It was hard for Adrian to convince his parents that he had to leave for the Charleroi Fathers’ junior seminary in the new year. His mother asked why he hadn’t mentioned his vocation in all his years at secondary school. His father said no boy could observe the rules of a religious order if he couldn’t even obey a few simple rules in his own house. And he reminded Adrian of all the fights he had with his brothers and the smart answers he gave his parents.

Adrian worked on them for days. He had two main arguments. First he made them recall the Sunday afternoons when he was only seven or eight and they all lived in the western suburbs. As soon as the Sunday dinner was over he used to spread a tea towel over the dressing table in his bedroom and celebrate mass. He wore a towel for a chasuble. His chalice was a two-handled sugar basin half-full of cold tea. The hosts were Life Saver lollies. He read aloud the Latin prayers from his Sunday missal while his parents peeped around the door at him. Sometimes they knelt in front of him at communion time and received a Life Saver each on their tongues and went away with their heads bowed.

While his parents were thinking this over, he made them read a paragraph he had found in a story about Blessed Peter Julian Eymard, the founder of the Blessed Sacrament Fathers.

‘The man who was to give his life to spreading devotion to the Blessed Eucharist showed at a tender age unmistakable signs of his future vocation. As a small child he would dress himself like a priest and reverently imitate the ceremonies he had witnessed at mass, even piping the Latin in his boyish voice.’

Adrian’s mother was impressed, but his father said if you took a monkey to mass often enough it would start to imitate the priest when you put it back in its cage.

Adrian’s second argument was to remind them of the quiet thoughtful life he had led for the past few years. While other boys of his age were at the pictures or at dances, he was always reading in his room or meditating in the back shed. He knew he was deceiving them. Most of his time alone he had been thinking of journeys across America or his marriage to Denise. But the circumstances of his vocation were so unusual that no one would have believed the true story.

Once again his mother became thoughtful. But his father said that was just the point, that Adrian had led a sheltered life and some priest had got at him and persuaded him to leave the world before he even knew what he was giving up.

Adrian was ready for this objection. He took the vocations pamphlet of the Charleroi Fathers out of his pocket and read a paragraph aloud.

Satan’s trump card, if you let him play it, is that you should first have a taste of life. ‘How do you know you can give up the pleasures of life, until you try them?’ How many a splendid vocation has been destroyed through a taste of life! Because the real intention of the devil is to lead you to have, not a taste of life but a taste of sin. Do you go into the infectious disease block to see if your health can fight off the germs? If you want to have first a taste of life you have nothing to gain, but a divine vocation to lose forever.

That stopped Mr Sherd for a while. But Adrian wished he could have assured his father that he knew exactly what he was giving up. Adrian had tasted all that life could offer—first, unbridled sensuality and then the joys of a Catholic marriage. And he had given it all up one morning without a second thought.

In the end it was his Aunt Kathleen who won his parents over. She had found from the telephone directory that the Charleroi Fathers had a small house in Melbourne, a stopping place for priests conducting missions in Victoria. She telephoned the place and a priest explained that Adrian would study the New South Wales Leaving Honours course at the junior seminary. At the end of his year there, he could return home if he found he wasn’t suited to the Charleroi life. Then, if he wanted to go to Melbourne University, his New South Wales certificate would be as good as a Victorian matriculation pass.

Adrian was never sure, but he believed his aunt had promised to pay for all his expenses at the junior seminary. One of Mr Sherd’s first objections, when Adrian had told him about his vocation, was that his family couldn’t afford to pay for his upkeep at a seminary year after year.

Aunt Kathleen took Adrian and his parents to visit the Charleroi house one Saturday afternoon. The priest who met them answered all the parents’ questions patiently. Adrian saw that the device near his collar was embroidered in crimson. The priest explained that it was a crown over the Greek and Latin letters XR for Christus Rex. Adrian would wear it after his year at Blenheim, when he entered the novitiate and assumed the Holy Habit.

Adrian took away some forms to be filled in by his parish priest, his school principal and his doctor and sent to the Father Provincial of the Congregation of Christ the King in Sydney. When his parish priest saw the form he wanted to know what had attracted Adrian to such an obscure order and why he hadn’t come and talked over the life of a secular priest when he first thought he had a vocation. But the priest said he would give Adrian a good reference because he had seen him at the sacraments regularly.

The Principal of St Carthage’s College looked at the Charleroi device at the top of the form and said, ‘You’ve chosen a hard, strict order, son. But I think you’ve got what it takes.’

Adrian took his medical form to the local clinic. A young doctor he had never seen before said, ‘What the blazes is this?’

Adrian realised this was his first taste of the ignorance and incomprehension he would meet all his life from non-Catholics. He explained that he was applying to enter the junior seminary of a religious order, and the medical examination was to see whether he could stand up to the hard life of the priesthood.

The doctor was not contemptuous, only very curious. He said, ‘How old are you?’

Adrian said, ‘Almost seventeen.’

‘And you’ve decided you’re going to sign up with these monks, these’—he looked at the form—‘these Christ the King chappies? Do they keep you for life?’

‘I don’t have to take my solemn vows until I’m quite sure I’m suited to the life. That won’t be for three or four years.’ ‘Solemn vows, eh? So you won’t be getting married or anything like that?’ He sat back in his chair and looked at Adrian.

‘There are three vows—poverty, chastity and obedience. Their purpose is to perfect a man spiritually.’ Adrian was embarrassed, but he offered up his discomfort to God and told himself he was acquiring the virtue of humility.

The doctor said, ‘Poverty and obedience too? They drive a hard bargain, don’t they?’

Adrian began another explanation, but the doctor jumped to his feet and began his examination. He filled in the form as he worked, and said he would post it next morning to the Chief Monk.

In the last few weeks at school Adrian quietly told a few friends about his future. Cornthwaite and his little group soon knew about it, but none of them tried to make a joke of it. Adrian wondered whether it was because they had given up their habits of sin or because he already had the air of a priest and they were treating him with the respect due to the clergy.

On the very last afternoon he found himself with Cornthwaite, Seskis and O’Mullane on the Swindon station. No one mentioned his vocation. A Coroke train pulled in and Adrian boarded it. The others stayed on the platform to wait for their Frankston train. Adrian stood in the doorway and waved to them as his train moved off. He knew he might never see them again on earth, and he wanted them to know that he bore them no grudge.

O’Mullane and Seskis waved awkwardly until Cornthwaite nudged them in the way that had always meant he was going to tell them a really foul joke. While they watched him he made an odd, exaggerated gesture with his right arm. No stranger watching would have understood it, but Seskis and O’Mullane did, and laughed.

Adrian was speeding away from them, but he understood the gesture. Cornthwaite was aping the movements of a fellow committing a sin of impurity by himself. Adrian sat down and resolved to include his former friends in the list of people he would pray for every day for the rest of his life.

On the first day of the summer holidays Adrian worked out a Divine Office to say each day until he left for New South Wales. Eight times a day at regular intervals he paced up and down the path from the back door to the shed, reciting prayers from his missal. He knew his parents thought he was taking things too far, but they no longer criticised him or tried to tease him. He guessed his Aunt Kathleen had warned them what a grave sin it was for a parent to oppose a child who was following a divine call.

After Christmas his mother told him he could spend a week with her relations at Orford. She said it would give her a last chance to get used to being without her eldest son. Adrian saw she was trying to tell him how much she would miss him when he was in New South Wales. But he said nothing. He had already shown her the paragraph in the Charleroi Fathers’ pamphlet telling parents what a joy it was to give a son to God.

At Orford his aunt and uncle treated him as if he was already ordained. They gave him a bed to himself and asked him to lead them in a decade of their family rosary each night. After Sunday mass they took him to the sacristy to shake hands with the parish priest, who said he had once visited the Charleroi house in Rome.

That afternoon Adrian’s aunt took him to the local convent. When they were leaving, some of the nuns asked him to pray for them. He held up his hand solemnly like a priest about to give a blessing.

Adrian would have liked to visit the settlement at Mary’s Mount, but his uncle didn’t seem anxious to go. He told Adrian that some of the settlers had gone back to Melbourne and the others were having a hard struggle to make ends meet.

One hot afternoon Mr McAloon drove Adrian and some of his cousins to a beach a few miles past Cape Otway. They climbed down a flight of narrow stairs cut in the cliff face. The little bay was deserted. Mr McAloon said that very few people knew about the place, but it was safe for swimming if you didn’t go out too far. The two McAloon girls went to the far end of the bay and disappeared behind a tall rock to get changed.

Adrian stayed in the shallow water. He had to be careful not to risk his life before he was ordained. (It would be a tragedy if he died before experiencing the fullness of the priesthood.) And he had to cope with a strange idea that had just occurred to him.

He realised he was standing at last on the sort of deserted beach he had dreamed of visiting in Tasmania or America. At Triabunna or on the coast of California the sight of a lonely beach had made him want to do something sublime or queer or wicked. Now at Cape Otway he had the chance to identify the mysterious influence that worked on him in solitary places.

The McAloon boys were watching him. They probably thought he was teaching himself to meditate like a priest. The thought of meditation gave him his answer. For centuries, priests and monks had gone off to meditate in lonely places. They knew they were close to God in caves and secluded valleys. The agitation that troubled Adrian in scenic spots was only his awareness that God was near.

At the far end of the beach the two girls, his cousins, were going behind the rock. They had scrawny arms and legs, and freckles all over their faces, but he had noticed the shapes of breasts in the older girl’s bathers. In the warm sunny corner, beside a limpid rock pool, the girl was peeling the damp cloth down from her shoulders. There were goosepimples on her white, freckled skin. She stretched her legs apart and rubbed with the towel to get the sand from the insides of her thighs.

Adrian threw himself into the water. The splash startled the McAloon boys. He wondered had they heard of the holy hermit who used to roll naked in snowdrifts and thorn bushes to drive away temptations of the flesh.

When he returned home to Melbourne Adrian found a letter with the Charleroi insignia on the envelope. It told him he had been accepted as a candidate in the junior seminary of the Congregation of Christ the King. He was expected to present himself in the first week of February.

Adrian showed the letter to his parents and asked his mother to book his ticket on the Spirit of Progress and to make sure the train stopped at Blenheim. Then he visited his Aunt Kathleen to say goodbye and thank her for all she had done for him.

He had never seen his aunt so excited. She said she had a thousand things to tell him before he left. First of all he must always wear the brown scapular of Our Lady. Aunt Kath gave him a new one in case his old one was worn or grubby. (He hadn’t worn a scapular since his first one had fallen to pieces in primary school.)

She told him the story of a young Australian soldier in New Guinea during the war. The soldier’s mother had asked him before he went away never to be without his scapular. One day he was on patrol in the jungle near the Japanese lines. He was about to walk into a clearing when he felt something holding him back. He kept trying to move forward but this thing kept stopping him. Suddenly there was a noise of firing in the clearing. A Japanese sniper was shooting at the Australian patrol. If the young soldier had gone ahead he probably would have been killed. Then he found out what had held him back. His scapular had caught on a branch. Our Lady’s brown scapular had saved his life.

Aunt Kathleen urged Adrian to take as his chief patron St Gabriel of the Sorrowing Virgin, who had been proclaimed by one of the popes as a model for young people in the modern world. St Joseph of Cupertino would help him to pass his exams. St Joseph had desperately wanted to be a Franciscan priest, but he just couldn’t learn his Latin. When the time came for his final exams, the only Latin he knew was a certain paragraph he had learned by heart. He prayed all the night before, and sure enough the Bishop examining him asked him to repeat that very paragraph. So he became a priest and worked many remarkable miracles.

St Anthony of Padua would always find lost objects for anyone who prayed to him. St John Chrysostom would help Adrian become a great preacher. (Chrysostom was Greek for Golden-Tongued.) And the Curé of Ars, St John Vianney, would make him a successful confessor. People used to travel from all over Europe just to go to confession to St John Vianney. One day a man finished his confession and the saint said, ‘But you’ve left out your worst sin.’ And it was true. The man had been too frightened to confess it, but St John Vianney could see into people’s hearts in the confessional.

Above all, Adrian’s aunt urged him to have a special devotion to Our Lady. He should choose one of her many titles (Aunt Kath’s favourite was Our Lady of the Seven Dolours) and consecrate his whole life to her. Adrian said he had holy cards of Our Lady under some of her titles, but he would love to go through his aunt’s book, The World’s Great Madonnas, and take his time over the great works of art in it.

His aunt got the book from her shelf and said it could be a going-away present for him. He was so grateful that he told her it would always be with him in his cell—on a little shelf among his spiritual reading.

When he was leaving she reminded him of all the sodalities and confraternities and societies she had enrolled him in since he was a small boy. Adrian thought of the lamp in the convent in Wollongong that had been burning night and day for his intentions, and wished the nuns could know that their prayers had worked after all, and he was going to be a priest.

On a table in the hallway his aunt kept a Jacky Mite Box—a little moneybox of red and yellow cardboard with pictures of Chinese boys in coolie hats and wide sleeves. Visitors were supposed to feed Jacky Mite Box with pennies for the Missions in the Far East. Just before he said goodbye, Adrian fed Jacky a two-shilling piece to make up for all the times he had let him go hungry in the years when he was neglecting his religion and disappointing his aunt.

That night Adrian organised a sacred beauty contest. He tried not to think of it as a beauty contest—he knew that Catholics were advised not to take part in such things. And he had never forgotten that a bishop in America once excommunicated a young woman for appearing in the Miss Nude Universe Contest.

Adrian’s competition was not judged according to physical beauty, although the winner would have to be graceful and pretty. He intended to find among all his pictures of Our Lady the one that would most arouse his devotion. After he had decided on the winning picture, he would take it to Blenheim and paste it inside the door of his room. Each time he left the room he would glance up at the picture and carry away the beautiful image of Our Lady in his mind. She would inspire him in his work and study just as the image of Denise McNamara had inspired him in the old days at St Carthage’s. And each night when he lay waiting for sleep, the face of the purest woman who ever lived would watch over him.

Adrian spread out all his holy cards of Our Lady. He wanted to choose two finalists from the cards and two from The World’s Great Madonnas, and then wait a few days before the Grand Final.

Since his first years in primary school, Adrian had heard Our Lady praised as gentle, loving, kind, pure, modest, meek, patient and spotlessly chaste. He had always been sure that such a woman would have a perfect face and body to match her virtues. But he had never heard any priest or brother or nun mention her physical beauty.

Sometimes he did hear bits of information that agreed with his own ideas about her beauty. A priest would say, ‘When God was looking for a human being to be the mother of His own beloved Son, he had to choose the most perfect human nature that the world has ever seen.’

Once, a brother had told Adrian’s class, ‘The great theologians think that God would never have asked Our Lady to endure the sufferings and discomforts of giving birth as we know it. When the time came for Our Lord to be born, it seems almost certain that the Divine Child simply appeared miraculously in her arms.’

And then there was the doctrine of the Assumption and the story of how the Apostles found Our Lady’s body gone from its grave and a mass of white lilies growing where it had rested. Our Lady had been assumed body and soul into heaven because it was not fitting that the flesh from which Our Lord’s body had been formed should be corrupted in the grave. Her body, still youthful and perfect, was somewhere in heaven even in the twentieth century while Adrian was looking for a worthy picture of it.

As he judged the pictures, Adrian looked only at the faces. Some of the holy cards showed full-length views of Our Lady but she always wore long loose robes that reached to her wrists and ankles. He had once seen in a book of old masterpieces a Madonna with the Child on her knees and two naked breasts poking out of her dress. If that picture had been entered in his contest he would have disqualified it—it was not a genuine portrait of Our Lady. The idea of her breastfeeding the Child Jesus in public was preposterous. If some sort of feeding bottle had been invented in those days she would surely have used it. Or God could even have nourished the Child miraculously, just as He had caused him to be born in a supernatural way.

Some of the contestants were quickly eliminated. Our Lady of Perpetual Succour had sharp, foreign-looking features and a stern expression. Her lips were pale and thin like a nun’s. She was not nearly feminine enough.

Others were ruled out because their faces were spoilt by grief. They had dark circles under their eyes or tears rolling down their faces. Our Lady of the Seven Dolours had a fiery glow where her chest should have been, and her heart was exposed to view with seven little swords stuck into it.

The two finalists from the holy cards were Our Lady of Fatima and a young modern Italian Madonna.

Our Lady of Fatima wore a long cream-coloured robe braided with tiny gold stars and falling away to reveal a pure-white ankle-length tunic underneath. Our Lady was barefooted, and the skin of her feet was the same flawless golden pink as her facial complexion. Her hair was hidden beneath her mantle, but her colouring suggested she was an ash-blonde.

The Italian Madonna wore the traditional blue with a mantle of white. The mantle was draped a little carelessly over her head, exposing a few tresses of a bright auburn shade. Her complexion was breathtaking—Adrian had only seen its equal on two or three film stars. But of course the film stars would have used layers of expensive cosmetics, whereas the Madonna’s skin had the radiance of natural good health.

Her delicate eyelids drooped as she clasped the infant Jesus in her arms. The mother and child were in a glade of roses, and the subtle tints of the blooms echoed the glory of the Madonna’s face. Behind them a pastel-hued dawn was breaking over the roof of a noble building of white marble. They were in some corner of the classical world that had never been defiled by the sensual Romans.

There were nearly a hundred entrants from the pages of The World’s Great Madonnas. The first to be eliminated were all the Asian and African and Red Indian and Eskimo Virgins, grotesque and impossible to venerate. Adrian would have described them as ugly if it hadn’t seemed vaguely disrespectful to the Mother of God.

The two finalists from the book were Mater Purissima from England, painted by Frederick Goodall RA, and the Mother from The Holy Family by C. Bosseron Chambers, one of America’s greatest contemporary artists.

Mater Purissima was a queenly figure with two turtledoves pressed to her breast. Her eyes were downcast and her expression was as innocent as any that Adrian had seen beneath the convent hat of a Catholic schoolgirl. The American Mother was a little older than the other three finalists—a beauty matured by her experience of the world.

One of the four finalists was to be Adrian’s Patroness for life. He would serve her as a knight in the olden days served his lady. Adrian got scissors and paste and mounted the four Madonnas on strong card. Out of fairness to the contestants he made the four pictures exactly equal in size. He had to mutilate the two pages of The World’s Great Madonnas, but it was in a worthy cause.

A few days later he sat in the stalls of a city theatre waiting to see Anna, starring Silvano Mangano. He had overheard Cornthwaite talking about this film during the last term at St Carthage’s. Adrian knew it was pretty hot, but not bad enough to be condemned by the church. He would not commit a mortal sin by watching it, but it might put a few mild temptations in his way.

