Essays
"I Have Come to Bring Fire to the World"
A writer finds his father in the archives
By Dan Fox
Still from BBC documentary The English Cardinal: A Personal View of John Carmel Heenan, Archbishop of Westminster, 1966. Fox’s father appears second from left, top row
The tatty cardboard box was bandaged with sellotape and stuffed with envelopes, old pale-blue airmail ones bordered with navy and red chevrons. Dad had produced the box as if by magic, like a rabbit out of a hat, retrieved from I don’t know what multidimensional cupboard where it had been hiding for the past half-century, invisible to others.
Dad’s habit, during my visits, was to vanish for hours into the cluttered spare bedroom that doubled as his study, or to go to the garden shed, resurfacing later with an enthusiastic grin and a surprise show-and-tell. A fossil squirreled at the back of a drawer. A broken saber. A postcard of the Titanic signed by a survivor. Now it was this box of letters. “Any use?” he asked. “My letters home from Rome. Grandma and Grandad kept them all. Dunno why. Load of rubbish probably. I was young. Have a gander anyway."
“Rome” stood for my father’s youth. In 1961, age eighteen, under immense pressure from a cruel religious school in the north of England, he was sent to Rome to train as a Catholic priest. He attended the Venerable English College, established in the 1400s as a pilgrim hospice before becoming a seminary in 1579—reputedly the oldest British institution outside Britain.
For seven years he had lived in semi-seclusion in the seminary, a patchwork of medieval and 17th-century buildings next to the Tiber where eighty young men obeyed a strict rule of life unchanged for centuries. Each hour of their day was directed. Bells rang to mark time for waking, praying, eating, studying, exercise, sleep, from morning prayers at five-thirty to lights out at ten. Save for the width of a button, a stronger stitch on a hem, their dress had barely altered since the Reformation: black cassock, clerical collar, biretta, black cloak, black stockings, black shoes, identical short haircuts. Seminarians were allowed outside in groups of four or more, never alone. One day off a week, one bath a week. They were barred from visiting cinemas, theaters, cafés, from reading certain books. Interactions with women were minimal and highly policed. Their lectures were given in Latin. Every December they celebrated the English Martyrs, forty-four students from the college, executed for their faith on their return to Protestant England in the 16th century—talked about as if they had left Rome only days earlier.
Dad wrote letters home every week, but only once in seven years was he permitted to visit his family back in England. He found a deep sense of camaraderie with the other students. They all struggled with loneliness, with the demands of celibacy, with self-doubt about their vocations. In what little spare time he had, Dad sought escape in archaeology. He called it a hobby. I suspect he might have pursued it professionally had he not been pushed to the priesthood. The seminary was claustrophobic, its superiors fixated on church politics and discipline. The all-male environment bred emotional immaturity. Each seminarian’s progress was reported to the bishop of his home diocese back in England; Dad’s bishop was sadistic and virulently right-wing, seeing communist tendencies and spiritual disloyalties in everything my father did. The men were desperate to work outside the college, to give practical help to ordinary people, the poor and the neglected. They loathed the cassock and felt torn between their obedience to the church and their youthful idealism. Anti-clericalism was rife in Italy. The trainee priests were frequently spat at in the street, called bagarozzi—shit beetles, cockroaches, vermin. The students were cut-off from the world they heard about on the radio and read about in theology manuals, a world they were expected one day to serve as priests.
Within the college the centuries past continued to exist as a kind of present. Time flowed around them like rocks in a stream. Christ stopped at Eboli and also Enewetak. Martin Luther was struck by lightning as Operation Rolling Thunder began.
