Read Online Henry and Cato by Iris Murdoch - Free Book Online

Catholics were a different breed. Faith had never been a problem for Cato. It had been absent. Then it had been present. He had not questioned it any more than he questioned the daylight. Now when it suddenly seemed to have been withdrawn he wondered if he had ever really had it at all. Had it all been utterly private, a subjective experience, something like a drug-induced hallucination? Or perhaps the real experience of faith was, for him, just beginning? His sense of living in and with Christ had been so positive that there had almost been no room for the concept of faith. Was he now, after so many years, just reaching the start? Or had he simply woken up from a happy dream? Brendan, to whom he talked at more length on a second occasion, did not brush his doubts aside, but said things which Cato had already said to himself about ‘the dark night of the soul.’ Cato would have liked to talk now to Father Milsom or to Father Bell, but Father Milsom was ill and Father Bell had gone to Canada.
    Of course during this sudden and unexpected period of change Cato contrived to do his work at the Mission, so much of which made no explicit reference to Godly matters. He watched the atheistic social workers, now his colleagues. Several of them impressed him very much indeed. They had no faith. They probably had no exalted feelings of love or care, no sense of companionship with a higher world; they just functioned as efficient machines, tireless tending rescuing endlessly looking-after machines. Cato in spirit bowed down to the ground before them. They were professionals. He took on no fresh penitents and only when unavoidable heard the confessions of those who had by now come to rely on him. He went on celebrating mass each day, but the mass was dead to him, seemed literally dead, as if each morning he were handling some dead creature. He stood at the altar excluded, blind, unable to give any devotional expression to the anguish which he felt.
    The decision, not taken by Cato, to close the Mission, was both welcome and unwelcome to him. He was beginning to feel all the pain of being in a false position, of being almost an untruthful lying teacher, a charlatan. He wanted to get away from all these people who took him for granted as a priest, and in their naïve way for a good man. On the other hand, what would happen to him now when at last he had time to think? Practical hard work, preoccupation, constant demands and lack of privacy had so far prevented him from fully facing and investigating his doubts. Suppose now when he was able to give the matter his whole consideration he were to decide, irrevocably and without appeal, that there was no God? So far muddle and procrastination had made the horror of it bearable. Easter, just over, had been a bad dream, but he had managed to get through it in a state of double-thinking. To Brendan, who was still his confessor, he had communicated a rather subdued version of his doubts, but so far he had told nobody else, and Brendan, who now took the line of ‘jollying him along’ and calling him a ‘poor old protestant,’ had not yet revealed his plight. Cato was now to be officially on holiday, visiting his father. After that there would be no more interim, after that he would have to decide, or indeed, whatever happened would have decided. Would he stagger on, consenting, concealing, doubting, half-believing, feverishly reshaping the dogma so as to save his honesty? Many priests did this. Or would he, as it now seemed, destroy himself by leaving the house of Christ? Or would there be a miracle which would renew his faith?
    By the end of this period however, by the time of the closing of the Mission, the question of what Cato would or would not have otherwise done about this spiritual crisis was already becoming academic, since something else, also quite unexpected and extraordinary, had happened to him. Cato had met Beautiful Joe quite early on in his Paddington days,