Nobody's Child (16 page)

T
hough the story of my childhood ended when I was 17, the story of my road to manhood and my chosen vocation within the Catholic Church had only just begun.

It was not a simple route I took. In fact, my journey towards God was rather like navigating a
three-dimensional
maze of mirrors with a constantly moving centre.

It was a fascinating journey, full of wonderful characters, often funny, sometimes difficult and occasionally quite terrifying. As in any great maze, there were dead ends and false trails and tempting openings to lure me in the wrong direction.

But I never lost my belief that it was God who was guiding my footsteps and that, if I listened to Him, I must ultimately arrive at the right destination.

My first steps towards God were faltering and uncertain. I did not know even if I was heading in the right direction. I was still only 17 and working in the nursing home in Bolton when I made my first moves towards breaking with the strict and particular Baptists. I had experienced the heavy influences of liberalism and universality and no longer wanted to belong to a tiny and exclusive sect.

Mr Thomas, my teacher at Knowl View School, had broadened my concepts and I had begun to develop a stronger faith as a Christian. But I needed to find some expression and wasn’t sure where to direct it, and in my search I turned first to the Anglican Church.

The obvious choice was Bolton Parish Church, which was close to where we lived, but when I walked in I was completely overwhelmed. It is an enormous church, about the size of Canterbury Cathedral, and I found it almost frightening.

Much better, I thought, to ease my way in with something more manageable and I plumped for St Paul’s, a smaller church conveniently sited by the main bus stop in Bolton market. St Paul’s was deeply evangelical, which was extremely Low Church, and fitted well with the traditions I had already adopted from the Salvation Army and the Baptists.

Canon Colin Craston was a committed Low Church
man and one of the leaders of the evangelical tradition in Britain. A tough, uncompromising man. At least, sadly, that’s the way he came across to me.

After my first visit to St Paul’s I asked if we could talk and he sat me down there and then in a pew and told me to say my piece. My account of my somewhat complex religious background, which ended with my baptism, by full immersion, into the Baptist Church, took me almost an hour, and he listened patiently, in silence, until I had finished.

His first comment took me completely by surprise. ‘You, Michael, are a Catholic.’

I said, ‘I’m certainly not. Catholics aren’t Christians.’

I noticed he didn’t bother to disagree with this statement, but he repeated, ‘You are a Catholic. Were you baptised?’

‘Yes,’ I replied. ‘I now understand that I was baptised a Catholic as a baby.’

‘Well, you’re a Catholic then.’

I reminded him I had been baptised a Baptist when I was 15. Didn’t that cancel out what had happened to me as a baby?

‘No,’ he told me. ‘You’re definitely still a Catholic.’

‘I know what I am and it’s not that,’ I insisted. ‘I really don’t care what you think I am, but what I want to be is a member of the Church of England.’

Strangely, had it not been for that mad conversation with Canon Craston, I would not have actually considered universality in the sense that the word ‘Catholic’ means
universal. One evening that week, and in the week that followed, he insisted on my spending time at his residence, listening to him expound on the differences between Catholics and Anglicans. It made not a scrap of difference to him how much I protested that this wasn’t necessary. That I had been considering becoming a Baptist pastor and had attended Bible College at Birkenhead on several weekends with that aim in mind.

‘I am an evangelical,’ I kept telling him. ‘I am not a Catholic, so why are you wasting our time giving me all the differences?’

The result of these lectures was really hilarious. He hammered home the differences between the two churches so convincingly that I ended up thinking to myself, My God, the Catholic Church actually appears more attractive.

But by this time the good canon had determined that I should be formally received into his church in the middle of Evensong, to publicly recant my belief in the Catholic Church.

‘You will have to denounce the heresies of the Church of Rome in front of the whole congregation,’ he said.

I was as nervous as any other 17-year-old and I certainly didn’t want to let him down, but I had to protest. ‘I’ve already told you that I’m not a Catholic and I don’t really want to renounce being what I’m not, either privately or publicly.’

‘You were baptised as a baby and you have to do it,’ he said.

I suddenly realised that, to him, my conversion had become a political as well as a personal issue. I couldn’t conceive that any Roman Catholic in Bolton had ever renounced his faith publicly and become an Anglican. This wasn’t a normal happening. It was more like something out of Oliver Cromwell’s times.

At this point, I had decided that I didn’t want to go through with the ceremony. But I did it anyway – out of fear. I also had a horror of letting people down.

Nor were my fears eased by the reaction of my local Baptist pastor when I told him I was about to join the Church of England.

‘You will be leading souls to hell if you become an Anglican,’ he warned me.

The thought flashed into my mind: perhaps I had better go for gold and become a Catholic, then I can really lead them to hell.

On that dreadful Sunday when Canon Craston called me forward to the altar, I felt that I was walking towards a gallows. He had a whole list of things I had to denounce, half of which I didn’t totally understand the meaning of.

‘Do you denounce the teachings of Rome, which are contrary to Scripture?’

‘I do.’

‘Do you abhor belief in Mary?’

‘I do.’

On and on it went, until finally he welcomed me into the Church of England.

When it was all over, I was doubly certain that I did not want to remain an Anglican. If this was the Church of England, I wanted none of it.

Ironically, though, it was his trying to make me an Anglican which brought me back to the Catholic Church.

In the midst of all this nonsense, I felt I had to talk to someone else about what was happening. I continued attending St Paul’s for two more Sundays.

Instead, I plucked up my courage and went to a service at St Peter’s, the vast and intimidating parish church, and there I met the lovely, almost saintly Reverend Sydney Clayton, who turned out to be Stanley Thomas’s intellectual double. He was a progressive Anglican and really rather grand, and was the number two at St Peter’s.

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.