They caught occasional sight of dolce vita Rome, knew the Beatles existed. Pop culture was distant, but the men’s idealism met the zeitgeist in other ways. They knew about the civil rights movement, discussed African independence from colonial rule and felt reverberations from European student protests. In 1962, the Second Vatican Council began, Pope John XXIII’s tectonic shift in Catholic thinking to modernize and “throw open the windows of the church” to the world. For three years, the Catholic hierarchy descended on Rome to debate the future of the church. While the seminarians of my father’s generation found "themselves in the middle of the debate—Vatican II was their ’60s revolution—within the college the centuries past continued to exist as a kind of present. Time flowed around them like rocks in a stream. Christ stopped at Eboli and also Enewetak. Martin Luther was struck by lightning as Operation Rolling Thunder began. The Pill was invented while the English Martyrs were hung at Tyburn, moments before Saint Thomas of Canterbury appeared onstage at the Royal Variety Show, London, and told the rich to rattle their jewelry.
Dad was eventually ordained and returned to the U.K. to work as a priest on council estates in Manchester. In the early 1970s, he was moved to Oxford. There, increasingly appalled by the corruption he saw around him in the church, he met my mother and decided to leave the priesthood and retrain as a high school teacher, taking up his true vocation.
I had explained to Dad that I wanted to write a book about his time in Rome. I imagined it as a novel. I don’t think he understood why, at least not at first. Dad never read fiction, only books about history and archaeology. If I wanted to write about historical events he’d lived through, why make anything up? I had heard his stories about Rome since my childhood. I knew them like the plots of favorite books and movies. As I grew older, the stories grew more complex. The tone darkened. My father had left the church but the church had not left him. He passed on useful lessons. I was raised to be wary of religiosity and piety, of people fixated on bells and smells, those who mistook rites and robes for God. What interested me now as a writer was not the Catholic Church but the experience of seclusion and insularity, the tension of living in the middle of the 1960s in a highly ideological environment designed for the 1560s. What happens when the cracks appear and the light pours in?
Specifically, I wanted to write about what happened in 1966. On November 3, after weeks of torrential rain, the Arno flooded central Florence, coursing through the city, inundating homes, museums, libraries, shops and churches. Water swept away cars and flattened road signs. Cataracts of mud poured into cellars and sewers exploded under the pressure. Trees went smashing into bridges, one of them tearing out the middle of the Ponte Vecchio. Racehorses drowned in the Cascine stables. The inmates of Santa Teresa climbed onto the roof of their prison to escape the rising water. Priceless works of art, architecture and literature were damaged or destroyed and people drowned in their homes and in pedestrian subways. The corpse of one elderly woman was found miles downstream, at the coast.
Appeals for help went out; the designer Emilio Pucci put out a call for aid on the radio. Within hours of the flood, Florentine director Franco Zeffirelli hired a helicopter to document the catastrophe on film. (Rushed to the cinemas, it was titled Per Firenze and was narrated by Richard Burton reading Italian written phonetically on cue cards.) Young people from around the world went to Florence to join the relief efforts—angeli del fango, “angels of the mud,” as they become known.
Still from BBC documentary The English Cardinal: A Personal View of John Carmel Heenan, Archbishop of Westminster, 1966
In Rome, Dad and his friends heard the call on the radio and felt moved to help. Media commentary focused on the damage to Cimabue’s crucifix and Ghiberti’s Baptistery doors, to thousands of manuscripts in the Biblioteca Nazionale. This, Dad felt, was wrong. Together with a friend, he recruited a hundred seminary students from across Rome to go to Florence with one stipulation: that they would not help salvage artworks and books, only people. Against the orders of their religious superiors, the men left their cassocks behind in Rome and spent a month in Florence in overalls, digging a hospice and psychiatric hospital from the sewage and mud, patients still inside. They worked shoulder to shoulder with communist youth groups, beatniks and drifters, young idealists their own age, people from outside the seminary system, people demonized by Catholic teaching. Through this common work, the world opened up.