Before going into the theatre he had calculated how long the film would last and divided this time into four equal parts. As the film started, he took out of his pocket the first of the four finalists in his contest. He held the picture in his cupped hands to hide it from the people around him while he stared at it for a minute or so. Then he put it safely back in his pocket.

During the first quarter of the film there were several scenes (shots of deep necklines, close-ups of women with lips ajar and nostrils quivering, long passionate kisses) that started the alarm bells ringing in his conscience. Each time this happened, Adrian closed his eyes and called on Our Lady of Fatima to protect him. He took careful note of everything that happened in his mind during the few seconds that followed. Usually it was like a scene from a film all his own. The pale dignified figure of Our Lady of Fatima floated slowly into centre screen. The scantily clad, sultry Italian woman who had tempted him took one look at the cream-gowned Lady hovering above her and fled from the screen, with one hand covering her face for shame and the other trying to rearrange her scandalous neckline.

During each quarter of the film Adrian used a different one of his four finalists to guard his purity. On the train home to Accrington he compared the results and prepared to announce the winner of the contest.

He had been rather alarmed to find that none of the contestants was totally effective on every occasion when he had called on her. There had been two or three nasty moments when a nearly naked film star had planted her hands firmly on her hips and stared at the Patroness of Purity and tried to brazen it out. Once, the temptress had looked meaningfully at Adrian and edged towards him as if to say that she had first claim on his loyalty because he had loved film stars long before he loved Our Lady.

However, all four finalists had managed one way or another to keep him from the brink of mortal sin. As the train neared Accrington he began the speech leading up to the announcement of the winner.

Our Lady of Fatima, he was sorry to say, was just a little too dim and ethereal under her pale voluminous mantle. He meant no offence, but she was after all an apparition designed to appeal to Portuguese peasant children forty years before. In the turmoil of modern life in the 1950s she did not seem quite corporeal enough to be the Patroness of a young man who had once been excessively hot-blooded.

(Before dismissing each of the unsuccessful finalists Adrian promised he would pray to her from time to time with minor requests that she would easily be able to grant him.)

Mater Purissima was very beautiful indeed. Her only fault was that in the stress and panic of temptation he had tended to confuse her with memories he had of senior Catholic schoolgirls sitting with downcast eyes in Melbourne trams and trains. He had never been able to imagine himself talking familiarly with those virtuous aloof creatures. And unfortunately for Mater Purissima he found her, too, just a little beyond his reach.

The Mother from Chambers’ Holy Family was a real flesh-and-blood woman. He could readily see himself falling at her feet in time of trouble—even flinging his arms around her gowned ankles as he cried out to her to save him. But even she, he regretted to say, would have to forgo first prize. He hesitated to put his reservation into words for fear it might convey a hint of sacrilege. But he assured her he was only describing what had actually happened when he had thrown himself on her mercy.

In the most perilous moment of his worst temptation in the theatre, when he had stared intently at her face, there had been a horrible instant when she seemed to be not the Mother of God who would freeze with one glance the raging fires of his passions, but an ordinary human being—a smiling young married woman who thought he was looking to her for human affection. No doubt this was his fault and not hers, but the mere fact that it happened made it impossible for Chambers’ Mother to be his Patroness.

It was clear by now that the winner of the grand final was the young Italian Madonna who had entered the contest without even a title. Before enthroning her as his Patroness and consecrating his life to her, Adrian wanted to confer a distinctive title on her.

He recalled the moments during the film when he had fled to her from the snares of women who were actually, he was sorry to say, her fellow Italians. She had saved him not by confronting the temptresses as the other Madonnas had done. She had not even deigned to look at the giddy misguided film stars. Instead she had signed to him to follow her through the dense rosebushes burdened with gold and vermilion blooms. Moments later, with her as his guide, he stood in a landscape where no temptation from the modern world could reach him. He breathed an air that no city had ever contaminated and looked up at a sky of other days. She had taken him back to the Great Age of Our Lady.

He would address her ever afterwards by the name of her lost kingdom. He tried to remember Golden Ages of the past. Into his mind came a name, a harmonious name that recalled a civilisation where she and he would have been at home among soft sea mists and monasteries full of illuminated parchments and the distant sound of hymns in Latin and Gaelic. He knelt before her and addressed her as Our Lady of Dalriada. He swore that from that day on, whenever danger threatened, he would spurn the allurements of the modern world and flee with her to the sanctuary of dim Dalriada.

In the last fortnight before he left for the junior seminary, Adrian Sherd thought about the duties and privileges of the priesthood.

A priest had to love the mass. Adrian would not find this difficult. He was looking forward already to the privilege of holding the chalice, which no lay person was allowed to touch. As a priest, he would know the feel of the gold-plated lining that actually came into contact with Our Lord’s Precious Blood. He would lean forward over the altar so that the congregation saw only his hunched back, and hear from only a few inches away the awesome crackling noise as his anointed fingers gently fractured the Host.

His aunt had once told him a story that showed how deeply a priest ought to love his mass.

During the war an Australian priest was imprisoned by the Japs in a POW camp. The Japs knew he was a priest, and because they hated the Catholic religion they had threatened him with death if he tried to say mass. They had confiscated all his vestments and sacred vessels, and they searched his cell every day and even shone torches on him at night to make sure he was not trying to celebrate mass in secret.

Day after day the priest prayed to God for the means to offer just one mass. At last he thought of a desperate plan. He took a teaspoon and the back of a silver watchcase and blessed them and hid them in his mattress. He squeezed a few drops of juice from a grape into the teaspoon and left it for a few days until it fermented. Then he got a tiny morsel of bread and hid it with the other things.

The night after his grape juice had fermented, he pretended to be sleeping on his stomach in bed. While the Jap guard was walking up and down outside with his bayonet exposed, the priest began to whisper his mass. He used the teaspoon for a chalice and the watchcase for a paten. He knew the prayers of the mass by heart, so he didn’t need a missal. He ran a terrible risk—if the guards had suddenly burst in and found his drops of wine and speck of bread they would have killed him on the spot.

Adrian understood how a priest could take such a risk for love of the mass. But he also understood the priest in a very different story that a brother had once told. One morning this priest found himself experiencing a terrible temptation during mass. At the moment of consecration he suddenly doubted that the bread and wine really did change into the Body and Blood of Our Lord. Like all Catholics, he knew the appearance of the bread and wine never changed—only their substance. This had never puzzled him before, but now that his faith had begun to waver he couldn’t see how it was possible. Each day at mass his doubts grew worse. Fortunately he had the sense to pray about it. He asked God on his knees to give him back his faith in the Blessed Eucharist.

One morning just after the consecration he looked down and saw on the white altar cloth a little pool of scarlet blood. Drops of real blood were trickling from the consecrated Host. God had rewarded him with an unmistakeable proof that He really was present on the altar.

Adrian would never expect to be favoured like that with a sign from God. Luckily his own faith was strong. But he knew he must never take his faith for granted. The Catholic religion was full of mysteries that could only be accepted by a person with faith. And faith itself was a free gift from God. A person who had not been given this gift could not believe in the mysteries, even if he wanted to. Adrian had heard a story to illustrate this.

A famous and very clever non-Catholic was being shown around a religious house. When he came out of the chapel he asked why a little lamp was kept burning beside the altar. The priest who was with him explained that in every Catholic church where the Blessed Sacrament was reserved, a light burned night and day to remind people that Our Lord was really present.

Then the visitor said, ‘But I didn’t notice any of your priests in the chapel just now.’

The priest asked the visitor what he meant. A strange, sad look came into the non-Catholic’s eyes and he said, ‘You know, your doctrine of the Real Presence is the most wonderful thing I’ve ever heard of. If I could really believe it, I would spend my whole life kneeling in a Catholic church talking to God. You Catholics believe the doctrine and yet you leave your God alone in the church for most of the day.’

That was a man who would have made a wonderful Catholic, and yet for some mysterious reason God had not given him the gift of faith.

A priest was expected to protect the Blessed Sacrament against disrespect or sacrilege. The devil hated the Sacrament because of all the souls it brought closer to God. In times of war he inspired non-Catholic soldiers to break into Catholic churches and commit outrages against the Sacred Host. Adrian knew a shocking story from the Spanish Civil War. Some Communist soldiers rode their horses into a church during mass and shot the priest and anyone in the congregation who tried to escape. Then they snatched the chalice and ciborium and scattered the Sacred Hosts on the floor and rode around the sanctuary stabbing their bayonets into them.

Whenever a priest had warning of an outrage like that, he was supposed to consume the Sacred Species as quickly and reverently as possible. When the Communists were taking over China, a community of monks saw the Red Army coming in the distance. There was still time for the monks to escape. But they went solemnly into their chapel and consumed all trace of the Blessed Sacrament. The Communists arrived just as they were finishing. The monks were captured and put to death, but the Blessed Sacrament was saved.

As a priest, Adrian would hear confessions. He couldn’t imagine himself being tempted to break the seal of confession—unless the Communists came to Australia and tortured him to reveal the sins of some leading Catholic layman. If this happened he could only pray for strength and remember the story of St John of Hungary.

John was confessor to the Queen of Hungary. The King wanted to know what sins his wife had been confessing. He tortured John for days to make him tell. In the end John died with the secrets of the confessional still safe in his heart. The King had his body thrown into the river. It floated there all night, beneath the walls of the royal castle, with a strange light shining from its tongue, and the King’s subjects saw it and knew what their ruler had done.

The seal of the confessional required more of a priest than just refusing to talk about peoples’ sins. A certain priest in a poor parish in Ireland found that money was disappearing from his room, even though he kept it in a secret place. One day his housekeeper told him in confession she had found where he hid his money and had been stealing from it ever since.

The obvious thing for the priest to do was to find a new hiding place for his money. But under the seal of confession he was not allowed to act on any information he had obtained in the confessional. He had to leave the money where it was and never mention the matter to his housekeeper.

Adrian read again a paragraph from the Charleroi Fathers’ vocations pamphlet.

Under the Ensign of the King, the Charleroi Fathers are striving to hurl back the satanic legions that menace the souls of men. Today the evil forces of Antichrist must be broken on an ever-widening battlefront. Boys and young men are wanted to take up their station beneath the Royal Standard of the Cross. Can there be any greater or more urgent duty? Can there be anything nobler?

Of course there was no career more wonderful than a priest’s. His main task was to win souls for God. At the end of each day he could look back and judge his success by the number of immortal souls he had saved. But Adrian knew there would be days when the going was tough—when the devil’s score of souls seemed to be more than his own. At such times the only thing to do was to pray harder and set a holier example to people. Otherwise he would be in danger of despairing and ending up like the few unfortunate priests he had heard about.

Yes, there were priests who neglected their duties or found the struggle too much for them. Only very few, perhaps one in ten thousand, but Adrian was realistic enough to face the facts about them.

Somewhere in Melbourne was a priest who owned racehorses. Adrian’s father had heard about him. He had inherited a lot of money and (because he was a secular priest) he had been able to keep it for his own use. He wore sports clothes to the races and kept his real name out of the racebooks, but his horses all had names from the New Testament. He owned a hurdler called Boanerges, a mare called Dorcas, and Philemon, a smart two-year-old. It was a great pity that he wasted his money when he could have used it to save souls. It would have built a new school in an outer suburb or paid off a parish debt.

Adrian’s cousins at Orford had told him about a priest in a little parish out on the Western Plains who spent most of his time fishing and shooting. He kept curly coated retriever dogs in the spare rooms of his presbytery. He had started with only a pair of them but the dogs had gone on breeding until they were all over the house. His poor old housekeeper had left because of the mess, and the priest hadn’t bothered to employ a new one. He just batched in a couple of rooms and let the dogs take over the rest of the presbytery.

Priests were only human, and now and then one went out of his mind under the strain of his grave responsibilities. A brother at St Carthage’s recalled that when he was a boy in Melbourne, marching along Bourke Street in the St Patrick’s Day Procession, someone in the crowd used to shout out a few lines from a Latin prayer as each Catholic school went past with its banner high. It was a poor old fellow who had gone mad years before and run away from the priesthood.

The brother had used this little story to illustrate something about the sacrament of Holy Orders that was remarkable, even miraculous. When a priest was ordained, his priestly powers were given to him for life. No matter what sins or heresies he was guilty of afterwards, he was still a priest with the power to consecrate bread and wine and to forgive sins and administer the other sacraments. But it was a fact that no priest (not even the blackest renegade who had ended up preaching and writing against the church) had ever used his priestly powers for evil.

What sort of evil could a renegade priest do? The brother had explained that an evil priest could walk into a bakery and whisper the words, ‘This is My Body.’ The brother had paused to let his Christian Doctrine class appreciate the full horror of it—a bakery stacked to the roof with the Body of Our Lord.

Or the lapsed priest could work the same mischief with all the vats of wine at a vineyard. But the brother had reminded his class of the point he was making. These things just did not happen, which surely proved there was something miraculous about the priesthood.

In all his life Adrian had heard of only two priests who had broken their vows. One morning he had read in the Argus that a young priest was missing from a Melbourne parish and fears were held for his safety. For the next few days all the Melbourne papers had reports near their front pages telling how the priest had still not been located. Adrian’s teacher had asked his class to say a little prayer that the priest would be found alive and well and that there would be no scandal for the enemies of the church to seize on.

About a week later a few lines in an obscure corner of the Argus announced that the priest had come forward in New Zealand and that a spokesman for the Melbourne Archdiocese had said the matter was closed. Adrian’s teacher told the class it was none of their business now. The priest should be left to sort things out between himself and God and his Archbishop. The brother said it was remarkable how anti-Catholic journalists and historians always concentrated on one priest who couldn’t live up to his vows and conveniently ignored all the other faithful priests and the good work they did.

Adrian never discovered why the priest had run away to New Zealand. But there was one case, the saddest of all, where he knew the whole story.

He heard it from Damian Laity, who had heard it from his father. Laity said that one of the teachers at the Oglethorpe High School, a man named Quinlivan, was really a priest from Queensland who had run away from his parish and eloped with a young woman and married her in a registry office. The Quinlivans lived in a weatherboard house just like any ordinary couple and had two children at the state school. Every morning Quinlivan caught a bus to the Oglethorpe High School to teach Latin and History.

Mr Laity had known about the apostate priest for years. When the fellow had first run away with the woman, little groups of responsible Catholic laymen in all the big cities started to look out for him. They had reason to believe he might do something that would bring the church into disrepute. At first they thought he would change his name and disguise himself and try to get a job as a lay teacher in a Catholic college. But he may have known they were watching for him, because he joined the Education Department under his own name. The Catholic laymen had watched him for some time, but so far he had kept fairly quiet.

From all reports, Quinlivan was a most unhappy man, tortured by his conscience. Laity had heard that sometimes at the High School when Quinlivan had to utter a Latin word that was in the prayers of the mass, his face twitched or he dropped his head in his hands for a moment. He often paced up and down like a priest saying his office and stared into the distance, remembering the glory he had run away from.

The suburb of Oglethorpe was on the far side of the great valley that fell away to the east of Swindon. From the upper-storey windows of St Carthage’s, Adrian had sometimes looked at the hazy hillside suburb and thought of Quinlivan, the renegade and black sheep, looking westwards to the faint lump of St Carthage’s College on the horizon and remembering the days when he had been a Catholic secondary student who dreamed of a life in the priesthood.

After Adrian himself had decided to become a priest, he had looked more often towards Oglethorpe and told himself he was much more fortunate than Quinlivan had ever been, because he, Adrian, knew a story to prove what a grave step he was taking and what a fate was in store for him if he proved unworthy of the priesthood.

In his last year at St Carthage’s, Adrian won the prize for Latin in Form Five. On a Saturday morning in December, he and the other prize winners in his class met their teacher in Cheshire’s Bookshop to choose their prizes. Adrian felt obliged to choose a book for his spiritual reading in the junior seminary. While he was standing in front of the shelves marked RELIGION, the brother came up and handed him a book called Elected Silence, by Thomas Merton, and said, ‘One of the great books of the twentieth century.’

Adrian chose the book as his prize because he didn’t like to offend the brother and because it seemed from the dust jacket to be about a man like himself who had sampled all that the world had to offer and then turned his back on it to become a priest.

He didn’t begin reading Elected Silence until he was packing his suitcase in the last week of the holidays. But then he couldn’t put the book down. He sat all day in the shed in the backyard to finish it. Afterwards he put it carefully in his case beside his daily missal and the notebook entitled Resolutions for the Future, and walked up and down the back path meditating on the story of Thomas Merton.

The brother had been right about the book. By every test that Adrian knew, Elected Silence was the greatest book he had ever read. There were passages in it that had brought goosepimples to his arms and legs and made the hair stiffen on the back of his neck. Many a time he had closed his eyes and turned a paragraph from the book into a scene in a film, with a mighty orchestra playing the climax of a gem from the classics, such as Overture 1812 or Capriccio Italien.

Often he had wanted to rush to the drawer in the kitchen and grab the writing pad and dash off a letter to congratulate the author because his book described exactly what a young man in far-off Australia had felt at important moments in his own life. This was the most remarkable thing about Elected Silence—that the story of Thomas Merton, the young man who had never known true happiness until he entered a Cistercian monastery in America, was so like the story of Adrian Sherd.

Of course there were some details in Merton’s life that didn’t match Adrian’s—Merton began life as a Protestant and attended several famous universities and travelled in many countries and had once joined the Communist Party—but Adrian was struck by the remarkable similarities.

Merton had grown thoroughly sick of the pagan materialism of the modern world. Once, when he was coming back from a visit to a remote monastery, he looked up at the bright lights of a city and saw a sign, CLOWN CIGARETTES, and felt disgusted. This was exactly how Adrian felt when he remembered the view from St Carthage’s of miles of garden suburbs full of people who practised artificial birth control so they could afford cars and radiograms.

Merton had had trouble with impurity in his younger days, just as Adrian had. The passage that revealed this was very brief—only a few lines buried in the great bulk of the book—but Adrian had not missed it. The passage was not very explicit either. But Adrian had once acquired the skill of skimming though pages of adult books for their few risqué lines and thinking over them for hours afterwards to get their full meaning.

So when Merton mentioned briefly that he had no wish to wake the dirty ghosts of his past, it told Adrian all he needed to know. The man had fallen in his youth, just as Adrian had, and perhaps as often. Merton was man enough to admit it. And some day when Adrian wrote his own autobiography he would mention his American year in a frank paragraph or two.

Merton described a summer holiday somewhere in the Appalachians when he sat outside his cabin every evening and read the Book of Job while his mates went down into the village chasing girls. Merton called them ‘mousey little girls’.

