Our fathers in an uncertain future

EVERY year a group of men, who could all comfortably be called middle aged, gather in a field just outside Durham for a game of cat. Described as a cross between rounders and baseball, cat is a seven-a-side sport played on a ring cut into the grass. Originating in north-eastern France, this annual game is probably its only reappearance anywhere in the world.

In a few years time, Jim O'Keefe expects even this tradition to fall by the wayside. Cat will be lucky to get a footnote in the most obscure history book.

"It was a brilliant game if you had good hand-eye co-ordination, and because you started at age 11 you got pretty good at it," says Jim, one of the stalwarts who turn out for the match. "I remember when I arrived, being given a block of wood and an axe and told to make a cat stick.

"It's only played once a year now, because there are no 11-year-olds to learn. We play it at a reunion of former students - some of them are still very good. Students now would not have a notion about it."

Cat's arrival at Ushaw College has its roots in the college's origins. At a time when religious persecution was beginning during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, a former Oxford principal set up a college in Douai, then in the Spanish Netherlands, now in France, in 1568, to provide higher education to English Catholics.

More than 200 years later, in 1792, the turbulence of the French Revolution saw the college thrown out of its home and return to the then more liberal atmosphere of England. Splitting into two, one half settled in Hertfordshire, with the northern scion arriving in County Durham, first at Dipton, and then Consett, before coming to rest in 380 acres of land at Ushaw. Work on the main quadrangle started in 1804, the college opened in 1808 and building continued intermittently over the next 160 years.

In the 1950s, the college had about 400 students, aged 11 to 24, most, although not all, training to be priests in the Roman Catholic church. Today, the college has just 40 students and the junior school block stands empty.

"From the early 1980s, there has been a gradual decrease in the number of men training for the priesthood," says Jim, who arrived at Ushaw as an 11-year-old in 1959, returned as a member of staff between 1977 and 1986, and, for the last six years, has been the college president.

The shortage of candidates has forced the Catholic Bishops of England and Wales to look at the future of their four seminaries, and the possibility of merging Ushaw with St Mary's near Birmingham. The college will remain open until at least 2004, when it will mark 200 years since its formation in this country, but after that all options are open.

And the reasons for the decline in numbers - Jim doesn't like to call it a shortage - do not augur well for any future increase. Jim points to a reluctance to commit to anything anymore - witness the high divorce rate - fewer large families, which often sent one son to be a priest, and even fewer second generation Irish immigrants, which at one time provided a large proportion of the North-East's Catholic clergy.

The sexual liberation of the 1960s has made the church's insistence on celibacy among its priests seem more of a sacrifice than it maybe would have been at one time, and the influence of the church itself has waned, with people more likely to make their own minds up about religion than accept the Christian teachings as gospel.

Andrew Shaw is typical of the trainee priests at Ushaw. At 29, he spent almost ten years working for a bank before deciding he could no longer ignore his vocation.

"It was something that was often at the back of my mind, but at times it would come to the fore, and then I would suppress it and say it was not me. For me, it was a sense of unworthiness, that it was not really me," he says.

Originally from Ashington in Northumberland, he had moved to Jersey with his job. But while everything seemed to be going so well, those thoughts of becoming a priest continued to lurk. "I had everything I ever wanted and worked for. I had a comfortable job, a comfortable lifestyle, but it came back. I thought 'why?'"

What seems to have swung it were two experiences on a pilgrimage to Lourdes. He had been to confession, and, as he left, the priest asked him if he had ever thought about becoming a priest. He said no, but instantly realised he had sinned without stepping outside the confessional.

And as he sat at a caf one day, a priest he had never met came and asked him if he was thinking of becoming a priest. "I didn't want to say 'No, I'm not,' so I said 'Yes'," he says. Now he is in the third year of the six-year course which will see him leave the college a priest.

While at one time, family pressure would have seen boys sent to the seminary, now it is often the other way round. Andrew vividly recalls the time he told his parents of his vocation.

"I cooked them a meal and I sat them down and I couldn't eat, my stomach was going mad. They were tucking in, and I went 'I've got something to tell you'. I said 'I'm thinking of priesthood', and there was a stunned silence. It took them a while to realise what was happening. It must have been difficult for them, but they've been so supportive," he says.

For Peter Allott, the road to priesthood saw him first convert from Methodism, but resist the calling to become a priest all through his time at university. In the end, he could hold out no longer, and, at 23, is one of the youngest seminarians at Ushaw.

"I wanted the normal life, the family, job and car, but you have to make a choice," he says.

Mention of family life is a reminder that it is impossible to speak to a 20-something trainee priest without asking the 'C' question.

"I had to detach celibacy from priesthood and ask if I was being called to be celibate for the rest of my life. I felt I had the call to priesthood, but was I really being called to the celibate life?" says Andrew. "People still see it as being something that is being forced upon us, but being called to be celibate is going to enable me to be free to carry out what God wants me to do.

'I had girlfriends in the past, but at the time I was not in a serious relationship. Now, relationships with my female friends are on a different level, they're deeper."

Peter adds: "You have to give things up if you are going to follow Him in the path of discipleship. It involves giving up the option to marry. It is a discipline of the church, but you have to recognise the spiritual benefit of celibacy.

"If it is something you are constantly resisting then it won't work, because you won't be happy. To go this far you have made the choice - you want to be celibate. You think you are missing out, but you could think that when your friends are going away for the weekend and you are not allowed to go.

"The point of being a Christian is to serve God, it isn't to make you happy. But we know, given the way we're created, that in serving God it will make us happy."

Whether there are enough people in the future who are willing to make such a sacrifice and place their trust in God, will determine whether the history of training priests at Ushaw College will go the same way as those rings in the fields. Cat may not be the only thing with a tenuous hold in the modern world.