Dad told me that the box of letters contained detailed accounts of the Florence flood relief. It took me weeks to sort through them. There were almost four hundred letters in total, kept in no particular order. They had been banged out on his beloved Olivetti typewriter, each one on college notepaper topped with the motto IGNEM VENI MITERRE IN TERRAM, “I Have Come to Bring Fire to the World.” I found the big stories—Florence, Vatican II, Pope John’s funeral, a summer spent road-building on Crete—alongside anecdotes of student pranks, comedy born of boredom. The more I read, the more I became fascinated by the letters as a record of life inside an extremely rarefied and secretive world. The tone was largely cheerful, written to reassure my grandparents and disguise Dad’s own doubts and fears. Reassurances: I’m drinking plenty of water. Smoking less. Learning Hebrew in Latin is a slog but working hard at it. Wine is part of the diet but I drink in absolute moderation. The archaeology, I promise, remains strictly a hobby.
I learned that the men spoke in slang confected from English, Italian and Latin. That the college rector during Dad’s first few years in Rome, nicknamed the Boss, kept a loaded gun in his desk drawer. I read about Anna’s, a tiny latteria off the Campo di Fiore where the men would escape in secret. They loved Elvis and Goon Show comedy records and sang the anti-fascist ballad “Bella Ciao” on long hikes along the Old Appian Way. Their rooms were run-down, furnished with used cinema seats and furniture from bankrupt hotels. They played rugby and staged plays for each other. They found ways to read Marx, Freud and other books forbidden by the church, including novels and anything in paperback. During holidays they hitchhiked in groups across Italy. Many struggled with illness and stress. Many dropped out and left Rome for good.
I came across one letter dated early 1966. It made passing reference to a BBC film crew. Every night, the students would assemble on the main staircase of the building to sing the Salve Regina, a short prayer before lights out. The custom dated back six hundred years to a time when the residents of the site were pilgrims, merchants and diplomats visiting Rome from England. The letter said that a BBC unit visited one night to film the men singing. B-roll for a documentary about John Heenan, an English cardinal. In the letter, Dad reported that he’d “managed to put my face into the muzzle of the camera several times.”
I had seen few photographs of him during his time in Rome. Images of the college interior were hard to find. When I asked him about the film, he had no recollection of it. After some digging, I found a reference in the National Film Archives in Britain to a documentary titled The English Cardinal: A Personal View of John Carmel Heenan, Archbishop of Westminster, presented by the journalist and Christian convert Malcolm Muggeridge. (As a Monty Python fan, I knew Muggeridge for going head-to-head with John Cleese and Michael Palin in a heated TV debate about their timeless satire The Life of Brian, which had been demonized by church leaders as blasphemous.) The documentary was broadcast only once, in April 1966. The date matched the letter. I wrote to the British Film Institute, which responded that it possessed a single master copy of the film, unviewable. But for a small fee, a reference copy could be obtained from the BBC. For rights reasons I wouldn’t be able to keep a copy, but an in-person viewing could be arranged at the BFI offices in London. I immediately made travel plans.
What interested me now as a writer was not the Catholic Church but the experience of seclusion and insularity, the tension of living in the middle of the 1960s in a highly ideological environment designed for the 1560s. What happens when the cracks appear and the light pours in?
Walking up Tottenham Court Road to the BFI, I imagined the viewing. Would I spend the morning at a Steenbeck table threaded with film, operated by a dedicated archivist? Maybe the archivist would wear a lab coat. Or perhaps I’d sit in a screening room with an intercom for talking to a projectionist. Click. “Can we run that again?” Thank you, I’d say, waiting for the replay in a comfy cinema seat.
Upon arrival I was shown to a tiny, dismal basement room used for storing chairs. Along one wall sat a work bench lined with TV monitors and old VCRs. The technician in charge of my viewing, on a sturdy PC laptop, seemed to be having a bad morning. He ran gruffly through his paperwork. “You’re here to watch”—his eyes skimmed the form—“The English Cardinal?” Yes. “From 1966?” Correct. “BBC?” Yep. He asked the purpose of my visit and I told him about the letter, about my father in Rome, that I had never "seen moving images of him in his youth. I told him I didn’t know if the sequence filmed in the college had even made the cut. Suddenly the man warmed up. “We get all sorts coming here to view stuff—producers, directors, industry types—but this, this is what makes my job,” he told me. And he had encouraging news: A BBC documentary crew in 1966 would not have wasted an inch of film. If they’d shot the sequence I described, it would be there.
