Homebush Boy by Thomas Keneally Page A

in the corridor with other people who wondered if they might be called. It was according to Father Byrne’s advice, and all the advice I had heard since childhood, better to err on the side that you might be called , as the phrase went, and it got you out of Buster Clare’s General Maths anyhow. And I was also within the guidelines: ‘Do you go to Mass more than once a week? Do you find yourself engaged in spiritual debates when some of your mates are more concerned about the things of the world? Do you spend most of your life in a state of Sanctifying Grace through regular Acts of Contrition and regular attendances at the confessional? Etc, etc.’ All that applied to me.
    â€˜I don’t think my sense of vocation has crystallized yet,’ I told Father Byrne when my turn to talk to him came.
    That was a good verb, I knew. Brother Dinny McGahan would have liked that word.
    â€˜Then be calm and pray to our Blessed Mother,’ said Father Byrne. ‘The Mother of all of us. I don’t know what would have happened to me without Her.’
    We would all later find out that he was telling the truth about this. While he spoke, he looked to the ledge in the corner of the room on which the Madonna stood in blue and white robes. The Virgin Mother Saint Bernadette had seen at Lourdes. Even though I now know, in the smart-alec way all we former Brothers’ boys now know, that Mary would not have been blue and white, would not have had Saxon or Celtic features, but would have been a small, brown and glittering-eyed, Bedouin-like woman, I did not doubt the force of what Father Byrne was saying then and I do not doubt it now. He was talking about an utterly literal kinship. He was talking about his Dreaming, if you like. The balance of his world depended on it. You looked into his pale face and did feel the appeal and temptation to be a young priest, rosary in hand, in a cold church after all the people had left, keeping the Virgin’s real company at the altar rails.
    â€˜I suppose if I’m not sure at the end of the year,’ I told him blithely, covering my bets, ‘I could go to the seminary maybe after a year at uni.’
    I wanted those poets and novelists, and the chance to argue with secular philosophers and to wrongfoot humanist professors with my Thomism.
    â€˜I must counsel you very seriously,’ said Father Byrne, leaning forward, ‘that is not the best way. There is a spirit of secularism and disbelief at the university. I know many a young man who followed that line: first my degree and then the priesthood. By the time they’d finished their degree, under the influence of atheistic philosophers from Marx to Nietzsche to Bertrand Russell, they’d lost their faith. The seminary is in any case a complete education – English, European Languages, History. But as well as that, of course, Philosophy, and Moral and Dogmatic Theology and Canon Law.’
    â€˜Would I be allowed to try to write poetry or novels?’ I wanted to know.
    The novelist priest. A sort of G. K. Chesterton with a collar. Monsignor Ronald Knox wrote murder mysteries.
    â€˜Subject to proper authority,’ said Father Byrne. ‘I had a seminary friend who wrote poetry on a regular basis and had it published in the Messenger of the Sacred Heart .’
    There was some confusion for me in this news of his friend’s literary glories. I’d read the Messenger of the Sacred Heart , and a lot of its verse was obvious, rhyme-y stuff, full of clichés (ugh!) and none of the verbal and theological thunder of GMH.
    â€˜I’ll be back in May,’ said Father Byrne, ‘and we may be able to speak then.’
    Mangan didn’t go to see Father Byrne. Mangan was beyond all that reassurance and urging stuff. He was shooting straight for the stars. He didn’t want anyone trying to persuade him to go to the Sydney Diocesan Seminary. Rather than chat with Father Byrne, he would