Henry and Cato by Iris Murdoch

disturbed him with dramas of any degree of intensity.
    At a certain time his superiors decided to give Cato a change of scene, and he, in the harmony of his mind with his priesthood, found himself wanting exactly what they were now proposing. Without yet leaving the shelter of the community house where he had lived hitherto, Cato took up a visiting role in a poor east end district of London upon the confines of Limehouse and Poplar. ‘You’ll be shocked, you know’, Brendan had told him. ‘Nothing can shock me’, said Cato. But he had been shocked. He had been frightened, frightened of his penitents, frightened of the dumb failure of his authority, and at a world where news of Christ had never come and, as it often seemed, could never come. ‘I was in prison and you visited me’ had lost its charm. Cato could sometimes discern no light at all in those whom he devoutly attempted to love. He saw for the first time the wilfulness of vice as a part of everyday life, and the way in which despair and vice were one. Just beyond the confines of ordinariness there were places where love could not enter; it was as if the concept broke. Cato knew perfectly well that the power of God could pass through the broken concept, and that this was the lesson which it most behoved him to learn. He measured now how cloistered he had been by his father’s clean idealism. Perhaps it was this very breaking point that he had been seeking when he fled away into Christ. He prayed ceaselessly and hoped to find some blinded understanding in his prayer as he brought it with him into scenes where he knew himself to be powerless, detested, or even (worst of all) a figure of fun! Yet in the midst of it there were families, especially Irish families, who took him absolutely for granted. ‘Ah, here’s Father come. Sit down now, Father, will you have some tea?’
    In the course of those adventures he made only one friend, a local secular priest called Father Milsom, an old man who had lived for many years in the east end, and who regarded Cato as an innocent child. Cato was glad of this new paternity, and soon told Father Milsom all about his own father and the quarrel and his hopes in Christ that it would end one day. Father Milsom was not very optimistic, but even his realism was to Cato like a kind of hope. Sometimes in the late evenings he met Brendan and told his ‘day’. Brendan had worked in the slums of Manchester and Cato found it impossible to astonish him. He talked to his friend and confessor about his discoveries and his fears. ‘All the same, one has such great power in the confessional’. ‘ You have no power.’ ‘Confession becomes a kind of collusion.’ ‘Of course it does. Just try to leave one little unassimilable grain of truth behind.’ ‘They confess, and carry on, in fact they confess to carry on!’ ‘Who can say what draws them to confession. God’s grace is everywhere.’ ‘Christ is with these people, he is in these people, in the most violent, most criminal ones, but sometimes it’s impossible to see Him there.’ ‘Just see Him, look at Him. He will give you the light.’ ‘You said I’d be shocked. The misery doesn’t shock, it’s the vice that shocks. I thought I’d seen it all already in myself, but I hadn’t. And do you know—Father Bell used to say that wickedness was dull, but it isn’t, it’s rather exciting.’ ‘It seems exciting. The place where one can see it as it is is above our level.’
    Just as Cato was beginning to feel less awkward in his duties a new idea was mooted. The order had acquired the lease of a house in Paddington, and a priest whom Cato knew slightly, an enthusiast called Gerald Dealman, wanted to set up a little community of priests to live there with the people and share their lives, perhaps even work with them. Cato was delighted when