Henry and Cato (6 page)

At a certain time his superiors decided to give Cato a change of scene, and he, in the harmony of his mind with his priesthood, found himself wanting exactly what they were now proposing. Without yet leaving the shelter of the community house where he had lived hitherto, Cato took up a visiting role in a poor east end district of London upon the confines of Limehouse and Poplar. ‘You'll be shocked, you know', Brendan had told him. ‘Nothing can shock me', said Cato. But he had been shocked. He had been frightened, frightened of his penitents, frightened of the dumb failure of his authority, and at a world where news of Christ had never come and, as it often seemed, could never come. ‘I was in prison and you visited me' had lost its charm. Cato could sometimes discern no light at all in those whom he devoutly attempted to love. He saw for the first time the wilfulness of vice as a part of everyday life, and the way in which despair and vice were one. Just beyond the confines of ordinariness there were places where love could not enter; it was as if the concept broke. Cato knew perfectly well that the power of God could pass through the broken concept, and that this was the lesson which it most behoved him to learn. He measured now how cloistered he had been by his father's clean idealism. Perhaps it was this very breaking point that he had been seeking when he fled away into Christ. He prayed ceaselessly and hoped to find some blinded understanding in his prayer as he brought it with him into scenes where he knew himself to be powerless, detested, or even (worst of all) a figure of fun! Yet in the midst of it there were families, especially Irish families, who took him absolutely for granted. ‘Ah, here's Father come. Sit down now, Father, will you have some tea?'

In the course of those adventures he made only one friend, a local secular priest called Father Milsom, an old man who had lived for many years in the east end, and who regarded Cato as an innocent child. Cato was glad of this new paternity, and soon told Father Milsom all about his own father and the quarrel and his hopes in Christ that it would end one day. Father Milsom was not very optimistic, but even his realism was to Cato like a kind of hope. Sometimes in the late evenings he met Brendan and told his ‘day'. Brendan had worked in the slums of Manchester and Cato found it impossible to astonish him. He talked to his friend and confessor about his discoveries and his fears. ‘All the same, one has such great power in the confessional'. ‘
You
have no power.' ‘Confession becomes a kind of collusion.' ‘Of course it does. Just try to leave one little unassimilable grain of truth behind.' ‘They confess, and carry on, in fact they confess
to
carry on!' ‘Who can say what draws them to confession. God's grace is everywhere.' ‘Christ is with these people, he is in these people, in the most violent, most criminal ones, but sometimes it's impossible to see Him there.' ‘Just see Him, look at Him. He will give you the light.' ‘You said I'd be shocked. The misery doesn't shock, it's the vice that shocks. I thought I'd seen it all already in myself, but I hadn't. And do you know—Father Bell used to say that wickedness was dull, but it isn't, it's rather exciting.' ‘It seems exciting. The place where one can see it as it is is above our level.'

Just as Cato was beginning to feel less awkward in his duties a new idea was mooted. The order had acquired the lease of a house in Paddington, and a priest whom Cato knew slightly, an enthusiast called Gerald Dealman, wanted to set up a little community of priests to live there with the people and share their lives, perhaps even work with them. Cato was delighted when Gerald asked him if he would like to join in. That had been a year ago; and the ‘Mission', as the local people called it, had come into being. In the original plan there were to have been three resident priests and a visiting Sacred Heart nun. The third priest, an eccentric called Reggie Poole, was present during the initial period of house-renovation and settling in, but afterwards mysteriously disappeared and was later said to have been sent to Japan. The Sacred Heart changed their mind about sending a nun, perhaps as a result of something which they had heard about Reggie. Gerald and Cato ran the Mission very haphazardly, each with his own kind of zeal. Cato in fact found it rather hard to get on at such close quarters with his brother in Christ, who was far from efficient and never stopped talking. However, after the Mission had existed for some time and was certainly a going concern, Gerald too disappeared from the strength after a punch-up with a penitent, an incident obscure in origin which landed Gerald in hospital with a broken jaw. After this it became clear that the enterprise must be either rescued or abandoned. The local authority conveniently decided about this time that it wanted to pull down the whole street, so the project was able to end without any awful stigma of failure.