Adrian saw the lean ascetic figure looking up calmly from the pages of the Old Testament, staring for a few moments into the peaceful leafy woods high above the pleasure-crazed cities of north-eastern America and pitying his weak sensual friends in the hot noisy cinemas in the valley below.

Adrian had had to fall in love with Denise McNamara to learn that the joys of human love could never satisfy him. Merton had learned this lesson without the help of any girlfriend. Not that he scorned women. He had chatted freely with them at the university and at parties, but always about intellectual matters.

There was another amazing parallel in the way that Merton and Sherd had discovered their true vocations. When Merton first decided to be a priest, he applied to join the Franciscans. Before he actually joined them, he went to make a retreat at the Cistercian monastery in Kentucky.

He travelled by train from New York to Kentucky, through some of the splendid American landscapes that Adrian had once dreamed about. It was late at night when he reached the monastery. A lay brother opened the great door and led him into the silent building. The brother asked him if he had come to join the Cistercian order. Merton said he hadn’t, and began to explain that he was committed to joining the Franciscans. The brother said simply, ‘I was a Franciscan once.’

Although Merton hadn’t dwelt on it, that was for Adrian the most stirring moment in the book. As the brother’s words echoed among the austere walls of the monastery, a mighty chord resounded. As Merton followed the brother down the shadowy corridor another chord rang out, and another. Then all the orchestras that Adrian had ever heard on the soundtracks of American films combined together in a heroic tune while the monastery faded and scenes from Merton’s early life surged up from the past.

Only a few days before he was to leave for the junior seminary, Adrian was lying on his bed thinking of Elected Silence, and enjoying a profound spiritual peace. Suddenly, without any warning, he experienced a powerful attraction to the Cistercian order. He leaped up and paced the backyard and tried to think of harmless thoughts. But his mind was filled with vivid pictures, rich in details that excited his imagination—long rows of white-robed monks chanting in choir or walking in silence to their day’s work through fields of golden wheat or hacking and hewing at logs of wood while their cowls flapped about their faces and muttering, ‘All for Jesus! All for Jesus!’ as Merton had described them doing.

Adrian was alarmed. The Charleroi vocation he had nurtured for weeks was threatened by a crazy temptation. If it had been an ordinary impure thought he could have called on Our Lady of Dalriada for help. But it was hardly fair to ask Our Lady to banish the Cistercians from his mind—they were one of her favourite orders. Merton had explained how the monks named all their monasteries after her. The Charlerois loved her too, but she couldn’t be expected to show a preference for one or the other order.

His urge to join the Cistercians would not go away. He told himself that his parents would never allow him to join an order that lived all their lives enclosed in a monastery and talked only in sign language. And he asked himself how he could afford the fares from Melbourne to Kentucky.

But he seemed to remember reading in the Advocate about some Irish Cistercians founding a small monastery in Australia. He walked to the phone box three streets away and spoke to his Aunt Kath.

She said, ‘Yes, some Cistercians from the famous Irish monastery of Mount Melleray have established themselves up in the hills past Yarra Glen, about forty miles from Melbourne. Whatever made you ask?’

She was suspicious. He said, ‘A friend from school asked me. He thinks he might have a vocation to the Cistercian life.’

‘Tell him to pray about it. And don’t you trouble yourself about them just when we’ve got you all packed up and ready to join the Charlerois. Read that pamphlet I gave you. Your own order leads a much fuller life than the Cistercians.’

Adrian went home thinking his aunt was prejudiced against the Cistericans. But he read his pamphlet again and noted all the references to a monastic way of life among the Charlerois. As he peered at the photographs of Charleroi houses with their extensive grounds and distant views, his temptation slowly faded. It was hard to imagine an inspiring landscape only forty miles from Melbourne, where the Cistercians had their monastery. And if he decided to join them he would have to go back to St Carthage’s for his matriculation year. His friends would be puzzled. Cornthwaite and the others would think he had fallen into his old habit over the long holidays.

In the end it was the thought of the journey to Blenheim that brought back his old feelings for the Charleroi Fathers and finished off the Cistercians. The trip to the Cistercian monastery would take him thirty miles by train and then ten in a bus. He would never be able to reflect on Merton’s great journey to Kentucky while he was looking out of an electric train at the eastern suburbs of Melbourne.

He would still take Merton’s book with him to Blenheim. He could read the best parts of it whenever his life with the Charlerois seemed dull or tedious. He could even follow some of the Cistercians’ rules and customs in private if the Charleroi life didn’t challenge him sufficiently. And the mere sight of Elected Silence among his spiritual reading would remind him to prepare for that great day years later when he was a priest of the Congregation of Christ the King and he welcomed into his monastery some worried young fellow seeking advice about his vocation and asked him, ‘Have you come to join the Charlerois?’

The young fellow would say, ‘No. I think I want to become a secular priest.’

Then Father Sherd CCR would say, his voice charged with emotion, ‘I was nearly a secular priest once.’

Adrian had to catch the late-afternoon train for Sydney. On his last day at home, three telegrams arrived for him.

FATHER CAMILLUS TO MEET YOU AT BLENHEIM

STATION BLESSINGS—CASIMIR CCR RECTOR

ALL PRAYERS AND BEST WISHES AS YOU BEGIN

GREAT CAREER—KATHLEEN

ALL BEHIND YOU IN YOUR NEW STEP

—MCALOON FAMILY

In the afternoon his parents and young brothers went with him to Spencer Street station. A priest from the Charleroi house in Melbourne met them on the platform.

Adrian’s mother had been crying quietly to herself for hours. The priest said to her, ‘It always seems a little hard when you’re saying goodbye, Mrs Sherd. But believe me, you never lose a child who goes into the religious life. Young Adrian might be hundreds of miles away, but he’ll be closer than ever to you in spirit.’

Adrian was annoyed with her for not cheering up after the priest’s kind words.

When the warning bell rang on the platform, Adrian shook hands with his father and brothers and let his mother kiss him and told them all he would pray for them. Last of all he shook hands with the priest and said he hoped the next time they met he would be wearing the Charleroi habit.

It was a hot, bright summer afternoon. The train would be almost to New South Wales before night fell. Adrian leaned back in his window seat. All the scenery was new to him. He was impatient to be out of the suburbs of Melbourne and into the great swathe of country opening up ahead of him.

Workers were going home from factories in the suburbs. They waited respectfully at railway crossings for the Sydney train to pass. Adrian saw their faces staring up at him. They were tired and worn. In a few years he would be able to forgive their sins and ease their burdens a little—although they were probably too attached to material goods to experience the true peace he could offer them.

In the grazing country north-east of Melbourne, Adrian chose the kind of small town where he would preach one of his best missions. There was one place where the little Catholic church had a proper stained-glass window, and the presbytery (where he would be a guest for the fortnight of the mission) was a spacious two-storey bluestone house.

The town itself was drab, but in the countryside around it Adrian noticed several huge homesteads sprawled among trees on low hilltops. During his mission he would call at the Catholic properties and sip cold drinks on their wide shady verandas. Each night of the mission, the little church would be crowded. The families from the grazing properties would be there, as well as the poorer people from the township. Father Sherd would remind them that Christ had said it was easier for a camel to pass through a needle’s eye than for a rich man to enter heaven. The graziers would squirm in their seats and resolve to be more generous in future, while their well-dressed wives and daughters would wonder at the courage of the young mission priest, who was obviously not impressed by their wealth.

After sundown it was harder to see the towns and farms and people in the land that was waiting to be conquered for Christ the King. Adrian sat back in his seat and thought of the long history of the priesthood.

All primitive peoples had an instinctive urge to offer sacrifices. This urge had been implanted in man by God Himself. All over the ancient world, people slew beasts or poured wine onto the ground or set fire to altars in an effort to appease the gods. Unfortunately most of these sacrifices were wasted because they were offered to idols of brass or stone or nature spirits or even demons.

The only ancient people who pleased God with their offerings were the Jews, because they acknowledged Him as the one true God. The Jewish prophets and holy men were inspired by God to make elaborate laws about their sacrifices. God was using the Jews to prepare the world for the arrival of His Son, who would establish the One True Church and the most perfect sacrifice of all.

So, by the time of Christ, people were used to the idea of having a special priesthood who wore elaborate vestments and offered sacrifices in a building set apart for the purpose.

The first Catholic priest was Christ Himself. At the Last Supper He celebrated the first mass in history. From then on, people had no further need to slaughter bullocks or burn corn. The mass was the most perfect sacrifice that man could offer to God.

The Last Supper was also the world’s first ordination ceremony. Christ turned His disciples into priests and told them to offer the mass in future just as He had done. Ever since, Catholic priests had followed His instructions, so that you could walk into a Catholic church anywhere in the world on any day of the year and see a faithful re-enactment of the Last Supper.

Priests had a hard life in the early days of the church. If Adrian had lived in those days he might not have had a vocation. There were so many persecutions and so many pagan countries to be converted, and few of the compensations that a modern priest enjoyed—such as quiet presbyteries with shelves of theology books and flowerbeds outside to walk among. Worse still, some of the early priests had wives and families to look after.

No doubt many of these married priests worked hard, but the church soon learned that the best priests were those like St Paul, who never married, or St Peter, who left his wife as soon as he was called by Christ.

There were several good reasons why the church, quite early in its history, insisted on the celibacy of the clergy. (In the dusk near Violet Town Adrian checked them off. Some hostile non-Catholic would be sure to start an argument about celibacy with him one day.)

First, a celibate priest is able to serve his flock twenty-four hours a day, whereas a married priest would have to give some time to his wife and family. Adrian imagined the embarrassment of refusing an invitation to an important meeting of priests because your wife was expecting a baby.

A celibate priest was somehow more dignified and commanded more respect than a married one. It would be hard, for example, to preach an exalted sermon to people who had seen you the night before with an apron over your clerical suit washing the dishes for your wife.

Most important of all, many people would be reluctant to confess their sins and talk over their troubles with a man who lived in close contact with a woman. Even the best of wives would ask you every night about your day’s work. One night you would let slip some item you had heard in confession, and next day it would be all over the district.

Anyway, Christ had said somewhere in the Gospels that a man who wanted to be perfect should cut himself off from all family ties. Our Lord knew it was almost impossible to perfect yourself with a wife and children distracting you all the time.

Even before the celibacy of the clergy had been made binding, there were many priests who sought to be perfect themselves by abstaining from marriage and practising extreme poverty and mortification. These were the early hermits and Desert Fathers, the forerunners of the monks.

There were famous hermits who walled themselves up in caves or hid themselves in forests and never spoke to a living person for fifty years and more. The state of holiness that a man would reach after living alone with God in a cave for half a century was too much for Adrian to imagine. Yet he himself would probably not have been suited to the life of a hermit. After a few years of saying mass alone with a rock for an altar and only the birds and animals to watch him he would have longed for a gilt tabernacle and a silken chasuble to remind him of the dignity of his office.

As the centuries passed, there was an increasing range of choices for a young man wanting to be a priest. The great monastic orders—Benedictines, Carthusians, Cistercians—were founded. Their rapid spread all over the civilised world was proof (if any were needed) that their founders had been divinely inspired. The orders of friars—Franciscans, Dominicans and Augustines—provided for those who liked to travel and to preach against heresies in the marketplace.

It was significant that the Protestant leaders of the Reformation spoke out fiercely against the celibacy of the clergy. It may well have been the devil himself who inspired them. The devil knew that his worst enemies were the clergy, who won back thousands of souls from his clutches every year. It would have suited him very well to do away with celibacy and so distract priests and religious from their great work.

Of course his schemes had almost no effect on Catholics. But he easily persuaded the Protestants to allow their clergy to marry. The results were plain for anyone to see. The Protestant clergy were pitifully outnumbered by Catholic priests and brothers and nuns, despite the fact that the Protestants were free to marry and satisfy all their fleshly urges. All over the world young Catholic men and women flocked in their thousands to seminaries and convents to embrace the challenging life of a celibate religious. Thomas Merton had written about the great monastic revival sweeping the United States. Young men all over the country were realising that a monastery was the only place where they could live a sane life.

The priesthood and the religious life had a long and glorious history. Past Wangaratta, when it was quite dark outside the train, Adrian put his face against the window and saw that history as a succession of pictures. The pictures hovered over the dark countryside just as the spiritual world of God and His angels and saints hovered over the Modern Age, although many people were unaware of it.

The pictures were line drawings from the pages of the History Readers—Catholic Syllabus, which had been Adrian’s textbooks each year at primary school. To represent the early centuries under the Roman Empire, there was St Peter in chains with the angel about to rescue him. For the Middle Ages, the Great Age of Faith, there was St Cuthbert and the otters. The Renaissance was typified by the portrait of a great Pope who patronised many of the leading artists of those days. England after the Reformation was illustrated by Blessed Edmund Campion being led to the scaffold. St Francis Xavier, baptising a crowd of several thousand pagans in India, stood for the Discovery of the New World.

As yet, there was no picture for the Modern Age. No doubt in years to come the authors of Catholic history books would assess the true importance of the many great modern priests and religious. Adrian thought of several who could serve as illustrations in his series—St John Bosco, the modern Italian priest who converted boys by juggling or walking tightropes in the streets; St Bernadette, who was visited by the Apparition of Our Lady at Lourdes and ended her life as a nun; Monsignor Fulton Sheen of America, who had converted thousands with his radio and television programs.

At Albury the railway gauge changed and the passengers walked along the platform to another train. By midnight Adrian was deep into New South Wales. It was the first time he had ever been outside Victoria. He peered out to see how different the landscape was, but he saw nothing in the darkness. He prayed silently that Father Camillus would be at Blenheim to meet him. Then he stared at the jumble of reflections in the dark glass beside him and tried to think again about history.

He realised that non-Catholics had their own version of history. Once, at primary school, he had glanced at a history book belonging to a state-school boy in his street. The only illustrations he saw were shadowy portraits of Oliver Cromwell and William, Prince of Orange, and a picture of the Duke of Monmouth lying on the floor with his hands clasped around the knees of King Charles the Second. The state schools kept religion out of their history courses.

The bigotry of non-Catholic historians was most evident when they wrote about priests or religious. The Spanish missionaries in South America were supposed to have baptised Indian babies and then dashed their heads against trees to send their souls to heaven. The Jesuits in England were always plotting to overthrow ‘Good’ Queen Bess. Monks and friars were fat and jolly and fond of a good time, like Friar Tuck. The Pope was no different from a temporal ruler, and his cardinals dabbled in politics.

These opinions were not just the ravings of a few fanatical anti-Catholics. The daily press in Australia and the majority of people educated in state schools accepted them as true history.

The train entered a fair-sized town and stopped at a station. A voice through loudspeakers said, ‘Cootamundra.’ Adrian realised he was hundreds of miles from home. Around him were dark shapes vaguely lit by weak electric lamps, and all he had to go by was the name—Cootamundra.

He must never forget that Australia was a Protestant country with Catholics a barely tolerated minority. As he passed into the darkness on the other side of Cootamundra he remembered the day when he had first suffered for the Catholic faith.

His mother was in hospital and he was having some of his meals with the family next door. One night the woman said to her husband, ‘Here, Dad, here’s the Pope’s nose, and I hope it does you good.’

The man took the piece of meat and ate it from his fingers and spat out the bones into his cupped hand. Adrian was disgusted. He had always been taught to call the tail of a fowl the parson’s nose. But when he tried to correct the non-Catholics they only laughed at him.

Adrian’s first week in the junior seminary at Blenheim was like a holiday. The Master of Students, Father Camillus, told the boys they would have a week to get to know the priests and their fellow students before the full seminary timetable began. In the meantime they were expected to attend mass each morning, join the priests and lay brothers at midday and evening prayers in the chapel, and spend their mornings working in the garden and their afternoons playing sport or hiking to the river.

There were fifteen students. When they sat in the refectory in order of seniority Adrian was seventh. The four oldest were grown men in their twenties—late vocations. If these fellows had joined almost any other order they would have gone straight into the novitiate year. They would have worn the habit of the order and followed its rule and undergone spiritual trials and hardships to test their vocations. But the Charleroi Fathers sent all their new entrants—no matter how old—to the junior seminary for a year. The Charleroi novitiate was considered too hard for a fellow who had come straight from the world.

During his first week Adrian tried to look like someone who had discovered at last the life he was destined for. When he was chipping weeds out of the gravel path and Father Camillus walked past, Adrian pretended to be so absorbed in his task that he hardly noticed the priest. When he was setting off for a hike he smiled at the trees and flowerbeds and parted his lips as though he saw all nature as a visible manifestation of God—and hoped one of the priests was watching him from a window.

At the end of the week the students were given copies of the timetable. Each day began at 5.40 a.m. (‘Morning Bell—Rise, dress and wash’) and ended at 10.00 p.m. (‘Retire to bed—All lights out’). Adrian pinned his timetable to the door of his room and read it over and over, savouring its harshness. (‘The Great Silence begins each evening immediately after Night Prayers and continues until after Mass on the following morning. During this period, students will observe silence in all parts of the building. At other times, students must also observe silence in corridors, study hall, washrooms and showers.’)

Adrian counted the hours until the timetable came into force. He thought of it as a religious rule, and he knew that the rule of every religious order had been approved by the Pope as a valid means of attaining sanctity. This meant that anyone who faithfully followed such a rule would perfect himself as a human being and be sure of reaching heaven after death.

When the morning bell sounded next day at 5.40, Adrian stumbled out of bed before he was properly awake. He was following the example of the saint who once said that a religious should leap up at the morning bell as though the bedclothes were on fire. He put on shorts and a shirt and pulled his long black soutane over his head. He hurried to the washroom. The timetable allowed him five minutes to splash his face and brush his teeth before he was due in chapel for morning prayers. (The students showered in the afternoon, after sport.)

After mass Adrian flung his head into his hands to make a brief thanksgiving while the other students were walking upstairs to their rooms. A hand fastened on his shoulder and a voice said, ‘Haven’t you read your timetable? It’s time to make your bed and tidy your room.’ It was the Dean of Students, a boy no older than Adrian but one of those who had been at the seminary for several years.

Adrian obeyed the Dean, but wondered what right he had to interrupt the prayers of his fellow students. All morning Adrian tried to find a few moments for the thanksgiving that he was used to saying after mass. But whenever he thought he had a free minute, the bell sounded and he had to begin a new class or hurry to some other part of the building.

That night in his room he read his timetable again and counted more than twenty bells from morning to ‘Lights Out’. While he was counting, the bell for ‘Lights Out’ sounded, but he left his light on for a moment. He took a pencil and the notebook he was going to fill with the fruits of his meditations and spiritual reading. The door of his room opened. The Dean put his head in and said, ‘Turn off your light at once and go to bed!’

