AND ANOTHER THING
Up among the Yorkshire monks who pray for their enemies
PAUL JOHNSON
It is a tempting thought to retire toa monastery, and shut a heavy, oaken door in the face of the corrupt world outside. I though of this the other day when I went up to Ampleforth Abbey in Yorkshire to give a talk to the senior boys at the school there. When I got off the train at York, the inces- sant October rain had stopped for a spell, and pale sunlight slanted across the grave and bulky towers of the Minster. I had half an hour to spare so I did a quick water- colour of this majestic structure, the largest of all our mediaeval cathedrals, which still dominates its town as once they all did. I tried to imagine how it must have seemed to a 15th-century peasant who came to York for the first, perhaps the only, time ur1 his life, to gawp and wonder at its inunen- Say. The Catholic Church, in its last century of glory before the Reformation destroyed all and the thieving upstarts of the Henri- elan court moved in to plunder, was ubiqui- tous and all-pervasive. It was much closer than the Crown, with more power at the loc. al level, especially in remote provinces like Yorkshire. My Lord Abbot was a grand Personage, who attended Parliament by writ of personal summons, in a mounted compa- ny of jolly monks and armoured soldiers, the bells on their harness tinkling, the banner of St Benedict carried in front. The poor were in awe of the monks, but loved them too. They were always there when needed, with ro, a bit of shelter, warm old clothes, no °rro-filling, no questions asked. Now there is the welfare state. Not the same thing. The monks were driven out by Henry's greedy commissioners. Most went quietly, glad toget a pension and save their skins. But Henry had to hang the Abbots of Glas- utenbory and Westminster, obstinate and u°1Y men, who felt nothing but scorn for an anointed king who broke all his oaths and Was being dragged to Hell by the demons of lust and avarice. The monks of Ampleforth, 1,`1.110 returned to England in 1802, claim a historic community with the Benedictines of Westminster Abbey. Would they were back there now, as they ought to be, instead Of the worldly canons under their dreadful r earl bickering spitefully with his organist! tlIstead they are in the fastnesses of rural th irrrkshire, little islands of sober sanctity in ee. grittY materialism of that bold, brassy s „ TheY have their treasures still, as it hap- 'ens. On my way to the Abbey I was shown Gilling Castle, Arnpleforth's prep school. This is an amazing house, once a seat of the Catholic branch of the Fairfaxes, with a cav- ernous 14th-century basement, almost untouched, a 16th-century interior above, and an 18th-century façade, all in the grand, buttery stone of the locality. The little boys take their meals in a setting not even Eton or Winchester can match, a great, airy stone chamber from the middle of Elizabeth's reign, with spectacular painted and carved panelling, decorated in the Renaissance manner with ladies and gentlemen holding high revel, and the coat-of-arms of no fewer than 370 local families of note. I have never seen anything like it. Nor had Randolph Hearst. He bought it on the spot, and had it dismantled and packed up for future erec- tion at his grim castle in Wales. But there it remained in its packing-cases while the magnate passed on to higher — or lower things. The story of how the monks took over the stripped and desecrated house, and eventually got the panelling back and rein- stalled it exactly as before — no one would know it had ever left — is nothing short of a miracle, fit to rank among the countless marvels which have marked God's favour to the Benedictines since they were founded in the 6th century.
I thought of the boys clattering their knives and forks in such splendour, and remembered how I was spared the prep school to Stonyhurst, on the other side of the Pennines, because my wise mother refused to let me leave home before I was 12. So I arrive at the big school with no friends there and no Greek either. But I had at least learned to box with skill and ferocity. On my first day I was surrounded by a ring of grinning associates, lip-smack- ing for cruel sport. The leader said, 'As a new squit, Johnson, can you give me one good reason why you should not be beaten up?' Yes,' I said, 'but you must lean for- ward so I can whisper it.' He obligingly inclined his head close to mine, and received a sharp uppercut delivered with the force of terror. At that point, as if on cue, a Jesuit master appeared, took in the fisticuffs and my flaming red locks — the symbol of bellicosity — and said sadly, 'Oh dear, Johnson, fighting already?' I knew then that I lived in an unjust world.
It is still unjust, more so than ever per- haps, but there are little enclaves where the writ of the Almighty runs even on earth. I loved Ampleforth, which I had never visit- ed before, set in stone in its comfortable vale, with its eager, questioning, beautifully mannered boys, the sound of bells sum- moning to prayer, and the earnest, decent hard-working monks in their simple black robes. They are schoolmasters but with a difference, for theirs is a life of self-sacri- fice and meditation, of chastity and poverty, of long silences and much litanising and chanting, as well as pedagogy. They give all for their God and to serve the boys, striving hard to bring them along as ordered and instructed Christian gentlemen, fit for this world as well as the next. And I think the boys realise the devotion of the community to their welfare, seeing them as rather more than schoolmasters — disinterested men- tors and spiritual guides, and family friends and elders, truly in loco parentis.
`It is so good to be cut off from the wicked world,' I said to the monks at break- fast in the guest parlour. 'Would that we were!' they answered sadly. Trying to run a high-quality public school on Christian lines in our present society is not only diffi- cult in itself but attracts extraordinary venom from the media, especially the so- called quality press. There is no topic on which journalists are more inventive, less interested in the dull truth, and more unscrupulous than when investigating tales about goings-on at famous public schools, especially Catholic ones. The Guardian, as one would expect, leads the pack in malice, but others are not far behind. The head- master, Father Chamberlain, told me he had now been forced to refer press calls to a firm of public relations specialists, run by an old Ampleforth boy, so sickened had he become by having his words deliberately twisted or inventions foisted upon him. `Never mind, Father,' I said, 'they will prob- ably be punished in this world, as well as the next.' But the monks do not believe in punishing their enemies. They pray for them, and that is as it should be.
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