The Mission had indeed, for all that it existed in a state of unparalleled muddle, not been entirely unsuccessful. ‘They'll love us!' Gerald had shouted. Cato had thought it more likely that they would be ignored or mocked. But, whether because Gerald and Reggie were so picturesque or because Cato was more experienced, the priests found themselves quite popular. There was a great difference between visiting a poor area and going home to a clean book-lined room, and living in a poor area night and day. It was now impossible to escape from people. The Mission became a centre not only for Catholics but for all sorts of people who were in trouble, wanting spiritual or temporal advice, or a chance to sponge on somebody or steal something. The simple worldly possessions of the Mission, saucepans, crockery, cutlery, linen, blankets, transistor sets, even books, began to disappear during the first two months. In the early days, on principle, they never locked the door; later on they took to locking up simply in order to preserve a kit for survival. Cato, forced to be a one man citizens' advice bureau, became expert on all sorts of practical matters concerning supplementary benefits, rent rebates, tenancy agreements, hire purchase, legal costs, insurance and how to fill in tax forms. He had felt disappointed at first that so little time seemed to be spent talking seriously to people and getting to know them. He would have liked to bring the reality of Christ to those whom he saw sunk in misery or upon the slippery edges of crime. Later he was too busy and too tired to worry about such matters or to seek to make opportunities for such ‘serious talk'. He went on hearing confessions but now did not experience the worries he had confided to Brendan. He celebrated mass every day, sometimes almost alone, at a side altar in the big local church. His time came to be spent, especially after Gerald's departure, more with atheistic social workers and less with fellow catholics or ‘devotional' people.

During this year Cato had felt himself changing. He felt like a plant growing yet not able to be conscious of what the changes were which were daily taking place in its form and texture. He began to feel more independent, more individualistic, less, in his relation to the Church, like a child. He took to wearing a cassock all the time, unusual for a Roman priest, arguing to Brendan that if Reggie Poole could go about looking like a hippy, he could at least sport a black robe if he pleased. He felt independent, but, amid his many clients, solitary. ‘You'll miss us', Brendan had said. He did. It was the first time since he had joined the family of his order that he had been on his own. Of course there was, for a time, Gerald, but his mild alienation from his companion made him feel more alone. He thought a lot about his father and wished that that wound could be healed, he thought about his sister and wished that he could see her more often. The local parish priest, Father Thomas, provided no company, since he had from the start regarded the Mission as a wrong-headed adventure and an intrusion on his territory. The secular priest and the monkish priest are always likely to be at loggerheads, since the former regards the latter as decorative rather than useful, while the latter can hardly help feeling superior and ‘more dedicated'. The general practitioner and the specialist are natural enemies. Father Thomas thought that Cato, Gerald, Reggie and the other members of their order were spoilt idle over-educated prigs, always off on holidays to monasteries abroad, always blowing in and out of places where the real work was done, drinking sherry and showing off their knowledge of Latin and Greek and of the finer points of theology. While Cato tended to find Father Thomas's conversation rather dull, and resented his assumption that Cato was a frivolous amateur. Of course Cato and Father Thomas, being decent sincere men of God, recognized their prejudices as prejudices. But this did not stop them from quietly feuding.

The majority of the people who came to the Mission were uneducated, some of them illiterate. This did not surprise Cato who had already learnt how in a rich and civilized society large numbers of citizens can be not only miserably poor, but unable to read a newspaper. Of course he had not come to Paddington to keep cultivated company or enjoy luxuries of private contemplation. It was now difficult for Cato to follow any strict regular devotional routine, since in the house he could never rely on being alone even at night. But he knew that a priest must maintain his life of prayer against the unceasing clamour of the world, making his cell of solitude even in crowded streets or underground trains. Thus prayer is strengthened and deepened; and he had seen in Father Milsom the results of a life-time which indissolubly combined trivial nagging practical activity with an absolute quietness in the presence of God. Cato hoped soberly and confidently for grace, the power when tested to live more deeply in and through the ground of his being.