Next morning during the study period before breakfast, Adrian knocked on Father Camillus’s door and told the priest he wanted to discuss a spiritual problem.

Adrian said, ‘Father, I know the timetable here is a sort of preparation for the Charleroi rule that we’ll follow next year in the novitiate. And I know we must follow the timetable without murmuring, and obey the Dean of Students because he represents the authority of the Rector. But twice yesterday the Dean interfered with my private devotions.’ And he told the priest about the two incidents.

The Master of Students heard Adrian out, but he looked as though he listened to similar stories from new boys every year. He said, ‘Our Founder, St Henry de Cisy, had a wonderful saying: “A holy religious has no time to be holy.”

‘St Henry meant of course that true holiness consists in doing the Will of God with all your strength all day long. God’s Will for you right now is to follow the timetable. A great saint once wrote that the bell in a religious house is the voice of God Himself telling each member of the community what he should be doing at any particular moment.’

Whenever the priest dropped his eyes Adrian looked at the bed in the corner. Every Charleroi priest and lay brother slept on a thin mattress of straw with only planks beneath it. Adrian wished the students could have proper Charleroi beds to test themselves on.

Father Camillus smiled at Adrian. ‘Believe me, we know what we’re doing when we keep you running with those bells all day long. Out in the world last year you were always looking for a quiet place to pray and talk to God about your vocation. Well, now you can really test that vocation. Follow the timetable here for a year with all your heart and soul. By the end of the year you’ll have found out some surprising things about yourself.

‘Some people would say it’s easy to obey a few bells and turn your light out when you’re told to. But you’re finding already it’s quite a challenge. Are you equal to that challenge? Let’s find out.’

Adrian went back to the morning study class and put his head down over his books because it was God’s Will that he should do nothing but study at that time. At the first sound of the bell he slammed his book shut without finishing the sentence and was second into the refectory for breakfast—just behind the Dean of Students.

For the next few weeks Adrian followed the timetable exactly. In recreation periods he learned all he could about the Charleroi life from the students who had been at the seminary in previous years.

He heard about scruples—the worst of all ailments that could afflict a religious. Living in retirement in one of the back rooms of the seminary was an old priest, Father Fidelis, who suffered severely from scruples. He spent most of his time alone in his room with the door locked. He ate alone from a tray prepared by the lay brothers and said his morning mass in one of the private oratories in the priests’ wing.

None of the students knew exactly what kind of scruples the old priest had. Whatever they were, they kept him from meeting any of the students. Sometimes when Adrian was walking along a corridor he saw the old priest come round a corner ahead of him, stop, and then scuttle back out of sight. Usually Father Fidelis made for the priests’ wing, where the students were not permitted. But if he was cornered in a distant part of the building he was likely to hide anywhere—behind a staircase, in the toilets or in a broom cupboard. Once Adrian saw a fold of a black habit showing from behind a pillar in the cloisters. He had forced the poor old priest into dodging round the pillar to avoid him as he walked past.

A boy who had once served mass for Father Fidelis said the priest had taken nearly five minutes to say the prayers of consecration. He whispered ‘Hoc est enim corpus meum’ over and over, as though he couldn’t be sure they would work unless he concentrated on them with all his might.

Some of the younger students tried to sneak up behind Father Fidelis when they saw him in the distance. But Adrian and the more serious students considered his case a warning to them not to overdo their piety.

Adrian heard about Father Malouf. He was a secular priest from the Blenheim parish who spent a lot of time at the seminary. It was rumored that he was unhappy in his parish work and wondering if he ought to give it up and join an order like the Charlerois.

Father Malouf had scruples of a different kind from Father Fidelis’s. He couldn’t sit still or kneel down. When he visited the seminary he walked for hours up and down the garden paths and round the cloisters. He would talk to a student, but you had to jog along beside him to keep up a conversation. When he stayed overnight at the seminary he came down to the chapel with the Charleroi priests for night prayers, but he paced up and down outside the chapel door and you heard his voice joining in the prayers from the hallway.

Whenever Father Malouf stayed overnight he said mass in an oratory the following morning. At the parts of the mass where he had to stand still, he lifted one foot after the other like a runner before a race. And he said mass probably faster than any priest in Australia. The students who served his masses always timed him behind his back. His record was nineteen minutes.

Adrian learned from the boys of the previous year that students were not allowed to form particular friendships. You were supposed to be equally friendly with every one of your fellow students. Otherwise, so the boys explained, you might be unhappy in later years if you were sent to South Australia, say, and your particular friend was in New South Wales.

Adrian was told why the priests and brothers (and those boys who knew) never passed a certain table in the front corridor without taking a plastic button from one of two bowls and dropping it in the other. Each button represented the soul of a dead Charleroi priest or brother from the Australian province. Each time you passed the bowls you picked up a button and offered a brief mental prayer for the repose of that soul. If the fellow was already in heaven, the merit earned by your prayer would of course be transferred to another button.

He heard about the discipline. The Charleroi Fathers were one of the few orders who still practised this extreme form of self-mortification. Each priest and brother kept in his room a leather whip with knotted thongs. (One of your first tasks in the novitiate would be to make a leather discipline for yourself in recreation periods.) Two or three times a week the priests and brothers disciplined themselves while they recited their office together.

The students who told Adrian about the discipline said if he didn’t believe them he could look up the Constitution of the Order where it was all written in Latin. A fellow in the senior Latin class had translated it for all the students the year before. Every religious had to lift up the back of his habit with one hand and strike himself firmly across the buttocks with the discipline all through the prayer called Miserere.

A younger student asked what underclothes the Charlerois had to protect their buttocks. Two or three students answered at once—this was something they had learned long before. Every Charleroi wore a long flannel thing like a nightshirt and a pair of huge baggy underpants. The novices years ago had nicknamed the underpants ‘grey horrors’. Any boy interested in them could duck around behind the building on a Monday morning. In a clearing among the fruit trees was a line where the religious laundry hung. On an average Monday morning you could see half a dozen grey horrors dangling in the breeze.

Every morning after breakfast the students were assigned to house duties for twenty minutes. Adrian’s duty for the first week was to clean the priests’ showers and toilets.

The priests’ rooms and oratories were upstairs in one wing of the building. At each end of their corridor was a door with a sign, ENCLOSURE, on the outside. Adrian knew that anyone taking a female person past either of those doors was instantly excommunicated. He looked along the passage that no girl or woman had ever seen or, please God, would ever see. It was silent and peaceful. The doors of the priests’ rooms were all closed. Adrian knew their windows looked out beyond the town of Blenheim to the timbered hills of the Southern Tablelands of New South Wales.

A man would climb the stairs from the chapel below, walk through the door marked ENCLOSURE and leave behind all the distractions, all the lust and avarice and ambition of the secular world. He could shut himself in his room and sit at his desk with a vast Australian landscape in front of him and prepare a sermon to persuade a whole parish to set up a door marked ENCLOSURE in their hearts, with a room beyond it where they could forget their senseless pursuit of pleasure and sit in silence with God.

Adrian wiped the priests’ showers and poured disinfectant down their toilets and checked their supplies of toilet paper. Then he walked gingerly along the corridor to savour the religious atmosphere.

Behind one of the last doors someone switched on a radio. Adrian stopped to listen. It was the breakfast session from 2GL Goulburn. He read the sign on the door. The room belonged to Father Pascal, an old retired Charleroi who had a bad leg and spent most of the day in his room. Adrian left the priests’ wing hoping that Father Pascal had only switched the radio on to hear the weather forecast. A man who had perfected himself by following the Charleroi rule for a lifetime would surely prefer the blessed silence of the priests’ enclosure to the noise of a breakfast session on the radio.

Adrian’s second house duty was to lay out the vestments and set up the sacred vessels for the mass of the following day. He had thought it would be years before he could handle holy things. But Father Camillus had told the students when they began their roster of duties, ‘According to Canon Law you’re all classified as postulants of a religious order and you’re therefore permitted to handle things that ordinary lay people can’t touch—the burse, the corporal, the purificator, the spoon and the pall. You may also touch the exterior metal of the chalice, the paten, the ciborium and the monstrance, but not, I repeat, not the inner gold-plated areas that come into contact with the Sacred Species.’

Each morning Adrian took a chalice from the safe in the sacristy and stood it on the priests’ bench. He arranged all the other sacred vessels and cloths to make the neat parcel that the priest would carry to the altar next morning. Over them all he draped the chalice veil, which had to be the same colour as the vestments of the day.

Whenever he held the chalice or the paten in his hands he could not help thinking that those were the same hands that only sixteen months before had been polluted by an unnatural sin. Alone in the sacristy he endured the humiliation of remembering his past. But he hoped that before he was ordained he would learn to touch sacred vessels without thinking of the sins his hands had committed years ago. His mass each morning would be a burden to him if it only reminded him of self-abuse.

On certain days in the sacristy he had to stack sixty small altar breads into a ciborium to be consecrated and given in communion to the students and lay brothers over the following few days. Adrian learned from the student who had done this duty before him how to rest a fountain pen inside the ciborium and stack the breads around it so the priest could lift them out easily for communion.

Each time Adrian rested the pen against the gold lining of the ciborium, he wondered why the plastic of the pen (which only a moment before had been in contact with his skin) could touch the sacred vessel while his own fingers could not. Sometimes he almost convinced himself it would be no more disrespectful to the Blessed Sacrament to touch the gold lightly with his fingertips than to rest a plastic pen against it. He brought his finger as near as a sixteenth of an inch from the sacred metal and held it there. No priest or brother or student would ever know he had closed the gap and made the faintest contact. But something always held his finger back.

In a cupboard in the sacristy Adrian found a tap and a tiny stainless-steel sink shaped like a spitoon with a drainpipe that disappeared through the floorboards. He learned that this was where the priest always rinsed the chalice and paten after mass. There was always a chance that a few minute fragments of the consecrated Species adhered to the sacred vessels after mass. It would have been a grave insult to the Body and Blood of Our Lord to wash these crumbs or drops down a common sink and force them to mix in the drains with all kinds of dirty substances. But the special drainpipe in the cupboard ran down into the natural soil under the building, where the Divine Body and Blood could decompose decently.

About a month after his first talk with the Master of Students, Adrian went back to the priest and said, ‘Father, I think I can say I’ve followed the timetable exactly and never murmured against it. And I’ve learned all I could about the rules and customs of the seminary and the Charleroi order. But I still don’t feel I’m becoming any holier—I still commit plenty of venial sins and my character is just as full of faults as it was when I came here. Are there any extra penances I could do to develop myself spiritually?’

Adrian had expected the priest to be at least a little surprised by his fervour. But Father Camillus only said, ‘So you’ve proved you can observe the letter of the law, but you’re looking for something more? Well, how about trying to observe the spirit of it? You know there are fourteen other students in this place. Do you behave towards all of them with perfect charity at all times? You say you follow the timetable perfectly. Are you proud of yourself because of it? The virtue of humility is one of the hardest of all to acquire.’

Adrian went away dissatisfied. But then he suspected that the priest was only testing his patience and humility. A truly humble religious accepted meekly every reproof from his superiors. Adrian told himself he deserved Father Camillus’s censure. He even decided to follow the priest’s advice for a trial period.

He seized every chance to observe the spirit of the rule. At recreation periods he deliberately picked out the two or three students he felt the least liking for and talked and played ping-pong with them as though he found them delightful companions.

On the weekly hike to the river he carried the haversack full of bread and sausages for longer than he had to, and then pretended he hadn’t noticed the time slipping away.

One afternoon when sport was over, Father Camillus sent two boys to the kitchen for a crate of soft drinks. When the students crowded around to get their drinks, Adrian hung back and offered up his thirst. But when he thought the priest was looking at him he pushed in among the others so he wouldn’t appear to be making a show of his patience and self-denial.

One day when he was rostered to wash the dishes in the kitchen, he stood staring at a scrap of newspaper wrapped round a parcel. The Dean of Students snatched the parcel away and said, ‘You know we don’t read newspapers in the seminary.’

Adrian knew the rule about newspapers but he hadn’t thought he was breaking it by glancing at the advertisements on an old torn page. If he had given way to his normal human feelings he would have argued with the Dean, but he bowed his head and said nothing.

One day at baseball when he stood under the ball ready to take the catch that would win the game for his team, he wondered whether he should deliberately spill the catch to forgo the pleasure of having his teammates crowding round and slapping his back. But then he realised that if he dropped the catch he would cause them to suffer considerable anguish. On the principle that charity towards others overrode all one’s own interests, he caught the ball and held it firmly.

When he was with the others at mass or prayers in the chapel, he kept his hands loosely joined and his eyes wide open. He avoided any posture or gesture or facial expression that might have suggested he was unusually intense in his prayers.

On one of the weekly hikes along the riverbank, Adrian was sitting as usual with the least popular of the younger boys. He lay back with his head against a warm rock and prepared to enjoy the sight of the languid brown pool with its beach of pale pebbles, and the view beyond the river of grazing country with scattered trees. Since coming to the seminary he had learned to look at a peaceful landscape without any urge to make it the setting for a sin of impurity. The pleasure he got from staring at quiet pastures or deserted riverbanks was now quite innocent.

Or perhaps it wasn’t. Adrian sat up suddenly and brought his reason to bear on a new problem.

If he were still a layman there would be nothing wrong with taking pleasure from the sight of a landscape. But he was now a religious who had given up the world. He was bound by a strict timetable and would soon follow the exacting rule of the Congregation of Christ the King.

By the standards of the religious life, the pleasures of the emotions were as reprehensible as unlawful sexual pleasures were in the world outside. It was no use mincing words—to lie on his back in the sunshine and feast his eyes on the countryside was a form of spiritual masturbation. In future he would resist any inclination to indulge in such pleasures. He would keep his eyes away from landscapes and works of art. Even his fondness for chalices and richly coloured vestments was no more than spiritual sensuality.

For the rest of that afternoon Adrian deliberately avoided looking at the long stretch of river or the miles of farmland around it. And all the way back to the seminary he walked with his eyes on the ground ahead of him. At the top of each hill he called on Our Lady of Dalriada to stand between him and the broad sunlit paddocks all around.

After two months at Blenheim Adrian was fairly satisfied with his progress towards perfection. By following the timetable exactly he was doing God’s will at every moment of the day. Poverty, chastity and obedience didn’t bother him. He wanted no material goods; he was relieved to be away from all sight of girls and women; and he delighted in obeying the Dean and the Master of Students for the practice it gave him in meekness and humility. He had proved he could cope with the religious life. His next step was to speed up his spiritual development.

The inner life, the life of prayer, attracted him. The great saints of the inner life had described years of painful struggle to reach even the lowest levels of the via contemplativa. They warned beginners that only one soul in a thousand ever travelled the long upward path to its end, which was nothing less than mystical union with God Himself.

Adrian calculated that if he had taken eight weeks to master the life of a religious, he could expect to be contemplating the Divine Essence within three or four years.

His first task was to stop thinking of prayer as the repetition of prescribed words and phrases—Our Fathers, Hail Marys and the like—and to begin composing his own spontaneous prayers to suit his different moods or the particular glory of God that he was contemplating. He considered the prayers of the mass. He had believed until then that the most meritorious way to pray at mass was to follow from his missal the exact words of the ceremony. Since deciding to be a priest he had read those words in Latin and been pleased to find he could keep up the speed of the average priest and still understand a good half of them.

Now he wanted to understand the true meaning of the mass so he could look up from his missal and, with one piercing glance at the altar, pray a wordless contemplative prayer more appropriate than the long Latin formulae.

He struck trouble at once. All his life he had heard priests and brothers and nuns talking of the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass: of how it was the centre of Catholic devotion, a re-enactment of the sacrifice of Calvary and a means of earning incalculable graces and merit for those taking part in it. Now Adrian was surprised to find he did not know exactly how the sacrifice worked.

His first attempt to understand the mass he called the Theory of the Perfected Victim. Adrian worked out this theory during a morning study period. Whenever the Dean looked at him Adrian pretended to be translating his Livy. In some circumstances it could have been sinful to deceive the Dean and neglect one’s studies, but Adrian had asked God for a dispensation from his studies until he had properly understood the true meaning of the mass.

THEORY OF THE PERFECTED VICTIM: The priest and the congregation offer to God the Father bread and wine representing a proportion of their worldly goods. They then persuade Him by means of their prayers to accept their sacrifice, humble though it is. Just when He is deciding how much spiritual merit to award them, the priest changes the offering into the body and blood of Jesus Christ. The priest says, in effect, to God the Father: ‘You were gracious enough to accept our bread and wine. Now see what it really is that we offer You.’ God then increases his generosity towards them in keeping with the increased value of what they have offered.

Objections: 1) How could the congregation claim that the bread and wine represented a sacrifice on their part? (Adrian understood that in the early days of the church the people brought their own loaves and wine to the altar. But no modern congregation would have been allowed to mill around the sanctuary, dropping breadcrumbs and spilling wine on the carpet.)

2) Why must God the Father be in any way pleased to be offered the body and blood of His Son under the appearance of bread and wine? Why must He reward those who offered Him such a sacrifice, if sacrifice it was?

Adrian had to wait until the evening recreation period to work out a better theory. At recreation the students were expected to mix widely with one another. No one was allowed to read or to sit apart from the others. Most played ping-pong or darts or gathered around the piano for a sing-song. Adrian usually played darts but he knew he couldn’t concentrate on his theories while he aimed at the dartboard. Instead, he stood with the group at the piano. During the last verse of ‘Drink to Me Only with Thine Eyes’ his second theory occurred to him.

THEORY OF THE DISGUISED PRIEST: The death of Jesus Christ on Calvary was the most perfect sacrifice ever offered because Christ Himself was both priest and victim. He Himself offered his own body and blood to God the Father, who derived infinite satisfaction from it. Whenever a priest celebrates mass he says, in effect, to God the Father: ‘Here is the very same Victim who pleased you so much when He was offered to you on Calvary. Moreover, I, the humble priest who offers Him to you’—and here the priest, metaphorically speaking, throws off his disguise—‘I am really the same Priest who offered the sacrifice of Calvary, because His power is working through me.’

A few minutes later, during the ‘Drinking Song’ from The Student Prince, Adrian saw a fault in his latest theory.

Objection: When Christ first offered His body and blood to the Father, He earned for mankind an inexhaustible treasury of merit that could be drawn on in any age. How could it be necessary for us to re-enact the death of Christ whenever we wanted some of this merit? Surely God the Father did not have to be reminded every morning of His Son’s death before he would deliver the spiritual goods that it purchased.

