Last year I saw an article of Ed Campion’s saying that no one had yet written a biography of Archbishop James Carroll. I had a rush of blood to the head (or somewhere!) and thought I might try it. I even told Ed I’d thought of it. He was helpful and encouraging as he always is but I quickly realised that I don’t have the energy or the desire.

Reading Chris Geraghty’s account of Carroll I realise that even if I did have the energy it would be a toxic place for me to go. I cannot dredge around in Catholic clerical politics without getting soiled and I doubt it is a good place for anyone who wants to tell the truth. You’d need to be Geoffrey Chaucer. It would be better to wait for a hundred years as Rome should have done with JPII’s beatification until people can get some perspective on our time and its people (if anyone is still interested) or just leave it all alone.

Someone has claimed that the Australian Catholic church was an Irish colony. That sounds about right. Ronald Fogarty, James Murtagh, Patrick O’Farrell and to a much lesser extent John Moloney were the chroniclers of that Irish colony or that branch of the Roman Empire, whichever you prefer.

One of the features of the natives’ response to being colonised by the Irish is that we have responded to it with stories, films, plays and poetry. Thomas Keneally, Edmund Campion, Fred Schepisi, Ron Blair, Michael Parer and Chris Geraghty and others are chroniclers of what affect it all had on us. Women-Church Journal, WATAC and other groups have told us what effect it had on women. Like good story tellers everywhere they are telling us the truth of it.

There are Aboriginal people in Australia who make fun of us Europeans. They use mythic language and jokes so that we do not catch on. Who can blame them? Bullies, power brokers, and main chancers don’t catch on to stories and jokes. They think that a command barked from on high or a few shots fired over the heads will fix things up. They don’t notice the natives are laughing at them.

This book is laughing at them. They won’t catch on. They will just wonder why everything has gone quiet all of a sudden and why everyone has noiselessly walked away.