When this hope seemed to be disappointed Cato was not at first alarmed. He ascribed the spiritual dullness which he felt to all sorts of natural causes, tiredness, lack of solitude, the irritations of his exposed existence or simply to the mysterious rhythms which, as he already knew, govern the spiritual life. The dullness, the blankness was a phase which would pass. It was just proving harder than he had expected to enjoy loving Christ without more frequent
tête-à-tête.
However the phase did not pass, and Cato woke up one morning with the absolute conviction that he had been mistaken and that there was no God. The conviction faded; but from that moment Cato began to treat himself carefully, almost tenderly, like someone who has discovered in himself the symptoms of a serious disease, and for whom the world in consequence is totally altered. Brendan came on a flying visit. Cato said to him, ‘Oh by the way, I've lost my faith.' ‘Rubbish.' ‘God is gone. There is no God, no Christ, nothing.' ‘I expected this.' ‘You expect everything.' ‘That darkness comes to us all.' ‘I knew you'd say that. But suppose the darkness is real, true?' ‘Hold on.' Brendan went away, then wrote him a wonderful letter, but the darkness persisted.

It was all very well for Brendan, born into a Catholic family, educated at Downside, inhaling the faith with his first breath. Those born Catholics were a different breed. Faith had never been a problem for Cato. It had been absent. Then it had been present. He had not questioned it any more than he questioned the daylight. Now when it suddenly seemed to have been withdrawn he wondered if he had ever really had it at all. Had it all been utterly
private,
a subjective experience, something like a drug-induced hallucination? Or perhaps the real experience of faith was, for him, just beginning? His sense of living in and with Christ had been so positive that there had almost been no room for the concept of faith. Was he now, after so many years, just reaching the start? Or had he simply woken up from a happy dream? Brendan, to whom he talked at more length on a second occasion, did not brush his doubts aside, but said things which Cato had already said to himself about ‘the dark night of the soul.' Cato would have liked to talk now to Father Milsom or to Father Bell, but Father Milsom was ill and Father Bell had gone to Canada.

Of course during this sudden and unexpected period of change Cato contrived to do his work at the Mission, so much of which made no explicit reference to Godly matters. He watched the atheistic social workers, now his colleagues. Several of them impressed him very much indeed. They had no faith. They probably had no exalted feelings of love or care, no sense of companionship with a higher world; they just functioned as efficient machines, tireless tending rescuing endlessly looking-after machines. Cato in spirit bowed down to the ground before them. They were professionals. He took on no fresh penitents and only when unavoidable heard the confessions of those who had by now come to rely on him. He went on celebrating mass each day, but the mass was dead to him, seemed literally dead, as if each morning he were handling some dead creature. He stood at the altar excluded, blind, unable to give any devotional expression to the anguish which he felt.

The decision, not taken by Cato, to close the Mission, was both welcome and unwelcome to him. He was beginning to feel all the pain of being in a false position, of being almost an untruthful lying teacher, a charlatan. He wanted to get away from all these people who took him for granted as a priest, and in their naïve way for a good man. On the other hand, what would happen to him now when at last he had time to think? Practical hard work, preoccupation, constant demands and lack of privacy had so far prevented him from fully facing and investigating his doubts. Suppose now when he was able to give the matter his whole consideration he were to decide, irrevocably and without appeal, that there was no God? So far muddle and procrastination had made the horror of it bearable. Easter, just over, had been a bad dream, but he had managed to get through it in a state of double-thinking. To Brendan, who was still his confessor, he had communicated a rather subdued version of his doubts, but so far he had told nobody else, and Brendan, who now took the line of ‘jollying him along' and calling him a ‘poor old protestant,' had not yet revealed his plight. Cato was now to be officially on holiday, visiting his father. After that there would be no more interim, after that he would have to decide, or indeed, whatever happened would have decided. Would he stagger on, consenting, concealing, doubting, half-believing, feverishly reshaping the dogma so as to save his honesty? Many priests did this. Or would he, as it now seemed, destroy himself by leaving the house of Christ? Or would there be a miracle which would renew his faith?