Despite their busy timetable and their long periods of enforced silence, the students found plenty of time to talk among themselves—at recreation, on their weekly hike to the river, during their hour of sport every weekday afternoon, and in the cloister between classes. Adrian was disappointed that they hardly ever talked about doctrine or theology. They sometimes commented on the different mannerisms they observed among their priest-teachers during mass or other ceremonies. Sometimes they compared the Charleroi way of life with those of other religious orders—usually to the advantage of the Charlerois—but Adrian missed the sort of discussion that might have helped him work out his deepest concerns.

Once, during the weeks when Adrian was working out his theories about the mass (as a preparation for a more intense life of prayer), he overheard two students commenting on the ugliness of the Roman chasuble and telling each other how pleased they were that the Charlerois wore only the more voluminous Gothic style. Adrian was ready to break in and say, ‘It’s all very well to compare styles of vestments, but have you ever tried to understand why the mass is a sacrifice?’ But he checked himself. The two he had overheard were so-called late vocations—young men who had left school and tried other careers before deciding they were called to the priesthood. One of the two had played senior rugby in New Zealand. Adrian feared he might seem childish or a cissy if he tried to turn these men, as they seemed to him, from discussing vestments and to talk theology with them.

One Saturday afternoon, when the students were sitting in the cloister and polishing the brass candle holders from the chapel, Adrian singled out the most serious-seeming young man and asked him abruptly why the mass was a perfect sacrifice. Adrian hoped no priest would stroll past and overhear the conversation. He had learned that the priests seemed to discourage such discussions among the students and to prefer them to talk about their tasks at hand or to joke with one another. Adrian was reminded of the many days at St Carthage’s when he had looked over his shoulder while he huddled with Seskis and O’Mullane and told dirty jokes or talked about sex.

As a result of his conversation in the cloister, Adrian postulated a third theory: THE SEPARATED SPECIES THEORY. The mass is basically the same kind of sacrifice as was offered by the Jews of the Old Testament. The congregation offer to God their most prized possession—not a calf or a lamb but the most outstanding member of their own kind, Jesus Christ Himself. The Jews of old had killed and burned their victims. In the sacrifice of the mass, the death of the victim is merely symbolised by the fact that the Body and Blood are consecrated separately and remain separated on the altar.

Objection: When the Jews sacrificed beasts or crops they actually deprived themselves of valuable property. How could a Catholic at mass claim that the Divine Victim was his to offer?

Adrian could devise no better theories than these three. He set about deciding which of the three would best assist him in contemplative prayer. On each of three consecutive mornings he left his missal closed during mass and stared at the altar while he concentrated on one or another of his theories. None of them gave him the exalted feeling he had hoped for.

Next morning, something told him to look for guidance in the prayers of the mass for that day. In the Postcommunion Prayer he found the words ‘O Lord, by the working of this Mystery may our vices be purged away and our just desires fulfilled.’

Adrian had found his answer. He, a mere student in a junior seminary, had wasted days trying to understand the meaning of the mass while the learned theologians who composed the official prayers of the church were content to call the whole business a mystery and to humbly ask God to make it work.

He felt suddenly free to enjoy life again. He was still in the chapel and mass was still in progress. He looked up at the chalice. It was a pure silver-white in the morning sunlight. He savoured the deep, rich violet of the Lenten vestments. He derived an innocent pleasure from the winking of the sanctuary lamp behind its ruby-coloured glass. This was how the mass ought to be experienced! God the Father and His Son between them understood how the sacrifice worked and how it earned boundless merit for mankind. The people, and even the priest, had only to follow the ceremony with reverence and to wait for their souls to be showered with spiritual treasures.

To put an end the intellectual puzzle that had tormented him for days, Adrian arranged his newest insight in the form of a theory: THEORY OF THE CELEBRATION OF THE MYSTERY. This was so simple and satisfying that he felt a rare form of excitement. He would have called it an intellectual excitement except that it gave him his first erection since he had arrived at the seminary.

He tried not to panic, but he recalled at once an anecdote in a book of modern psychology that he had once found by chance in the State Library of Victoria. A young student of theology (he would surely have been a Protestant) became so tense whenever he was working on a difficult theological proposition that he was obliged to masturbate as soon as he had solved all his theoretical problems.

Adrian was determined not to allow theology to do that to him. To save himself, he turned away from theological theorising to the purely sensuous satisfactions of the mass. The door of the tabernacle was ajar. He stared at the frilled white satin exposed for a moment inside, and his erection quietly subsided.

Marco Zovic was in his early twenties. All that Adrian knew about him was that he came from Western Australia, where he had managed one of his father’s shops selling jewellery and souvenirs and smokers’ requisites.

On the second Thursday after classes began, Father Camillus told the students that Marco wouldn’t be going with them on their hike to the river. Some of the previous year’s students looked at each other, but no one else made any comment. Adrian supposed Marco was sick or staying back to receive an important visitor.

Later that afternoon Father Camillus met the boys at the chapel door before meditation. He said, ‘I have a piece of sad news for you all. Marco has gone home to Western Australia.’

Adrian saw the same fellows look at each other again and nod. Others gasped or looked shocked. Someone asked the Master why Marco had gone, but the priest said, ‘I’m sorry, but that’s all I can tell you. Marco is no longer one of us.’

Adrian learned afterwards from the fellows who had nodded over Marco that this was always how a fellow left the seminary. Sometimes, they said, you could tell beforehand when a student was thinking of leaving. He would mope in a corner during recreation or daydream in study periods. He might have long talks in private with Father Master. Of course he might whisper to the others that he was thinking of going home, but this was strictly against the rules.

Once the fellow and Father Master had agreed that he ought to go home, he left the seminary by the first train to Sydney or Melbourne. This was because a student who knew he was going back to the world could have a damaging influence on the others. He couldn’t see the sense of obeying the rules any more and he might even make fun of the hard life the students led. He always disappeared without saying goodbye to the others in case he made them homesick or tempted them to give up their vocations.

Adrian asked the fellows from the previous year what proportion of students went home each year. They reckoned that of the fourteen still left after Zovic, two or three would be sure to disappear during the year. They told Adrian that if ever a fellow was missing from his desk in the study room or absent from morning mass, you could bet Father Master would announce a little later that the fellow had gone home. And if you ever heard voices from the driveway in the early hours of the morning and car doors slamming, it would probably be a student taking a taxi to Blenheim station for the night train.

Adrian began to take a fresh interest in the other students. He wondered which were the two or three who were doomed to go back to the world, and when they would disappear in the night. At recreation periods and on hikes to the river he investigated them all in turn. He would tell a fellow a little about his own past and then wait for the fellow to open up about himself.

Bernard Cleary, the oldest student, was a qualified optometrist with his own business in Sydney. He had lived with his mother in one of the best suburbs on the North Shore. One night he had heard a lot of cars coming and going in his neighbour’s yard. He found out next morning that his neighbour (a wealthy dentist and a good friend to Cleary and his mother) had shot himself and left a note saying he couldn’t see any point in living.

Cleary had suddenly realised there was more to life than making money. He had always been an average sort of Catholic but now he started going to daily mass and wondering what else he ought to live for apart from money and possessions. A few months later he had contacted the Charleroi Fathers and now, here he was in the seminary to test his vocation.

Adrian said, ‘It was lucky you weren’t engaged or married.’

This started Cleary talking about his experiences with women. His mother had always been at him to take out this or that daughter of families she knew. He had taken out a few to please her, but no matter where they went there was always a floor show with a comedian telling double-meaning jokes. Cleary had got fed up with the embarrassment of it.

Adrian doubted whether Cleary had a true vocation. He was probably suited to a life of chastity, but the poverty of the religious life might be too much for a man with his wealthy background. When he was over the shock of the dentist blowing his brains out, he would probably be tempted to go back to his optometry business.

Daryl Drummond, the second-oldest student, was twenty-four. He had been a schoolteacher at Grafton in northern New South Wales. He told Adrian his story in strict confidence one day at the river, but Adrian often saw him talking quietly to other fellows and wondered how many had heard Drummond’s history.

Drummond had been brought up a High Anglican. Every Sunday as a boy he had travelled ten miles by train to a church in Sydney where Anglican priests in proper vestments celebrated a kind of mass and believed they were actually consecrating the bread and wine like Catholic priests. It was always his ambition to become an Anglican priest and join the Community of the Resurrection—an order of Anglicans who lived a monastic life.

When he was eighteen Drummond had a spiritual crisis. It started with worries about the Apostolic Succession. He couldn’t be certain that the Anglican priesthood could trace back their orders in an unbroken line beyond the English Reformation. (If they couldn’t, they had no power to consecrate bread and wine, and their lives were dedicated to an illusion.)

He read articles and books by Anglo-Catholics who said they had preserved the succession, and Roman Catholics who refuted the Anglicans’ claims. At first he used to spend a few weeks believing the Anglicans and then go over to Rome for a few weeks. Soon he was spending no more than a day in each camp, and the time came when he changed sides every few minutes.

He spent one whole Sunday afternoon casting lots from the Bible—saying a prayer for guidance, then opening a page at random and trying to find an answer in the Sacred Text. When this failed he made two little cardboard churches and labelled one CANTERBURY and the other ROME. He put them a few feet apart on the floor of his room and tied a blindfold over his eyes. He whirled round and round until he was giddy and then started crawling towards the churches with one hand groping in front of him. He blundered into a wall and found he couldn’t move. His willpower or something was all gone. He stayed where he was until late at night, and decided he had to see a psychiatrist. He had been weeping for hours without noticing it. He went to the bathroom and stood on the scales and saw he had lost a stone since his first doubts about Anglican orders.

He chose a psychiatrist who was reputed to be an atheist—a Catholic or an Anglican might have been prejudiced. But the atheist was no use anyway. He made Drummond tell his whole life story and then insisted that his real troubles had nothing to do with religion. Drummond told the psychiatrist the main historical facts about the Reformation in England and asked him whether he thought Canterbury was a branch of the One True Church. The psychiatrist said a church was a group of people united by their beliefs and obviously no one church was exclusively true.

In the end Drummond had worked out for himself that he could be converted to Rome without having to decide whether Anglican orders were valid or not. If they weren’t valid he would have made the right choice, and even if they were valid he would have lost nothing. The priest who received him into the Catholic Church had told him to wait for a couple of years before he applied to enter a seminary in case his old worries came back, but they never did.

Adrian asked Drummond what he thought about the validity of Anglican orders now that he was safe inside a Catholic seminary. Drummond turned his pale-blue eyes away and stared at something far off—perhaps the Community of the Resurrection, where a handful of lonely men tried to imitate the great Catholic monastic orders but never realised they were worshipping a piece of plain white bread. He said, ‘That’s the one question you must never expect me to answer.’

Adrian thought Drummond just then looked no different from any sanctimonious Protestant minister, and was sure the ex-Anglican would disappear from the seminary one night and sneak back to Canterbury.

Kevin Gilchrist was twenty-one. He had worked in a government office in New Zealand for four years. Adrian thought he was the most manly of all the seminarians because he used to own a share in a racing dog and enjoy a glass of beer after work. He and Adrian became friendly after Adrian had told him a little about the rough mates he used to knock around with at St Carthage’s and how they were always trying to show him hot magazines.

Adrian asked him one day how he had discovered his vocation. Gilchrist said, ‘You mightn’t believe this, but one night my boozy cobber said he had important business to do and would I like to come along and help him. He took me down to the slum parts of Wellington to a shabby house. The front door was unlocked. Inside there was a queue of men in the hallway. My cobber took his place in the queue and whispered to me to have two pounds ready. I was so innocent it took me a long time to work out what was going on. A big ugly fellow and a middle-aged woman were sitting at the foot of the stairs keeping an eye on us. Every few minutes a man came down the stairs and said goodnight to the ugly fellow and went outside. Then the ugly chappie told the man at the head of the queue to go upstairs and which room to go to.

‘When I was sure what the queue was for, I sneaked outside. My cobber was so drunk he hardly noticed me go. When I got outside I’d had such a shock I tramped three miles home to my boarding house to clear my head and think things over.

‘I knew I was at a turning point in my life. I had sunk about as low as a man could. The next step was into the gutter. I still went to mass every Sunday and said a few daily prayers, but that was all the religion I had left. Still, I had no doubt what had saved me that night in the nick of time—it was the grace of God.

‘All the way home I asked myself why God would make such a special effort to save me. Next Saturday I made a clean breast of everything in confession and started to lead a better life. The funny thing was, that didn’t satisfy me either. It had to be all or nothing for me. I’d scraped the bottom of the barrel and now I wanted to reach for the stars. So I contacted a Charleroi priest and asked him was it possible I had a religious vocation. He told me to wait and pray for six months, and here I am.’

Adrian was confident that Gilchrist would go on to be a priest for the same reason that he was sure of his own vocation—each of them had tasted the pleasures of the world and found them not worth the price. Other students might be tempted to go back and try the pleasures they had never experienced, but Gilchrist and Sherd knew that sensuality led only to misery.

Cleary and Drummond and Gilchrist were the only students who could describe for Adrian an actual incident that had prompted them to think of a vocation to the priesthood. Most of the others were not so precise or so candid when they spoke of their past lives.

Terry McKillop was a twenty-year-old trainee accountant from Newcastle. Adrian had sometimes heard him saying he had left a girlfriend behind when he entered the seminary. One day on a hike Adrian got McKillop on his own and asked him what sort of girl she was.

McKillop said, ‘She was a wonderful dancer. We had loads of fun together at dances and balls.’ Adrian waited to hear more but McKillop had nothing to say.

Adrian said, ‘I suppose you took her to other places as well as dances.’

McKillop said, ‘Oh, yes. I met her parents. That was the trouble really. Her mother was so anxious to marry her off—always dropping hints about the future and asking me about my accountancy studies. Then I sat down one day and tried to imagine what it would be like married and I knew I was meant for something better.’

Adrian couldn’t decide whether McKillop had a genuine vocation or not. He wondered what sort of fun McKillop had had with his girlfriend at dances. If they had gone to casual dances where the lights were dimmed and the couples shuffled round with their bodies pressed together, then McKillop would have known what he was giving up when he rejected marriage. In that case he was likely to end up a priest. But if he and his girlfriend had only gone to old-time dances where the girl’s body was usually at a safe distance, then McKillop might decide one day to go back to the world and taste to the full the pleasures he had barely sampled as a young man.

John Medwin was only fifteen but he claimed he had read nearly half of St Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologica. When he played ping-pong at recreation he chanted Gregorian antiphons under his breath. Each time he played a shot he stressed whichever syllable he happened to be up to. His opponent heard a loud sanct-ISS-imus or OMN-ibus just as he was trying to play his own shot, and sometimes told Medwin to shut up, which was against the spirit of charity that was supposed to pervade the recreation room.

Medwin sang Latin hymns to Our Lady under the shower and while he was sitting on the toilet seat. He was the only boy who tried to talk about theology on hikes or at work in the garden. Some students believed he was a genius. Others nicknamed him the Boy Bishop and said he was a religious maniac. Most tried to avoid him, but Adrian often listened to him as a penance.

When Adrian questioned Medwin about his vocation, the Boy Bishop started talking about grace and free gifts of God and labourers in the harvest and those who cast out devils in My name. The only information he gave about his own case was that from his earliest years he had been blessed with vivid liturgical dreams in which he himself came to take a more central part as he grew older.

Adrian looked at Medwin’s cheeks and top lip. The Boy Bishop had not yet begun to shave. Medwin had somehow been preserved from experiencing a normal puberty. If so, Adrian could not judge whether his vocation was genuine until Medwin had had some dreams about pagan orgies and film stars instead of the liturgy.

Philip Da Costa was the best all-round sportsman that Adrian had ever met. He was only seventeen but he had represented New South Wales in junior cricket and boxing. When the seminarians played cricket he hit twenty runs off the first over and then gave an easy catch to get himself out. At tennis he beat all the priests the first time he played them, but afterwards he used to return some of their serves into the net to give them a sporting chance.

Adrian was irritated by Da Costa’s modesty. He could not believe it was genuine. When Da Costa hit up a dolly catch at cricket or pretended to be beaten by a ball from Drummond (who was hopeless at cricket) or jumped the net to congratulate a fellow he had allowed to beat him at tennis, Adrian remembered the boys from Eastern Hill Grammar, far away in the garden suburbs of Melbourne, who affected such gentlemanly manners but secretly lusted after the Canterbury girls. Adrian looked forward to the day when Da Costa showed his true self at last and swept every ball of an over from Drummond into the trees or served four straight aces to a priest and grinned at the spectators with not a trace of humility.

Paul Kupsch from South Australia was the youngest student. He was fourteen and suffered from homesickness and didn’t care who knew it. Adrian was sure a fellow so young could have no real idea of what a vocation meant, and never bothered to find out why Kupsch had come to the seminary. The only time anyone took much notice of young Kupsch was at meals. Word had got round that Kupsch could eat as much as two or three grown men. When the servers carried round the second helpings, boys leaned forward to see Kupsch heap his plate. Every Saturday afternoon some of the students carried Kupsch into the kitchen and made him swing by his hands on the butcher’s scales. He was said to be putting on three pounds in weight every week.

There were six other students including the Dean—all of them younger than Adrian. They were exactly what Adrian had imagined seminarians to be. They had been taught by the nuns at primary school and then by the brothers. They had been altar boys for years and had loved the mass all their lives. Their heroes were young priests who had stripped to their bathing trunks on altar boys’ picnics and behaved like he-men and ducked the boys in deep water. Their devotion to Our Lady had kept them chaste during puberty. They had danced with girls at school socials but never allowed themselves to be alone with any one girl unless adults were present. Then, at fifteen or sixteen, they had entered the junior seminary to realise their lifelong dreams. They were such healthy well-balanced fellows; their lives had been so normal and predictable that Adrian found them dull by comparison with chaps like Gilchrist, who had knocked around in the world, and Drummond, who had been through a dark night of the soul.

Adrian was annoyed by the serene faces and uncomplicated motives of these ideal seminarians. He wished the Master of Students would impose some harsh burdens on everyone so the serene six would realise the seminary was not just a pious boarding school. He knew they would probably all reach ordination anyway, but he consoled himself by thinking what nasty shocks they would get when they started hearing confessions and learned what some young men got up to at an age when they (the serene ones) had been dreaming of celebrating their first masses.

But a time came when Adrian had to admit that some of these six fellows were heroes in their own way. One Saturday afternoon when the students were weeding the front garden, some of them swapped stories of how their parents had tried to keep them at home a few more years before they entered the seminary.

In each case there had been one parent who refused to let the boy leave home. Fortunately the boy had managed to win over the other parent, so that the prejudiced one gave way after a few months of quarrels and arguments. One fellow’s mother had cried every night for weeks until she saw she couldn’t make him give up his vocation that way. Another boy’s father had taken him on a week’s holiday in the middle of a school term and hired a fishing boat every day and talked for hours to persuade him that life in a seminary was unnatural for a boy of his age.

