AND ANOTHER THING
Drumming Christian principles into imps of Satan — or angels
PAUL JOHNSON
he beatification last Sunday of Edmund Rice, founder of the Irish teaching order, the Christian Brothers, is a welcome event. First, the Pope, who is very keen on saints, is right to go on making them. Sancti- fication, in which the Pope and the collective Church exercise powers directly delegated to them by the Deity, is among the greatest of Catholic institutions, one which helps to give it its distinctive fundamentalist flavour and marks it off from fraudulent forms of Christianity, such as Anglicanism. Second, there is no doubt that Rice was a good and holy man, and one who accomplished a noble work. Third, in beatifying him, the Church also honours the Christian Brothers, one of those workhorse organisations within Catholicism which has no glamour, often attracts sneers, but which performs an essen- tial task.
There is a lot of snobbery in the Church, I am sorry to say, and the Brothers are often dismissed as socially, intellectually and culturally inferior to that other great teaching order, the Jesuits. Mary Holland, in an excellent report from Dublin in the Observer, points out how important a role the Brothers played in the creation of that essentially lower-middle-class state, the Irish Republic. The present Irish premier is only the second not to have been educated by them. She quotes an Irish historian who remarked, 'The patricians were sent to the Jesuits.'
I was educated by both orders, as it hap- pens. My mother would not allow me to be sent to a boarding school until I was 12 (being a wise and humane woman), and so between the ages of eight and 12, when the Sisters of St Dominic judged me 'too old' to be mixed up with their girls, and the time I was ready for Stonyhurst, I went to a day- school run by the Brothers. I did not enjoy it as much as Stonyhurst because no day- school, however well conducted, can hope to equal the sheer competitive excitement of that dramatic universe-in-itself, that daily combination of soap opera and ado- lescent epic, the old-fashioned public school. But I liked it and was happy there, and I learned an enormous amount.
It is true that the Brothers were rough- and-ready compared to the ultra-sophisti- cated and urbane Jesuits. Most of them came from humble homes and had had their education knocked into them the hard way. Their instinct was to carry on the tra- dition. It is a standing Irish joke that the most ferocious exponents of corporal pun- ishment are the Christian Brothers and the Sisters of Mercy.
Our headmaster, Brother Wall, was a stem man who used the occasion of morn- ing assembly to issue bloodcurdling threats: `A disgusting word was written on the blackboard of Form IVb yesterday. If I ever discover the boy who did that, he will wish his mother had never borne him', or: 'A disgraceful filum is to be shown in the Ritz cinema next week. It is called Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. No boy is to see that filum even outside school hours. And any boy who misses classes to see that filum will be severely dealt with, even if I have to beat the entire school single-handed!' (Why Brother Wall objected so strongly to Snow White I cannot now imagine; or why he stressed his single-handed duty when he had 30 or 40 Brothers — mostly muscular young men — to help him. But so it was. Many boys, despite the warning, did miss class to see the movie and were caught and beaten — but not the entire school.) Each Brother carried a beautifully craft- ed, custom-made leather strap inside the breast of his tunic, which could be whipped out and flourished in a trice. I occasionally saw boys thus strapped on the hands, but I never suffered such punishment and I doubt if it occurred often. Stories about the Christian Brothers being sadists and sub- jecting terrified boys to horrible and degrading treatment are lies put about by apostates and anti-clericals, of whom there are now many in Ireland. Nor is it true that sexual abuse of boys was common in schools run by the Brothers, another smear story now circulated by enemies of the Church in Ireland. No such thing ever hap- pened at my school, I am perfectly certain of that.
The truth is that the Brothers were sim- ple, humble, hard-working, decent men who, for reasons modern minds now find it difficult to comprehend, devoted them- `I want the Tories to win, so I'm leaving!' selves to a lifetime of celibacy, poverty and academic drudgery. They were admirable teachers, certainly devoted ones. They did not teach Latin and Greek as well as the Jesuits, but in maths and science they were more advanced. They had the best art stu- dio I have ever painted in, in contrast to Stonyhurst, where art was taught in a base- ment. They were all terrifically keen on sports of every kind, in which they worked off their sexual energies. Their piety was intense, innocent, all-embracing and (in retrospect) touching. One of my form mas- ters, Brother O'Meara, was the sweetest human being I have ever met. He never punished even the most tiresome boy. I asked him if he had ever used his strap: 'To tell you the truth, I don't carry it anymore. Sure, I never used it anyway. How can you hurt a boy made in God's image? I tell you, Paul, inside every single boy there's an angel waiting to be let out.'
Conor Cruise O'Brien's description of the Christian Brothers' teaching of history as 'concentrated anglophobia' is complete nonsense so far as my experience goes. They taught patriotism and love of country, and when the war came they prayed fer- vently for Britain. Brother Wall was a dedi- cated enemy of the IRA, who were active in 1939 putting letter-bombs into pillar-boxes. He told morning assembly, 'If ever I hear a boy say anything in favour of those low- down villains and scoundrels, I shall do . . . words fail me, boys.'
The Brothers never had a high opinion of themselves, unlike the Jesuits, and that is one reason why they have never been tempted, again unlike the Jesuits, by `Nicaraguan religion' and other heresies. They are not even priests and have always accepted a lowly rung on the hieratic lad- der. But for providing high-quality sec- ondary education cheaply, and sound Christian principles without fuss or frills, they are unsurpassed. The Irish Republic has never been a proper country since it parted company with its mentor, England, and lost its natural ruling class, the Anglo- Irish ascendancy — 'no mean people' as Yeats put it. Indeed, now riding a meretri- cious boom fuelled by EU handouts, the Republic seems fated to become the most corrupt and lawless country in Europe, after Greece and Italy. But what would it have been without the Christian Brothers to educate its politicians and civil servants? Words fail me, boys.
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