The night the Ôrecruiting sergeantÕ came calling

Date Published: {J}

We recently had what I think used to be called Vocations Sunday – and it brought back memories of the time when schools were visited by priests and brothers looking for possible entrants to the religious life, and one encounter I had with the system.

The visitors were, somewhat unkindly, described by my late lamented father as “the recruiting sergeants”. I only learned of the expression when we had one vocations seeker visit our school, I put down my name as a possible, and there was a resultant visit to my home one evening by a Brother.

For accuracy sake, I have to say here that my memory is a little hazy. Memory tells me it was a Brother was involved, a representative of the Christian Brothers, because of the impression left on me by one piece of film which they showed involving the glories of their novitiate buildings and the life of those in the novitiate.

In this context, it is interesting to note that one of the facts commented on in one of the reports on child abuse is that the training facilities for brothers were second to none, and that they received an excellent schooling on teaching. The report seemed to suggest that it was in later years that things could go wrong.

Of course, one of the potential weaknesses of the novitiate system in the days of the 1950s of which I am writing, was that it tended to take boys – or girls in the case of the female religious orders – at a very young age. It was often before they were in any way equipped to deal with questions such as how they wished to spend the rest of their lives.

In those times, it was usually a decision for life, unless one had extraordinary personal courage and left after some years. The idea of leaving an Order and going back home again seemed to have a degree of stigma attached at the time.

Certainly in my own case and my flirt with joining the Brothers, I can have been no more than 13 or 14 when ‘the recruiting sergeant’ called to the school, spoke at length to us, showed us a short film on the novitiate and the life of a religious, and then passed out leaflets on which one might express a further interest.

I think that, in retrospect, you have to remember the times that were in it. Opportunities were nil, and the chances of further education were nil unless you were the son of a bank manager, a doctor, or a teacher. Participation at third level was almost non-existent and the entry requirement seemed to be – could your ould fella produce a few hundred pounds for fees, books and digs.

I am not saying that I coldly calculated that such a move would get me through a sort of ‘third level’, but I clearly do remember thinking that the opportunity to get away from a strict home, get into the companionship of other lads, play football for hours, live in that magnificent looking novitiate, and study, seemed a very attractive proposition.

Those gleaming hallways of the novitiate, that quiet air of study and comradeship of others, the simply fantastic facilities for football and hurling, and the positively dreamy silence of the huge rooms and hallways, made it sound like quite a life.

Compared to all of this, what did a vow of celibacy seem . . . it was some kind of theoretical abstinence from something about which we were not quite sure, though we knew it involved girls and marriage.

For more, read this week’s Galway City Tribune.