But the best story of all came from a quiet South Australian named Brophy who was only fifteen. When Brophy’s parents were on their way to the station to farewell him, his mother had collapsed in the taxi. Brophy’s father and sister revived the mother in the railway waiting room, but then she threw her arms around her son and swore she wouldn’t let him go. The last thing he saw from the train window was the father holding her back from running after the train.

After that, Adrian had more respect for some of the younger fellows, especially Brophy. Even Gilchrist climbing up from the gutter was perhaps not so heroic as the boy from South Australia who had broken his mother’s heart to follow his call from God.

At five each afternoon the students assembled in the chapel for fifteen minutes’ meditation. When he had first seen MEDITATION on the timetable, Adrian thought they would simply kneel in silence for fifteen minutes while each boy meditated on the spiritual topic of his choice. It turned out that the Dean read aloud to the others from a book called First Stages in Practical Meditation by a famous German Charleroi. The book had detailed instructions for a hundred short meditations on texts and incidents from the Gospels. The Dean read the first step in a meditation and then paused. The students dropped their heads into their hands and meditated while the Dean kept an eye on his watch. After three minutes the Dean read the second step. The heads came up to listen. Then he paused again and the heads dropped for three minutes more.

Adrian was impatient with these simplified meditations. He longed for a half-hour at least of unbroken silence so he could begin an arduous course of contemplative prayer. Instead of following the Dean’s childish instructions he used the fifteen minutes to think practical thoughts about his future.

The wonderful thing about being a Charleroi student was that his future was clearly set out. The future he had once planned with Denise McNamara had been based on his own hopes and conjectures. But his future as a Charleroi was guaranteed by God Himself.

At the end of the year he would pass his exams for New South Wales Leaving Honours. A week before Christmas the seminary would break up. Adrian would take the train back to Melbourne for a month’s holiday. It would be the last holiday he would spend at home—once he had entered the novitiate even his holidays would be spent as his superiors ordered.

During his last weeks at home he would give away all his old toys and his model railway to his young brothers. He would do odd jobs around the house to compensate his parents for leaving them. (He need not do too much, because he would be saving them hundreds of pounds in board and lodging by leaving home.) Each Sunday at mass he would walk to the altar rails with the confident stride of an experienced seminarian. After mass he would stay in his seat making a long thanksgiving—not hiding his face in his hands like a meek layman but staring boldly up at the tabernacle to show he had a special relationship with God. He would not deliberately look for Denise McNamara, but if she happened to see him she would notice a difference in him and guess he had lived the past year under a strict religious rule.

Of course he would visit his Aunt Kathleen. She would question him for hours about life in the seminary and the ways of the Charlerois. He would be guarded in his answers. He didn’t want to offend her—after all, it was she who first introduced him to his order—but things like the discipline and the straw mattresses were not fit topics for women’s gossip. Even on the subject of his devotions he would not say too much to his aunt. Already, with his meditations and his efforts to perfect himself, he was outgrowing his aunt’s kind of religion, which depended too much on holy pictures and relics and burning candles.

He would like to spend a week with the McAloons at Orford. Whenever he spoke at the tea table the whole McAloon family would stop to listen. His uncle might even ask his opinion on the spread of world Communism or some statement made by the Bishop of Ballarat in one of his pastoral letters.

Adrian would ask his uncle to drive him just once to some rocky beach near Cape Otway. He would not go into the water. It would detract from his dignity as a religious if the others saw his skinny white body in bathers. While his cousins were swimming he would walk alone past a headland or in among the huge rocks at the base of a cliff. He would stand silently and prove once and for all that the Australian outdoors had no power to make him sin. After his year in the seminary he would have such control over himself that he could ponder on some spiritual topic in the very places where, twelve months before, he had struggled with thoughts of girls peeling off their wet bathers.

In his last week at Accrington he would urge his parents to practise their religion more fervently after he had gone. As the parents of a priest they would have to set an example to their Catholic neighbours.

And this time, when he boarded the interstate train at Spencer Street station, his mother would surely not give way to human weakness and weep in public. She would have had a whole year to reconcile herself to losing him for good.

He would take the train all the way to Adelaide. The journey would be even longer and more stirring than his trip from Melbourne to Blenheim. The novitiate was in an outer suburb. He would feel strange and confused in an unfamiliar city, but they would surely send a priest to meet him.

Each novice would have to take a religious name at the start of the year. Adrian was already preparing at the junior seminary for this. Every afternoon he stayed only a minute under the shower. If he hurried back to his room he had at least five minutes of spare time before meditation in the chapel. His room was only a few yards from the students’ library (a huge old-fashioned bookcase in a corner of the study hall). It was a rule that a student must ask Father Master’s permission before taking a book from the library—not because there were any improper books on the shelves, but to remind the student that even his reading came under the jurisdiction of his superiors in religion. However, Adrian absolved himself from this rule on the grounds that Father Camillus would not understand the peculiarly personal reason that drove him to the library each afternoon.

Each day Adrian sneaked a volume of Butler’s Lives of the Saints into his room and skimmed through a few of the thousands of entries. He was looking for a saint whose name could be his own name in religion. He required only two things of the saint—his name must be unusual and distinctive, and he must have been a notorious sinner in his youth. After going through nearly half the entries, Adrian had a short list of two names—Isidore and Hyacinth.

Blessed Isidore of Portugal was a thirteenth-century Dominican. As a young man he had given himself up to every vice and even practised sorcery. One night a fearful demon appeared to him and cried out, ‘Amend thy ways!’ Isidore made a pilgrimage to the shrine of St James at Compostela and began a life of exemplary piety and severe self-mortification. He was received into the Order of Preachers and died in the odour of sanctity.

According to Butler, there was some doubt as to whether Blessed Isidore had actually existed. One afternoon when Kevin Gilchrist lost his wristwatch in the long grass of the sports paddock and the students were all sent out to look for it, Adrian prayed silently to Blessed Isidore and asked him to prove he was a real person by finding Gilchrist’s watch. Within a few minutes someone had picked up the watch, and Adrian quietly apologised to the saint for having doubted his existence.

St Hyacinth of Antioch was a holy hermit. In his youth he had been a pagan much given to luxury. His old schoolmaster became a Christian and engaged in philosophical dispute with Hyacinth until the young man embraced the true faith. Thereafter he sought only to commune with God in solitude, and repaired to a savage place beyond the city. In later years the fame of his holiness and the miracles that he wrought attracted so many pilgrims to his hermitage that the saint had to withdraw several times to more remote refuges.

Adrian found St Hyacinth not as attractive as Blessed Isidore. First, there was the name itself. Adrian wrote faintly on scraps of paper: Rev. Hyacinth Sherd CCR. He was quite prepared to bear a name that ignorant people might smile at. (He had learned that the Greek root meant simply a colour.) But he thought his superiors might advise him to take a more masculine name that would give the enemies of the church no excuse to mock the priesthood.

Then there was Hyacinth’s life story. It did not resemble Adrian’s own life as closely as Blessed Isidore’s did. Young Hyacinth had grown up in luxury, whereas the Sherds had no floor coverings in their house and Adrian had worn his school uniform to mass because he had no other good clothes. Hyacinth had been converted by his teacher, but Adrian would never have dared confide his troubles to the brothers at St Carthage’s.

On the other hand, Adrian’s gambolling with film stars in the green grass of the Catskills or the blue waters of Florida had been a sort of luxury. And St Hyacinth retreating further and further into the wilderness prefigured Adrian’s wanting to live a devout life in the remotest parts of the Otways.

At the novitiate he would live the full Charleroi rule, which was famous for its severity. People who knew almost nothing else about the Charlerois could tell you they broke their sleep each night to chant the first part of their office. Some students had asked Father Camillus about this at Blenheim one day.

The priest had said, ‘Of course you realise the Fathers here at Blenheim don’t do it. Because of the smallness of the community and the demands made on us as teachers, we say most of our office privately each day. But just wait till you reach the novitiate. The bell goes at two every morning. You fall out of bed and pull on your sandals (you sleep in your habit, of course). Then you stagger down to the chapel. If it’s winter your toes are freezing and your fingers are too stiff to turn the pages of your breviary.

‘But seriously, it’s a wonderful experience—especially on Sunday mornings. You think of all the other fellows your own age all over Australia coming home drunk after some party or taking girls home from dances and getting into all sorts of trouble—and there you are shivering in the chapel and chanting the beautiful words of the divine office and offering reparation to God for all the sins being committed all over Australia at that very moment.’

There were other hardships to look forward to in the novitiate. As a training in obedience, the novice had to ask the Novice Master’s permission to do anything that was not covered by the Charleroi rule. If he wanted a drink of water while he was working in the garden he had to ask permission first. And to train himself in humility, he had to confess his faults each week to the whole community—priests, lay brothers and his fellow novices—and ask them to impose a suitable penance on him.

Novices had to observe a severe fast during Lent and on Ember Days and Fridays throughout the year. And of course in the novitiate you made yourself a leather discipline and gave yourself your first taste of it.

After the novitiate, Adrian would take a vow to remain with the order for three years. He would spend those three years studying philosophy in the Charleroi house in Canberra. Then he would make his final profession—his vow to remain with the order for life—and do three years of theology before his ordination.

Adrian had no clear idea of what he would be studying in his six years of philosophy and theology. But he knew his philosophy would enable him to refute the arguments of any atheist or agnostic from a university. And his knowledge of theology would equip him to advise even Catholic surgeons and barristers in problems arising from their work.

Some of his courses would teach him things he would never have learned as a layman. For example, he would learn all the intricacies of the church’s laws on marriage—the acts that were forbidden to married couples because they were unnatural; the valid reasons (if any) on account of which a couple might decide to have no more children, and the means they might use to that end; such matters as how often a man might exercise his rights in marriage before his wife could reasonably complain to her confessor about his excessive demands.

After his ordination he would be so well informed that he could visit any married couple and look them both in the eye because there was nothing they could do in private together and no moral problem they could face that he had not read all about in his studies.

It would be seven years altogether from the time Adrian entered the novitiate until he was ordained and ready for his life’s work as a priest. Every day in the seminary at Blenheim he asked God to keep Australia safe for at least seven years. If a foreign power invaded the country or the Communists took it over from within, his whole future would be ruined.

The students at Blenheim never saw a newspaper or heard a radio. In all his letters home Adrian asked for news of the Emergency in Malaya and the crisis in the Labor Party. His parents couldn’t tell him much about Malaya, but his mother wrote in one letter:

Your Auntie Margaret McAloon wrote to me about a nasty business on election day. Your Uncle Cyril was handing out how-to-vote cards for the AntiCommunist Labor Party outside the Orford State School. After a while the ALP chap started moving up close to him and getting in his road and stopping your uncle from giving out his tickets properly. Cyril could smell spirits on the chap’s breath and he tried not to start trouble but then the fellow started mumbling foul language and calling Cyril a traitor. Well, Cyril touched his arm gently and asked him to move back a bit and then the fellow turned on him and swung a punch. Next minute there was a real donnybrook. Cyril tried to defend himself and he could have handled the ALP fellow all right only three or four criminal-looking types turned up from nowhere and said they saw Cyril start the fight and joined in on the ALP man’s side. Lucky for Cyril some Catholic men from the parish came to his rescue and in the end everyone backed off. Cyril heard later from someone high up in the Anti-Commo party that these sort of things were happening all over Victoria on election day.

Some of the big Communist unions sent tough fellows with criminal records to all the polling booths to start fights and grab all our men’s how-to-vote cards. It gave me a creepy feeling, especially when Margaret said the police were called to some booths but they wouldn’t lift a finger to arrest the guilty ones.

Adrian could sense some kind of disaster ahead for Australia or even the world. His worst fears came to him on the very days when the seminary and the countryside around it seemed most peaceful.

One fine autumn afternoon he stared through the classroom window at the great mass of cannas beside the driveway outside. One of the last blossoms suddenly came adrift from its stem. It fell, not to the ground, but onto a bare spike among the tattered foliage. The crimson petals flapped like the folds of a brilliant flag shot down from a masthead.

Adrian looked out past the garden. In the autumn sunlight the empty paddocks and the distant roofs of Blenheim were strangely distinct. Even the farthest hills were clear of haze. It all seemed beautiful, but it could not last. The landscape was poised on the brink of something.

Out of the tall grass beside a hidden creek, on an afternoon just like this, would come the burst of machine-gun fire that ripped the cannas to shreds and shattered the seminary windows.

What would the Charlerois do when they heard the first shots? The best plan would be for old Father Fidelis to go to the chapel and consume the Sacred Species and then wrap the chalices and ciboria reverently in clean cloth and bury them in the garden. Anyone who chose martyrdom could stay behind with Father Fidelis and old, lame Father Pascal. Meanwhile the rest of the community would go to the laundry and grab a shirt and trousers each from the old working clothes in the cupboards there. They would discard their habits and soutanes and sneak out into the world disguised as ordinary working men. Before they scattered they would arrange to write to some secular address to keep in touch with each other.

In the western suburb of Melbourne where Adrian had spent his early childhood, there was a football oval set in a small park with elm trees and dusty oleanders and a sparse lawn. In a corner of the park was a small weatherboard grandstand. Under its wooden tiers was a dark room where the curator of the little park stored trestles and benches and odd lengths of timber. In the sixth grade at primary school Adrian and a few friends had discovered where the curator hid the key to this storeroom. Sometimes after school they unlocked the room and shared a packet of Maypole cigarettes in the dark among the cobwebs and timber.

While the Communists were desecrating the Charleroi monastery, Adrian was making his way overland across New South Wales. He slept in haystacks and washed in creeks and lived on vegetables and milk from farms. Weeks later he reached the outskirts of Melbourne. He hid until evening in long grass in Fawkner Cemetery. Then, after dark, he crept through side streets to his old suburb. Miraculously, the key to the room under the grandstand was in its old place. Adrian unlocked the door to the dusty room, put the key back in its hiding place, and went inside and slammed the door behind him.

Years passed. Adrian studied and prayed by day in his hideout and visited loyal Catholic families and fellow religious by night. In a moving ceremony in a damp cellar he was ordained by a bishop disguised in overalls. His parents were present to receive his first blessing, but they had to leave soon afterwards because they were in a gang doing forced labour on a collective farm past Dandenong.

Alone under his grandstand each day, Sherd the priest (his religious name hardly mattered now) stared through a chink in the boards at the sunny park where he had played as a child. And he grieved continually over the sufferings of Australia.

The worst loss of all was the liturgy. No more could the faithful crowd their churches to watch their priests intercede for them with God in a cloud of incense at the high altar. There were boys growing up who would never see a priest, bowed down by a sumptuous cope and humeral veil, elevating a bulky gold monstrance in the sight of an adoring congregation. And Sherd, who would gladly have worn himself out in solemn processions or high masses that lasted for hours, was reduced to creeping into backyard sheds by night, dressed like a workman, and celebrating masses on tabletops for a few frightened onlookers.

He longed to live once more under a religious rule and to perfect himself by obeying its every detail. In a Charleroi monastery he would have had regular penances such as breaking his sleep each night for divine office and fasting every Friday. As a priest under Communism his life was disordered. He never knew what his hours of sleep would be or when he might have to leap up from his bed and flee for his life. And it was impossible to fast when he was half-starved for most of the time.

He would never know the joy of walking down a crowded street in a clerical suit and staring proudly back at the bigoted non-Catholics who looked at him curiously or even insolently. Now, if he made a show of his religion he might be shot on sight or arrested and tortured.

One of the advantages of dressing as a priest was the effect it had on women. Even the most attractive girl or young matron would have dropped her eyes modestly before Sherd in a clerical suit to acknowledge that he could not be affected by her charms. But under totalitarian rule he had no way of demonstrating his dedication to celibacy. The pretty women he met in the streets stared boldly into his face to see how he responded to their good looks.

In a religious house, with fellows like Medwin talking endlessly about the spiritual life or Drummond worrying aloud about the history of the Church of England, he could have earned merit by deliberately associating with the companions he liked least. As a priest in hiding he was often so lonely that he talked to people for no other reason than to enjoy their company.

He had once looked forward to the poverty of the Charleroi life—having to ask his superiors for train fares and the price of some devotional book that he needed. Under the grandstand he had no chance to practise the virtue of poverty—he had to spend hours each day devising schemes to feed and clothe himself.

When things got too bad for the priest under Communism he could always tell himself it was all a bad dream and melt back into the seminarian who was thinking of the future. But Adrian Sherd, looking across the paddocks in the mild autumn sunlight, could not be sure it was not real.

He wrote to his mother a few days later:

Tell Uncle Cyril the priests and seminarians of Australia are all praying for him and his party. It’s a pity there are so many lukewarm Catholics who can’t be bothered fighting Communism with him. If only they would try to imagine what life would be like in Australia with all the monasteries closed and all their priests in hiding. That would bring them to their senses!

One morning Father Camillus told the students he had arranged their first Whole Day for the year. They were going by special bus to Sydney to spend four hours on the harbour in a hired boat.

The younger students talked a lot about the trip but Adrian tried not to look forward to it, because a good religious lived only for the present and avoided vain speculations about the future.

Fathers Camillus and Fabian and two lay brothers were going with the students. Father Camillus warned the boys not to be shouting out ‘Father’ and ‘Brother’ on crowded beaches but to call him ‘Cam’ and the other priest ‘Fabian’ and the brothers by their religious names, Sylvester and Ambrose, so they wouldn’t attract attention or give occasion for idle gossip among non-Catholics.

The bus left the seminary at seven on a fine morning. The trip to Sydney was to take three hours. Adrian made sure he was last into the bus so as to miss out on a window seat (out of consideration for the others and to earn merit by an act of self-denial).

Apart from the weekly hikes to lonely stretches of the Blenheim river, it was Adrian’s first trip into the world since entering the seminary. He had intended to guard his eyes carefully all day—only glancing at the more striking scenery, avoiding all sight of girls and women and offering up a silent aspiration when he saw someone who obviously needed his prayers. But so many things disturbed him in the first few miles that he ignored his resolutions and gaped around him like any undisciplined layman.

After only two months in the seminary he had forgotten what an irreligious place Australia was. In Mittagong the morning sun caught the cross above the Catholic church while the neat paths and dewy lawns below were still in shadow. People were leaving the church after morning mass. Adrian counted only four women and three schoolgirls. He wondered what the other hundreds of people in Mittagong had been doing while the sacrifice of Calvary was re-enacted in their main street. He saw women beating mops and dusters, schoolboys feeding pet dogs and men yawning and stretching after heavy breakfasts. All of them would have said they were much too busy to share in the spiritual treasure that was poured out on Mittagong every morning of the year.