I settled in front of the laptop. He brought me a big mug of milky tea. “If you need anything,” he said, “I’ll be in my office, just down the corridor, listening to see if you find what you came for.”
The digitized film showed up on the screen in high-contrast black and white. Details had degraded. Everything had a soft edge, textured with video distortion. About twenty minutes in, I saw a shot of St. Peter’s Square: Cardinal Heenan striding with purpose down the steps of the Basilica, dark cassock and sunglasses, a professionally genial smile, Muggeridge trotting by his side in neat suit and tie, bright winter sun making a halo of his white hair. The cardinal was tall and Muggeridge short, looking like a child eager to impress an older boy at school.
They walked to a busy street market, journalist and priest in deep conversation. Via voice-over, Muggeridge imagined the strain the cardinal felt over the struggle inside the church between the forces of conservatism and reform. “In the circumstances,” he supposed, “the cardinal must turn with relief to a particular doorway in Rome.”
A pair of dark-paneled doors filled the frame. They resembled the entrance to a respectable law firm or an elegant apartment block. Slow zoom on a polished brass plaque: VEN. ENGLISH COLLEGE.
On the soundtrack, a male chorus could be heard, singing a hymn in unison: Salve Regina, mater misericordiae, vita, dulcedo et spes nostra salve. The simple melody cycle rose, hovered, dived, took flight again. A delicate dip in volume ended each phrase and the tempo of the hymn slowed a touch before picking up with the next line.
Then, at a turn in the stairs, Dad. His lean face seemed to float in the dark like an apparition, his body indistinguishable from shadow. The image hovered on the screen for nine or ten seconds.
Dissolve to a shot of a stone staircase in high-key light and shadow. The camera looked down into a square stairwell. Young men in cassocks lined the stairs, two by two, arms folded, faces turned toward a sculpture of the Madonna and Child fixed to a wall above them, modern, hand-carved. The camera was now on the stairs, slowly moving upward. It framed the men close and tight. Most looked barely out of adolescence. All were clean-shaven, if they needed to shave at all. They wore identical haircuts, identical black half-moon glasses, like young men rehearsing middle age.
Now there was the cardinal’s voice: “You’ve got to be quite mature before you realize what being a priest involves, particularly the question of celibacy, giving up the right to a family, and so on. The camera turned beneath the Madonna and hovered back down the steps. Each man wore a look of earnest devotion as he sang, trying to ignore the camera. The melody rose—ad te suspiramus, gementes et flentes—and fell—in hac lacrimarum valle.
“…It’s at that time when I think the crisis comes and these young men, they’ll be twenty, nineteen, twenty-one, quite mature, and they will say, now, for the first time, ‘I realize that this really does mean a lonely life.’”
Then, at a turn in the stairs, Dad.
His lean face seemed to float in the dark like an apparition, his body indistinguishable from shadow. The image hovered on the screen for nine or ten seconds. His head was tipped back slightly as he sang, as if on tiptoe, trying to see the camera crew over the head of the man in front of him, trying to see his family down the barrel of the lens watching him on television thousands of miles away, the first time they would have seen his face in years. Then he was gone.
I ran the sequence four, five, six times. I shot video on my phone from the dusty laptop screen. I could not stop watching it back. Later that day, when I showed Dad the video from my phone, it took him a moment to register what he was seeing. “Was that me?” he asked. He still could not remember being filmed. After watching the sequence in silence, he said, simply: “Most of them are now dead.”
Writing the book, I am often struck by the thought that my father’s young, thin face continues to exist on a fragile piece of 16mm film, in a metal canister, on a shelf, in an archive facility somewhere in the British countryside. A few seconds of light and shadow behind which lies the weight of a whole life.
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Dan Fox is the author of Limbo (2018) and Pretentiousness: Why It Matters (2016). He co-directed the documentary film Other, Like Me: The Oral History of COUM Transmissions & Throbbing Gristle (2020), which was nominated for a 2022 Grierson Award. He is a senior editor for The Yale Review.