The sexual travails of a priest

CELIBACY Author: Tyrone Grima Self-published / 2007 Extent: 71pp

I honestly do not know how this book came to be among the books I intended to review, or who had sent it.

This is his first book, followed some years later by Bep, a story of love and obsession. His main interest, I take it, is the theatre: last February he put up Anouilh’s Antigone at the Manoel as part of the V18 cultural offering.

In his daily life he is, or was, a teacher at a church school and maybe his working relationship with priests and brothers inspired him to write this book.

It is about a failed priest, Fr Paul, whose honesty brought him trouble when he told a girl reporter all about his masturbation. The provincial (we all know how provincials react, we had a recent case) flipped over and enforced silence.

But Fr Paul is not so easily silenced, especially with his internal demons. Enforced celibacy really stirs up yearnings and they tend towards the sexual, as against a more comprehensive humanity (which includes a normal relationship between man and woman). Silenced by the provincial, he still finds ways of speaking out but that first interview and the subsequent hullabaloo about masturbation come up time and again, every time he gets invited to speak, on radio or to young people. Fr Paul retreats into himself, opening up, with opposite results to a young man, Peter, and his girlfriend and to a man from his original village, Gilbert, who has come to help out with the youths and who has huge personal problems. Available to Peter any time he wanted to talk, Fr Paul shuts out Gilbert even when he knows he really needs someone he could talk to. This sense of failure brings on a huge collapse of his self-confidence – at the end, he has some sort of mystic experience which then leads him to make a very definitive decision about his life. It is, in a way, a journey of discovery along the lines of shedding the misconceptions with which Fr Paul became a priest. He learns, badly, about his own sexuality, in the sense that sexuality through masturbation is a one-sided sexuality. He learns how to relate to others but the one he was closest to, Peter, goes away and as for the other person in his life, Gilbert, he callously shuts him up. At the end, there is only one way left open to him and that is to walk away. The book’s title, Celibacy, is in English but the book is in Maltese. Celibacy, the blurb tells us, is the name Fr Paul gave to a pet tortoise he gave to Peter’s girlfriend, Michela. One day, after Peter left, Michela phoned Fr Paul. You would think the story would develop along one, predictable, direction, but it does not. That’s the limit of Fr Paul as a man, let alone as a priest.