In Picton the shops were opening for the day. A chemist stood in front of his newly polished window and threw back his head and laughed at something the barber next door was telling him. Adrian read the chemist’s name: H. J. Carmichael. He was probably an Ulster Protestant. His laughter must have been forced—he had surely never known the true happiness that came from being in the state of grace. Adrian was in the state of grace, and he could have laughed a louder laugh than Carmichael if only he had understood why God allowed sinners to be just as happy as people who spent their lives obeying His will.

Adrian thought he might experience a few temptations during a day in the world. But the first one took him by surprise. Approaching Camden he saw an old brick house well back from the road and surrounded by a half-acre of lawns and trees. One of the front rooms had french windows.

Before he realised the danger he was in, Adrian had seen himself getting up from his desk and stepping through the french windows for an early morning stroll across the lawns. He was a lecturer in English at Melbourne University. After returning to Melbourne at the end of 1955 he had undertaken an honours degree in the School of English at Melbourne University. For four years he had done nothing but study. Poems, plays, novels—he interpreted and criticised them with the intellectual precision he had acquired in the seminary. His academic results were so outstanding that he reached the position of lecturer before the age of thirty. He lived alone in his rambling brick mansion, his only passion being his enormous library.

The trouble with this absurd reverie was that it presupposed Adrian would reject his vocation to the priesthood for the selfish pleasures of a life among books and gardens. As soon as he saw this, he drove the temptation from his mind.

The bus reached the outer suburbs of Sydney. The dense traffic, the acres of factories and the jumble of advertising signs made Adrian uneasy. Thousands of people were making goods in factories or carrying them in trucks or selling them in shops as if their lives depended on it. The people of Sydney had all the wrong priorities. In the calm of the seminary Adrian had seen the world as it really was. Everything depended on prayer. On the Day of Judgement the world would be amazed to discover how often God had almost let it destroy itself but relented because of the prayers of a few faithful priests and religious.

The students and priests and brothers left the bus at a little wharf in a suburb of Sydney and boarded a boat for their trip round the harbour. The boat took them first into some of the bays and inlets upstream from the city. Adrian saw back gardens reaching down to rocky beaches with private boat ramps, and blocks of flats whose windows overlooked miles of blue water.

It was a block of flats that gave rise to his second temptation. The topmost flat was a kind of penthouse with trees in tubs and sun umbrellas in a walled roof garden. A. M. Sherd was a lecturer in philosophy at Sydney University. He had obtained his master’s degree with a thesis that constructed an entire system of philosophy starting from basic questions about the nature of man and ending with the conclusion that the highest good a man could pursue was the enjoyment of intellectual and aesthetic pleasures. True to his philosophy, Sherd had purchased an apartment overlooking the harbour, where he sat each day admiring the beauty of the waves and jotting down corollaries to his conclusions.

Adrian fought this temptation by exposing it to ridicule—he could never end up like that because no honest philosophical investigation could explain away the Christian revelation and its message of self-denial in place of hedonism.

In mid-afternoon the boat stopped at a little bay somewhere east of the city. The New South Wales students looked awed and said the place was Frenchmans Cove, one of the toniest beaches in Sydney.

Adrian’s party all went swimming. They were almost the only people in the water. The students ganged up on the priests and brothers and ducked them in the waves. They roared, ‘What’s the matter, Cam?’ or ‘Poor old Sylvester!’ and enjoyed the chance to call the men by their religious names without the usual ‘Father’ or ‘Brother’.

Adrian soon left the water and walked towards the dressing sheds. They were part of a new cream-brick building on a neat lawn above the sand. He walked with his head down. He was trying to overcome a temptation to be angry with his fellow students for romping and yelling like schoolboys on such an exclusive beach. One of his feet was planted firmly in the sand before he saw it was only inches from a deep-tufted dark-green beach towel.

He sprang sideways. A slight noise—something between a drowsy murmur and a snarl of resentment—told him there was a woman on the towel, but he dared not look at her. She would have seen the boatload of boys and men arriving at the jetty and heard their rowdy horseplay in the water. Now, one of the louts was sneaking up to spy on her while she sunbathed.

Adrian hurried away with his face averted so she wouldn’t be able to describe him to her husband or boyfriend or recognise him in years to come if she saw him in the streets of Sydney in a clerical suit. And he wanted to be as quick as possible in the dressing sheds so the woman on the towel (and anyone else who had seen the incident) wouldn’t think he had gone into a toilet cubicle to masturbate like a common pervert.

He put his foot so firmly on a royal-blue-and-yellow towel that he undermined the leg of a woman lying face downwards. The leg rolled slightly towards his own and a few square inches of lean brown calf muscle touched his pale hairy skin before he could pull away. A head tossed angrily under a huge sunhat and a face glared at him. It was framed by a white silk scarf. The lips were unnaturally pale.

All the way up the beach Adrian repeated under his breath the word ‘sorry’ in the idiotic voice that must have sounded to the woman like a child’s. She herself was in her twenties—too old for him to court on a beach in real life, but the ideal age if he had been a schoolboy again and looking for companions for his American adventures.

In the dressing sheds he dragged the towel roughly across his skin. (It was a seminary towel—thin and faded and stiff from being boiled every week in the laundry copper.) When he lifted his right leg he saw a thin coating of sand grains on a part of his shin. He stopped and stared. Underneath these grains was a smear of oil from the calf of the leg of the golden-skinned woman in her twenties. She had rubbed the oil on with her fingers. The same fingers had rubbed other parts of her body. Wherever her suntan extended, the fingers had been—spreading the gentle oil with delicate strokes.

He stared at the patch of sand until he began to tremble. He would not touch it. He would pull on his trousers with the sand still clinging to his skin, and that night in his room he would anoint his own fingers with the last traces of the precious oil to see what images it might bring to his mind. On the contrary, he would put on his bathers again and run back down the beach into the cold water and stay close to the priests and brothers all afternoon. Better still, he would knock on Father Camillus’s door that night and say that an extraordinary occurrence had made it necessary for him to go to confession at once, and when he had confessed his temptation or sin, whichever it was, he would ask for some crushing penance such as having to stay home when the students went on their next Whole Day’s outing.

There were other possibilities. He could pull on his trousers and walk around naturally all day and wait to see whether the friction of the cloth rubbed off the oil anyway. If it had gone by night he could take it as a sign that Our Lady of Dalriada or Blessed Isidore of Portugal had come to his aid in a time of danger.

He could even take the most extreme course of all—give up his struggle against impure temptations and devote himself to a life of lust with glamorous suntanned women like those at Frenchmans Cove. It would be so easy. He saw clearly every step he would have to take—walk in to Father Camillus next morning and say he was going home because the Charleroi life was too hard; get a job in the Victorian public service and study for his matriculation at night; pass his matric and enrol at the university in the Arts Faculty, where female students outnumbered males; then, on the first warm day of the first term, stroll round the lawns looking boldly at the bare arms and legs until he found a girl who was in one of his lectures or tutorials and think up some excuse to start a conversation with her.

He noticed he was dressing himself even while he considered all these alternatives. And in the end the best course of action suggested itself. He dressed nonchalantly, as if there was nothing wrong with his right leg, then rolled up his towel and bathers and decided to look for an omen in the first thing that met his eyes when he was outside again.

He strode across the sunlit courtyard of the dressing sheds and made for the exit. He noticed two men sitting astride a wooden bench in the courtyard. They were white-haired and stout but their skins were dark brown and leathery and they were both naked. They were playing cards quietly and solemnly. One old fellow put his cards down for the other to see. On the bench between his legs was a wrinkled bag. Adrian thought it was a pigskin purse for coins or poker chips. But when the man turned idly around to look at the staring boy the bag moved with him. It was the larger side of a huge old scrotum.

Adrian hurried outside away from the stern, creased face and the sun-blackened naked skin. He hoped the man hadn’t thought he was a rare kind of homosexual who was attracted to older fellows.

He supposed they were wealthy retired businessmen. He wondered how they could sit so calmly in the nude while young women in twopiece bathers were sprawled on the sand only a hundred yards away. Their organs, lolling on the bench, were unnaturally torpid. If Adrian Sherd, a student for the priesthood, had sat there naked he couldn’t have seen his cards for his towering erection.

Perhaps the men were so exhausted by years of lust that their bodies no longer responded even to the stimulation of a day at the beach. And perhaps this was the omen he was looking for.

The tired old weatherbeaten genitals had been shown to him as a sign. It was God’s way of telling him, ‘All right, walk down to the water’s edge right now and call out, “Cam, I’m giving up my vocation here and now. The other boys can go back to Blenheim tonight. I’m going to spend the rest of my life taking pleasure from the bodies of young pagan women on beaches.” Then do just that. Let your eyes roam freely over their golden-brown thighs and midriffs and cleavages. Then lock yourself in a cubicle in the dressing sheds and sin foully in thought and deed. Go back to Melbourne and follow your plan to live a life of lust at the university. Take your fill of carnal pleasures. I won’t lift a finger to punish you. Your punishment will be the natural result of your excesses. One day you’ll find yourself with white hair and a wrinkled belly playing cards in a sunny corner with some worn-out boon companion. The beach nearby is alive with suntanned women. But your once-proud organ lies slack and useless against your thigh. And when you lift it gently to gather up your cards it gives no sign of recognition—even to the man who served it so faithfully all his life.’

In the bus back to Blenheim Adrian worked out the implications of the day’s events. He had experienced three serious temptations. The first had been to give up his vocation for the life of a lecturer in English. He had to convince himself once and for all that the attractions of literature were only an illusion compared with the real happiness that awaited him as a priest.

Adrian had always got high marks in English at St Carthage’s because he wrote so enthusiastically about the set texts. Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson, Macbeth and Twelfth Night by Shakespeare, The Ballad of William Sycamore by Stephen Vincent Benét, Prester John by John Buchan, X=0 by John Drinkwater, Captain Dobbin by Kenneth Slessor, Felix Randal by Father Gerard Manley Hopkins—it had been so easy to study them. The worlds they had opened up for him were almost as real as the Great Plains of America or the forest near Hepburn Springs. And there was almost nothing in those worlds that went against Catholic teaching. The authors were not all Catholics, but their ideas were sound. A brother had even said one day that scholars had listed hundreds of quotations to show that Shakespeare thought like a Catholic.

But in Form Five Adrian had realised there were mysterious areas of English literature where a Catholic went at the risk of his faith. The public examinations syllabus for that year allowed a choice between two novels—The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy and Great Expectations by Charles Dickens. The brother at St Carthage’s told Adrian’s class to cross Hardy off their book lists and buy only the Dickens title. There was just a hint of vehemence in the brother’s voice when he dismissed Hardy from the course. Adrian noticed it at once and asked, ‘Is there something wrong with Thomas Hardy, Brother?’

The brother said, ‘Dickens had a healthy Christian attitude to man. Thomas Hardy was a pagan and an atheist. Most critics agree that his books are much too gloomy and pessimistic to be considered good literature. The man himself led a most unhappy life and died in a state of despair. There’s an anti-religious clique at the university who take a delight in pushing this sort of book onto impressionable young people—especially Catholics. I can assure you a page of Dickens will interest you much more than a whole novel by poor old Hardy.’

Adrian went on earning high marks for English and passed comfortably in the public examinations at the end of the year. But he often thought of Thomas Hardy and visualised the landscape of the novels he had still not read.

It was only vaguely English. Adrian could not have enjoyed the real England. He remembered the wrongs that English Catholics had suffered since the days of Henry the Eighth and the plundering of the monasteries. But in Hardy’s country he could almost forget he was a Catholic. It was a green place neither good nor evil. The scenery did not tempt a man to sensual sin as America’s did. Instead it provoked a longing for refined emotional pleasures. And over it all hung the threat of despair—the danger that a traveller there might find himself lost, far away from both heaven and hell.

In the bus back from Sydney to Blenheim Adrian saw the meaning of his temptation in Camden that morning. It was his old feeling for Hardy’s country—his dream of escaping into a landscape where he need not judge things according to strict Catholic values.

Safe among his fellow seminarians, and with Father Camillus in the seat behind him (he was ‘Father’ again now that they were nearly home), Adrian looked out at the lonely paddocks beside the highway. He was somewhere on the Southern Tablelands of New South Wales, about forty miles from Blenheim and four hundred miles from Melbourne. He wondered how he had ever thought of tramping the bleak moors and heaths in search of Casterbridge or the Woodlanders. And he thanked God that he was going back to the familiar life of the seminary, where heaven and hell were always within reach.

Then there was his temptation to give up his vocation for philosophy. He had never understood what philosophy was about until a brother had explained it all in a Christian Doctrine period in Form Five.

The brother drew two circles on the board—a large one enclosing a smaller one. He labelled the larger circle TRUTH and the smaller one REASON. He used the diagram to prove that human reason could discover only a small amount of all that was eternally true. The only Mind that could comprehend all truth was God’s. Furthermore, because human reason was itself created by God, its proper function was to discover Divine Truth. Anyone who tried to use his reason for any other purpose was perverting a gift of God.

Proper philosophy, as it was taught in seminaries and great Catholic universities like Louvain, used human reason to uncover some of the noblest truths about God and man. (The brother tapped at the large circle on the board.) There was another kind of philosophy, however. This kind was taught in such places as the Philosophy Department at Melbourne University, which was a hotbed of atheists and agnostics. The half-baked university philosophers would tell a student to forget all he had ever been taught at school (yes, even his religion if he happened to be a Catholic) and start all over again using his reason to build up any sort of philosophy that took his fancy. It was not hard to imagine where this would lead. (The brother tapped various points on the board far outside the larger circle.)

In the bus among the Charlerois, Adrian closed his eyes and used pure reason to defeat his philosophical temptation at its own game.

Suppose he went back to Melbourne, passed his matriculation exam and enrolled for an honours degree in philosophy at the university. And suppose he did what the atheists told him and built up a system of philosophy based on his own reason. He was not a fool. He had been told by the brothers that he had a better than average mind. Sooner or later the iron laws of logic would compel him to admit the truth of the church’s teachings.

It might not happen until the final year of his course, or even until he was a tutor or lecturer adding the finishing touches to his philosophical system. But one day he would have to be honest and step back inside the circle that the brother had drawn on the blackboard years before. And then there would be nothing left for him but to write humbly to the Charleroi Fathers and ask to be accepted as a late vocation. The atheists at the university would jeer at him, and it would serve him right.

The last of his three temptations had been his scheme for a life of debauchery beginning with his pursuit of female students at Melbourne University. The trouble had started on the beach when Adrian was doing his best to guard his eyes. (It was typical of the modern world that a celibate couldn’t walk fifty yards staring at the ground without stumbling over near-naked female bodies.) If he couldn’t avoid seeing such temptations, he must learn to stand up to them and fight them.

That night at the seminary Father Camillus told the boys they could have an extra hour’s sleep in the morning in place of morning study. Adrian woke at the usual time. He dressed quietly and sneaked along the corridor to the library cupboard. He took down a book he had found by chance a few weeks before and smuggled it back to his room. It was a volume from an old encyclopedia called Peoples of the World. He found three pages that suited his purpose and marked them with strips of paper. Then he closed the book with the three strips dangling from between the pages.

He sat on the bed with the book beside him and closed his eyes. He was about to perform a spiritual exercise. Its purpose was to strengthen him against the most common of all temptations. He would perform it regularly until he was completely indifferent to the sight of bare skin on a woman.

He was Rev. Isidore Sherd CCR and newly ordained. His superior had sent him to visit a Jesuit in the Catholic College of Melbourne University. He had taken a short cut through the university grounds. It was lunchtime on a warm day. Students of both sexes were sprawled on the grass in light summer clothing. As he walked along a path near the Old Arts building he noticed a suntanned girl in a low-necked frock almost beneath him on the grass.

Adrian opened the book at the first marker and stared at the full-page photograph with the caption: A haughty Latuka maiden from the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan displays her finery. The young Latuka woman was bare above the waist, with prominent black nipples.

Sherd the priest walked on. Near Wilson Hall he had to stop and tie a shoelace. He happened to glance up just as a young woman strolled along the elevated pavement. A light breeze lifted her frock a little.

Adrian opened the book at the second marker. The caption read: These Nuba women believe their mutilations beautiful. Adrian concentrated on the foreground of the photo, which showed a close-up view of a young woman’s bare buttocks.

Reverend Father Sherd followed a path past the sports oval. The shouts of girls made him look up. A women’s hockey team was practising only a few yards away. They wore thin blouses and short skirts. As they ran and jostled and feinted, the muscles moved in their calves and thighs and their breasts leaped and bounced.

He opened the book at the last of the markers. The photograph was captioned: A high-spirited dance in the French Cameroons celebrates a betrothal in the Tikar tribe. Adrian stared at the flurry of bare limbs and especially at one young woman whose skirt had been partly raised by her primitive movements. He remained quite calm. Even the shadow under the skirt did not make him wish the sun had shone from a slightly different angle or the photographer had chosen his moment with more care.

He walked on—past the university library with its shelves of Thomas Hardy’s novels and the Philosophy Department where the lecturers undermined the faith of students, and through a throng of young women who actually brushed their bare arms against his sleeves. He recalled a day long before, at Frenchmans Cove in Sydney, when he had been tempted to give up his vocation for these things. Then he laughed aloud and strode on to his meeting with the learned Jesuit.

It was the season of Lent. Each day the prayers of the mass spoke of penance and mortification. Adrian examined his conscience.

He was still thinking too much about the future—perhaps because the daily routine of the seminary wasn’t providing enough stimulation for his imagination. Life in the seminary was still too easy.

He told the Master of Students he wanted some extra penances for Lent. The priest insisted that no penance was more suitable for a fellow in Adrian’s position than the faithful observance of his daily routine. He gave Adrian a book for spiritual reading and said, ‘Read that and you’ll see what true penance is.’

Adrian took the book into the chapel for the fifteen minutes of spiritual reading before the midday meal. He studied the title—in bold crimson letters against a background of subdued gold. He repeated it under his breath: ‘Suffering with Christ.’ He was cheered up already. He moved to the centre of a patch of warm sunlight and settled himself comfortably in his seat to read.

But he could not enjoy the book. Its message was no more than Father Camillus had told him. True suffering, according to the book, was not something you could choose for yourself. It came from submitting to God’s Will and denying all your own inclinations and preferences. The model for anyone who wanted to suffer properly was Christ Himself, who spent every moment of His life in perfect obedience to the Will of His Father.

