A world away from home for a reluctant priest turned apostate

Roy Hattersley's father became a priest after seven long years at the English College in Rome
HE HANDWRITING had not changed with the years. The shape of the signature in the Iiber Ruber — dated November 20, 1920, the day my 'father was entered Venerabili .of the English College in Rome — was as familiar as the name itself. In the 'pictures, he was easily recognisable under his shovel hat . and behind his pince-nez gven though he looked like a priest in a school play.
They took photographs to ;commemorate great occasions — tea in the garden of , the British Embassy during .the King's state visit to Italy, tie St George's Day picnic r4lind the arrival at Palazzola, tan idyllic villa on Lake Vilbano in which they took fuge from the summer heat. The seminarians always wore their soutanes buttoned up to .,the chin and they were never allowed outside the college Alone. Those days have passed. Like the Roman Catholic Church itself, the nglish College in Rome has -changed.
In my father's day, boys, who had been hand-picked by priests and sponsored by bishops, arrived in Rome when they were 17. They remained there without once returning home in seven long years. Now, only men sign the Liber Ruber and, although they are less likely to be homesick than the youthful seminarians of the 1920s, they spend Christmas and summer holidays in Britain. Tony Currer, 25, with a research degree, and David Parmiter, 35, who has given up a job in local government, look like any other mature students. Their maturity is particularly important. Both men were calmly certain of their voca tion. The voice which called my father in his early teens was never loud or clear. When he met my mother, it fell completely silent. So the oaths that he swore before the altar in the Martyrs' Chapel were forgotten. I, at least, am grateful for the apostasy.
In those days, the seminarians took two oaths. One promised no more than celibacy, obedience and piety. The other, a relic of 1580 when Elizabeth I was knighting Francis Drake and persecuting papists, was a promise to die for the true faith. Paradoxically, now that prospective new priests are old enough to understand its implications, the martyr's vow has been abandoned. But the English College, playing on its strengths, still takes its martyrs seriously. The tablet on which they are immortalised celebrates the sacrifice of 41 alumni — ten of them saints. It is not easy to get on the list. "James Lomax, a former student, died in chains in 1581" but had his "case deferred in the 1886 Beatification". When the official history of the College was revised in 1979, he was still waiting.
The first martyr to be canonised was Ralph Sherwin, whose response to the vow of self-sacrifice is commemorated in stained glass. Asked if he was ready to give his life for the reconversion of England, he replied, "Potius hodie quam cras" (today rather than tomorrow). Latin is now out of fashion; 20 years ago, it was still the language in which lectures were given at the Gregorian University from which all seminarians graduate. The change came about when a French philosophy don — regarded, for some reason, as irreplaceable — refused to teach in a dead language.
My father — who had been plucked out of a Nottingham back street and sent, in brief preparation, to
a Catholic boarding school for two years — must have found his first year's lectures incomprehensible. But he learnt by what is now called "the direct conversational method". Fifty years on, during our excursions to old country churches, he could still translate
tombstone inscriptions on sight. I did not know, until after he was dead, that he had once been a priest. But I never wondered why a Ministry of Pensions executive officer treated Latin like a living language. He was my father; there could be no mystery about him.
I accepted, without question, his hatred of Oliver Cromwell, his attachment to the Young Pretender and arcane information about Prince Charlie's brother's appointment as Archbishop of Frascati.
The Cardinal Duke of York took refuge in the College and his portrait hangs in one of its corridors. Cardinals are commonplace on those walls. Since the College was reopened in 1818 — follow ing Napoleon's occupation of Rome when it was used as cavalry stables — it has produced Nicholas Wiseman, Arthur Hinsley, Bernard Griffin, William Godfrey, John Heenan and William Theodore Heard, Titular Archbishop of Feradi Maggiore. It has educated too many bishops to count most of whom — thanks to the Victorian prohibition on Catholics borrowing Anglican titles — sailed on distant sees with irresistible names. In 1840, the future Cardinal Wiseman became Bishop of Melipotamus and Coadjutor of the Central District.
My father never spoke of the College, so I have no idea if he thought of it as the place to which high-flyers went before they fluttered on to heaven. These days there is a conscious effort to lose what was once regarded as an enviable elitist reputation. Parmiter and Currer denied absolutely that membership was any more a sign of distinction than of grace. But the Rector, Mgr Adrian Toffolo (himself an English College man) suggested that seven years in Rome was bound to widen hori zons and prepare a young priest for "a variety of jobs". My father spent only a year as curate before acquiring a parish of his own. And, though it ended in desertion, he remained part of the brotherhood of the English College.
It was a one-sided relationship. He only wanted to forget his years as a priest. But, once the secret was out, his contemporaries kept a watchful, if spiritually unrewarding, eye on me. In 1974, a group of Catholic laymen denounced me for attacking the public schools. Archbishop Dwyer of Birmingham, whom I had never met, wrote to the newspapers in my defence. I telephoned him with my thanks, and the assurance that I did not want to suppress religious educa tion. He told me he had done it for my father: "We were friends in Rome a long time ago."
MY FATHER'S time in Rome is not so much a long time ago, more a different age. Then seminarians wore calico shirts and canvas shorts beneath their soutanes. They were required (for medical reasons) to drink the half-litre of wine left
outside their cells each morning and were forbidden to entertain guests in their cells — except at times of ill-health and even then not singly. Now they stick posters on their walls. In an act of glorious self-parody, one seminarian displays a picture of four priests averting their eyes from a courting couple in close embrace. The attitude to women has significantly, if not fundamentally, changed. Then the nuns — Elizabeth's Sisters of Hungary who washed and cooked — were expected to face the wall if a man came into the room. Now a distinguished-looking lady with a pectoral cross teaches pastoral care.
The founding fathers, who in 1577 turned the King's Hospice into a college, believed in the Church triumphant. Their vision hangs behind the altar in the College chapel. It is called The Martyr's Picture because, for 100 years, a Te Deum was sung before it whenever news of a new martyrdom was received. Durante Alberti painted Christ descending from the cross in the arms of God the Father. Four hundred years ago, the young men — refugees from Tudor tyranny — combined patriotism with piety. My father could sustain only one of those virtues.
For seven years he longed for England, home and family life. One winter in Rome (when, according to the story I was told, he worked for Cook's at Termini station) he read Bleak House and was brought to tears by the description of a fog. All that he had to sustain him during the long exile was the romance of the College — the books, the fireflies at Palazzola, the Gregorian chant and the memorial to
Julian Watts-Russell, a young Englishman who fell fighting for the Pope when the Risorgimento dragged Rome into a unified Italy.
My father would have left the priesthood even if life in the English College of the 1920s had been as congenial as it is today. He would have enjoyed the atmosphere of cheerful study — two years of philosophy, three to get a degree and two more on some sort of specialisation. He would have taken the modem priests' pastoral role — now a subject on the syllabus — particularly seriously. But once my mother knocked on his presbytery door, the Pope was powerless. The beatific vision took on a new meaning. Not even the Eternal City could have withstood the undying emotion.
This article first appeared in The Times