Description

Priest Factory
A Manly Vision of Triumph
1958-62 and beyond
by Chris Geraghty

This book is the second volume of Chris Geraghty's memories describing what it was like forty plus years ago to be training for the Catholic priesthood. 'Cassocks in the Wilderness' dealt with his years at Springwood from 1951 (when Chris was 12 years old), to 1957. Now in 'The Priest Factory', with superfine sharpness and with uncanny recall, he presents his recollections of the triumphalist understanding of the church and of its priesthood which permeated the senior seminary in the years between 1958 and 1962.

A more apt title could hardly have been imagined for what Geraghty describes, evoking as it does the assembly-line concept of cutting down to size all the young men who entered there, until, like pineapples in a canning factory, each could be squeezed into that one model of 'Catholic Priest' then current, stereotypical of all things clericalist.

Over the years much has been written of this form of spiritual blight which had so often corroded the life of different religious communities and movements. The mind-set of the notorious Taliban is not an invention of the last century, or something unique to the world of Islam. Geraghty describes the process of clericalising the young, in all its debilitating details. 'The Priest Factory' gives us a wonderfully clear picture of how a clericalist system operated throughout the Australian church, and how it used its seminaries to mould fresh-faced, enthusiastic young men – some still only boys – into its own image and for its own purposes.