The author was a French Benedictine and a renowned authority on the interior life, but Adrian disagreed with him. If he, Adrian, were to give up looking for severe penances and do no more than follow the Will of God, instead of suffering properly he would only feel continually miserable.

There was another way to refute the Benedictine. If the most perfect form of suffering was to oppose all one’s personal preferences and desires, then Adrian would have to oppose his greatest desire, which was to suffer. He ought to gorge himself at meals and heap his bed with extra pillows and make sure his showers were comfortably warm to avoid the sort of suffering he preferred. But this was absurd. Therefore the Benedictine’s argument was illogical.

After this, Adrian could not endure to read Suffering with Christ. In spiritual reading periods he propped the book open in front of him and devised sufferings that would really satisfy him.

He made himself sit absolutely still in class and timed himself by his watch. One afternoon he sat for eighteen minutes without moving a muscle and only gave up because he thought the priest was looking curiously at him.

He remembered the story of St Benedict Joseph Labre, who was despised as a halfwit all his life but was really a great saint. He, Adrian, would suffer the humility of appearing a fool in the eyes of the world. When he combed his hair before mass each morning he deliberately did not touch the unruly tuft on the crown of his head, so that it stood up like the long spikes of hair on Dagwood Bumstead in the comic strip.

If he found a pimple on his face ready for squeezing, he left it with its white head plump and prominent for anyone to see and shudder at. Sometimes, if his skin was clear, he dipped his finger in black shoe polish or scraped it across the soap and put a little black or white smear on his face. One of the students usually told him about it on the way to breakfast so that he had to wipe it off, but at least he had looked ridiculous during morning prayers and mass.

He could not do these things too often in case one of the students realised they were penances and told the others about his extraordinary piety. The only penance he could use every day was a small, sharp pebble in his sock. He trod on his pebble as often as he could. He veered from side to side to add extra steps to his walks along the cloisters. And if someone called to him in the recreation room he walked to the fellow by the most circuitous route he could devise.

But even with the sharpest edge of his pebble pressing into his heel and his tuft of hair standing straight up on his head, he was not content. Arranging his own sufferings day after day was a hardship. It would have been much easier to live under a strict rule that provided easy opportunities for penance.

At Easter the mood of the liturgy changed from penance to rejoicing. On Easter Sunday the students were served three separate desserts with their midday meal and allowed the whole afternoon for recreation. Adrian sat in the sun and watched a game of quoits. He had eaten too much and his stomach was aching. He kept shifting in his seat to relieve his pain. He blamed it on the Charlerois and their absurd custom of forcing students to eat extra sweets on great feast days.

Near him a student named Cerini was talking about some monastery he had visited before he decided to join the Charlerois. Adrian suddenly realised the fellow was talking about the Cistercians. He questioned Cerini afterwards and learned his story.

Cerini came from Albury, New South Wales, where his father was a wealthy builder. At the age of fifteen he had read Elected Silence by Thomas Merton and longed to give up his comfortable life and join the Cistercians. He wrote to the abbot of the monastery at Yarra Glen near Melbourne and spent a week of his school holidays in the Cistercians’ guest house. But his parents had persuaded him to join an order nearer to home. He told Adrian he would never forget the Cistercians and offered to answer any questions about their life.

That night Adrian knelt beside his bed for nearly an hour after ‘Lights Out’. A layman or someone with little faith would have said it was only an amazing coincidence that he should have heard about the Cistercians again just when he was looking for a better way of life. But Adrian saw the Hand of God behind it. He could not have applied to join the Cistercians the previous year because he had been too young. So Divine Providence had led him to Blenheim to prove that he had a religious vocation. And now, when he realised he was called to a more demanding order than the Charlerois, God had put a fellow in his way who could answer the few questions he still needed to ask before he found his way to his true vocation.

Next morning Adrian stopped Cerini outside his room. He made sure the Dean was not about (because talking was forbidden in the corridors) and whispered to Cerini, ‘What’s it like in the monastery at Yarra Glen—the silence, I mean?’

Cerini said, ‘It’s wonderful. Pure silence. Nothing like what they call silence at this place.’ And he and Adrian whispered together for a few minutes about the advantages of perpetual silence.

That afternoon Father Camillus asked the students to give up their sport and dig a drain in the seminary grounds. Adrian made sure he was put in the same gang as Cerini. He asked Cerini about the hard manual work of the Cistercians. He leaned on his shovel and listened to stories of monks ploughing and harrowing and harvesting all day in the hot sun.

When they were going inside for the evening Adrian stood with Cerini on the path beside the long beds of crimson-flowered cannas. Adrian looked across the gently sloping paddocks towards the town of Blenheim. He said to Cerini, ‘In the Charlerois’ vocations pamphlet they had a photo of this side of the building with Blenheim in the distance. That picture was the only thing that persuaded me to join the Charlerois.’

The afternoon sun picked out a few windows in Blenheim. The town was not all that far away. With a pair of binoculars he might have seen people in their backyards. Or someone in Blenheim could have seen him and Cerini beside the cannas.

Adrian said, ‘I suppose the Cistercian monastery is pretty remote.’

Cerini said, ‘Miles from anywhere. Would you like to see some photos of it?’

Adrian wondered why he hadn’t thought of this before. He clutched Cerini’s arm out of gratitude. The bell rang for showers. While they hurried inside Cerini promised to smuggle the photos to him as soon as he could.

Fifteen minutes later when Adrian was leaving the showers in his shorts and singlet, he saw Cerini making signs to him near the door to the toilets. Adrian understood. The two of them walked over and stood at neighbouring urinals. Each of them held his hands in front of him as if to open his flies. But Adrian saw the folder of photos in Cerini’s hand. He edged his own hand across, took the folder and palmed it into his pocket—all without moving his head sideways. He pretended to shake the last water out of himself and then washed his hands at the handbasins. Two or three fellows were hanging round but none of them had noticed anything.

Adrian almost ran back to his room. He shut the door and leaned against it. He opened the folder and dragged the photos out and pored over them. They were the first pictures he had ever seen of a Cistercian monastery.

Adrian knew he had to make a momentous decision. He did not intend to make it lightly. He put three pictures back in the folder and hid it under the lining of his bottom drawer. He put the fourth photo in the pocket of his shorts. Then he pulled on his soutane and put on his shoes and socks and walked down to the chapel as usual for meditation.

He made sure he was last to leave the chapel after meditation. While the others climbed the stairs towards the study hall, he slipped out of the cloisters through a side door and stood on the steps overlooking the beds of cannas.

It was almost dusk. There was just enough light for what he had to do. He took out the photo of the Cistercian monastery and held it at arm’s length in front of him. He stared at it for perhaps half a minute. In the fading light he made out a building that looked like a farmhouse with wings and a tower built onto it. Beyond the building was a wide paddock ending in a belt of dark trees. Beyond the trees there seemed still more paddocks. And the whole landscape was surrounded by forested hills.

He looked away from the photo to the vista of farmland in front of him, with Blenheim in the distance. He looked briefly at the photo again and then compared it once more with the country before him. Then he put the photo away and went inside and bounded up the stairs.

He caught up with the last stragglers at the door of the study hall. His troubles were over. He had made his decision. He actually looked forward to an hour of study. It was easy to throw himself into the Charleroi life now he knew he was leaving at the end of the year to join the Cistercians.

Next day Adrian returned the photos to Cerini and told him his plan. Cerini promised to keep it to himself, and from then on they seldom talked about the Cistercians for fear of being overheard.

But the next time they met in the corridor, Cerini pretended to talk to Adrian in sign language like the Cistercians’. And when Adrian caught Cerini’s eye in chapel he put his hands to his neck and ducked his head. Anyone else would have thought he was loosening the collar of his soutane, but Cerini knew he was pretending to pull his monk’s cowl over his head.

Often at sport or recreation when no one was looking they mimed the manual work of the Cistercians—pulling on a crosscut saw, milking a cow by hand, driving a tractor, or simply dashing the sweat from the face with a sleeve.

Once, at the midday meal, Cerini made as if to eat his chops and vegetables with a soup spoon. Adrian nodded at him and grinned—the Cistercians had only soup and bread at midday.

A few hours later in the chapel Adrian made a show of knocking over the statues of Our Lady and the Sacred Heart and painting over the ornate Stations of the Cross because Cistercian chapels were supposed to be bare of decoration. But Cerini didn’t seem to understand. He looked alarmed—as if Adrian was desecrating the whole chapel and giving up his vocation. Adrian had to explain later what he had meant.

Each morning before mass Adrian performed a simple spiritual exercise. By an effort of willpower he caused his fellow students and the inessential details of his surroundings to disappear, and in their place he put the chapel at Yarra Glen filled with white-robed monks. After this he prayed as devoutly as any Cistercian. Many times during the day he worked a similar transformation. He was praying and working and studying harder than ever before to meet the challenge of the Cistercian life.

In the month of May the nights were frosty on the Southern Tablelands. In the mornings at the washbasins Adrian’s fingers were too numb to feel the difference between the hot and cold water. He tried to ignore the cold and offer it up like a true Cistercian. But one morning before mass he could think of nothing but his fingers and toes and his ribs that cringed when he hugged them under his soutane. He could not even begin the exercise that changed him to a Cistercian. He had to spend the whole of mass in the unwelcome surroundings of the Charleroi junior seminary among boys in black soutanes who were almost strangers.

That afternoon the sun was bright and warm. The students played tennis and handball in their sports period. Adrian sat beside the tennis court waiting for his turn and hoping it would never come. He was trying to reach an important decision.

He could last the whole year at Blenheim as a Cistercian but not as a Charleroi. If the winter was too cold for him to live like a Cistercian he would go home to Melbourne.

But if he was going home he would have to do it soon because he must pass the matriculation exam before he could join the Cistercians. He was smart enough to coach himself in English and Latin and History if he bought all the books and stayed home all day at Accrington to study. But he would need something more than studies to sustain him during the long months before he went off to the Cistercians.

He leaned back and stretched himself in the sunshine and looked out past the tennis courts. It was the same view of grazing paddocks and distant bush that he saw every day from the upstairs windows. Usually it made him vaguely uncomfortable. It was all part of the world that a Charleroi was supposed to convert to the kingdom of Christ. But the yellow-brown undulating paddocks, the scattered roofs of farmhouses, the subtly folding forested hills seemed always to be drifting slowly out of his reach. By the time he was ordained, the whole of Australia might have been beyond saving. It would lie forever, a lost country, under a sunny pagan sky.

Now, when he thought of leaving the seminary, a glimpse of a secretive roof or a tantalising pattern of paddocks no longer troubled him. Somewhere out there, he knew, were thousands of people who would never be fitted into God’s plan for the world. But Adrian would never have to rescue them or alter their obstinate landscapes. He was free to sit back and admire the fragile beauty of the land in the autumn sunlight. And in a few months’ time, as a monk of the Cistercian order, he would contemplate his own private landscape—a few miles of grass and timber in the ranges above Melbourne.

He recalled in detail the vista of paddocks in Cerini’s photograph. Already it had started him thinking lofty thoughts. And then he remembered that Thomas Merton was a poet as well as a monk.

Adrian himself loved poetry. Each year at St Carthage’s, while other boys read only the few poems set by their English teacher, Adrian had searched his anthology for poems about remote and beautiful landscapes. His three favourites from his last year at school were ‘The Lotos-Eaters’ by Alfred Tennyson, ‘The Hunter’ by W. J. Turner and ‘Kubla Khan’ by Samuel Taylor Coleridge—in that order.

He half-closed his eyes and tried to recite ‘The Lotos-Eaters’ as though its setting was the Southern Tablelands of New South Wales on an autumn afternoon. But he could not remember more than the first ten or twelve lines. He realised it was the fault of the Charleroi life. There was no time for contemplating poetic landscapes in the frantic routine of the seminary.

The Cistercians were much more reasonable. Thomas Merton had taken his poetry notebooks with him into the monastery, and his superiors had let him go on writing as a monk. Adrian would start writing poetry as soon as he got back to Melbourne. When he joined the Cistercians he would show them his works and ask could he keep on writing. He would explain that he drew his inspiration from landscapes and had already admired photographs of their farm. They would almost certainly encourage him to keep up his poetry.

It was all settled. Someone called him onto the tennis court. He played a set. He threw himself into it. He played for the Cistercians against the Charlerois and wasn’t surprised when he won. All the omens were urging him forward.

After showers he went with the others to meditation in the chapel. He spent the time preparing what he would say to Father Camillus that very evening. He would not trouble the priest with the whole story of how he had finally discovered his true vocation. He would say just enough to convince him that his motives for leaving were purely spiritual.

Adrian remembered the words of the Charlerois’ vocations pamphlet: ‘If, during his stay at the junior seminary, a boy decides that he is not called to the religious life, he is free to leave at any time. No one will put any pressure on him to stay.’ He would quote these words to Father Camillus if the priest tried to win him back from the Cistercians.

As soon as evening study had started, Adrian left his seat and asked the Dean for permission to see Father Master. He knocked at the priest’s door. A Charleroi always called out, ‘Ave Maria’ instead of, ‘Come in.’ Adrian heard the priest’s call and went in.

Father Camillus pointed to the visitors’ chair and said, ‘You’re looking very solemn tonight, young Adrian. What is it?’

Adrian started talking. He was brief and blunt. He had tested his vocation rigorously and thrown himself wholeheartedly into the Charleroi life but now he found he was not called to it. He was keeping the story of his Cistercian vocation to the end, but before he got to it the priest stopped him.

Father Camillus lit a cigarette. (The Charleroi priests were allowed two packets a week. They said it was permitted by the Rule—their founder had written that a bowl of snuff could be placed at the disposal of the community in the recreation room. The Cistercians would never have allowed such a luxury.)

He said softly to Adrian, ‘First of all, there’s no need to get so worked up about things. Just sit back and let me get a word in.

‘In my job I’ve learned to be a pretty good judge of character and what it takes to be a good religious. Every year I see young fellows come in from all over Australia to test themselves for the Charleroi life. And every year a proportion of them come and knock on my door one afternoon and tell me they want to go home.

‘Roughly speaking, there are two sorts who want to leave. The first sort of fellow takes me by surprise. Whenever I’ve seen him around the seminary he’s fitted in well. He studies hard and enjoys his sport and takes his mass and his prayers seriously. But one day, without me noticing it, he’s begun to worry about something. He thinks and prays and worries a bit more until suddenly he comes rushing in here and says, “Father, I realise I haven’t got a vocation to the Charleroi life after all and I want to go home.”

‘Well, after I’ve got over my surprise I tell him what a tragedy it would be if he rushed off home without being absolutely sure he had no vocation. So he usually agrees to stay another ten days or so to be sure he really does want to give it all up. And during those ten days we sit down and try to sort out what’s been worrying him.’

Adrian realised the Charlerois had lied in their pamphlet. A boy was not free to leave at any time. They were going to force him to stay for ten more days. He got ready to argue with the priest.

Father Camillus was saying, ‘Then, Adrian, there’s another kind of fellow. Now, don’t get me wrong. No priest or brother of this order has ever thought worse of a fellow because he came and made an honest effort to test his vocation. There are fine Catholic laymen all over Australia who tried out with us until they found it was not what God wanted of them.

‘Well, this other fellow usually catches my eye in the first few weeks after he’s arrived here. He just doesn’t fit in. He goes through the motions of following our rules but he can’t settle down. In study periods he stares out at the paddocks and dreams about heaven knows what. Even during mass or spiritual reading he’s thinking of something better he could be doing. At sport or recreation I often see him hanging back or moping on his own. Or else he forms a particular friendship with someone else who’s a bit unsettled like himself and the two of them have a quiet grizzle together about why the seminary doesn’t suit them.

‘Well, one day this fellow comes in to me and says, “Father, I want to go home.” Now, remember he’s not a bad sort of fellow at all. He just wasn’t called to the religious life. So I say I think he’s making a very wise decision. Then I ring up the stationmaster at Blenheim and book his seat. And within twenty-four hours the fellow is sitting up happily in a window seat on the train home.’

The priest smiled broadly. ‘Now, Adrian, would you like to wait here while I ring the stationmaster about your ticket? And while I’m gone you can compose a telegram for your parents. We’ll send it tomorrow and you can be on the train to Melbourne the day after.’

Adrian wrote out the words for the telegram on the priest’s notepad. His hands were so sweaty that he had to hold a handkerchief round the pen. Father Camillus was a long time away at the telephone. Adrian paced the room to stop his kneecaps from twitching.

Father Camillus came back and said, ‘It’s all fixed up. Tomorrow night I want you to knock on my door after night prayers to collect your tickets. You’ll be leaving at nine the following morning. You know the rule here is “No Goodbyes”. I’ll take you quietly out to your taxi while morning classes are on. You’re forbidden to tell any of the others you’re leaving.’

Adrian interrupted him, ‘Father, you’ve got the wrong story. I mean, I haven’t told you the right story—the whole story.’

The priest said, ‘Oh?’ and lit another cigarette. Adrian wondered how he made his two packets last the whole week.

Adrian said, ‘One of my main reasons for leaving—my only reason, really—is that I believe I have a vocation to the Cistercians. As soon as I get home I’m going to write to them and visit them. And at the end of the year I’ll apply to enter their novitiate.’

Father Camillus looked out of the window for a long time. Adrian looked out too. He wished he could tell the priest how his love of poetry had influenced his decision. But the paddocks outside were almost invisible in the dusk. Poetic inspiration seemed a frail thing after all.

At last Father Camillus turned and said, ‘Take a bit of good advice from me. Don’t contact the Cistercians until you’ve given yourself a nice long holiday back in Melbourne. Then talk it over with your parents or your parish priest before you do it.’

He must have known Adrian wasn’t convinced, because he said, ‘You realise surely that if a fellow applies to join the Cistercians after he’s already spent some time in a Charleroi junior seminary, the Cistercians are going to write to us for some sort of reference. And we’d be bound to tell them truthfully how the fellow had measured up to our rules.’ Father Camillus looked at his watch and drummed his fingers on his desk. ‘And our rule of course is not much harder than a boarding school’s, whereas the Cistercians’…’

He didn’t have to finish. Adrian said, ‘I see what you mean, Father. I’ll give the matter a bit more thought—and prayer.’ Then he left the room.

Adrian decided he would not be breaking the seminary’s rule if he told Cerini he was leaving. He was not really leaving the religious life, anyway—only changing from one order to another. Next morning he took Cerini aside and told him his plans and said a taxi would be calling for him at nine the following morning.

Cerini said he was glad Adrian had chosen the order that suited him best. He even told Adrian not to be surprised if he (Cerini) turned up one day to join him at the Cistercian novitiate. He promised to leave class next morning, on the pretext of visiting the toilet, and try to wave to Adrian through the windows in the cloister.