Smoke in the Sanctuary: A Novel [Paperback]

Smoke in the Sanctuary is a comic novel about the Catholic Church in England today. It concerns Father James Page, a parish priest in his thirties taking up his first appointment in the small West Country market town of Cheeseminster. He immediately encounters opposition from a group in the parish called We Are Right! (WAR!), who object to various changes he tries to make in the parish liturgy. WAR! are very radical, whereas Father Page, as time goes on, becomes increasingly traditional. Page’s opponents include Miranda Phillips, chair of the Liturgy Planning Group, and Greg Tonks, leader of the parish folk choir and lead singer of local band, the Nurdles. When Fr. Page introduces a weekly Latin Mass, demonstrations are staged against it and the bishop sends his trouble-shooter, Monsignor Rory Sloane, to sort things out. Unfortunately, Sloane is as radical as the WAR! members and forces Page to backtrack. By the time Sloane leaves, Page is worse off than when he started. Meanwhile, he tries to help Julia Anderson, a young teacher at the Catholic primary school, introduce a more traditional religious education course. In this, he is again opposed again by WAR!, but supported by Hubert Drone and the Campaign for Real Catholicism (CRC). Page also tries to help the hapless Mark Spooner, an engineering student at the local university, who is using the Internet Catholic Dating Agency to find a girlfriend. Despite Page’s regular advice, Spooner's quest for love does not run smoothly. In due course, things get hopelessly out of control and Page finds himself at the centre of an escalating media row. Sloane now returns and the real battle begins.

Stephen Oliver was born in Southampton in 1963. After education at St. Mary’s College there, he graduated in Classics from the University of Birmingham and trained as a teacher at Queens’ College, Cambridge. He then taught Classics at the Haberdashers’ Aske’s School, Elstree and the Royal Grammar School, Guildford, before spending a year and a half as a novice monk at Downside Abbey, near Bath. This was followed by four years teaching at Stonyhurst College, Lancashire, where he attained the lofty position of deputy Syntax Playroom Master. Following six months in the south of France with the Institute of Christ the King, Sovereign Priest, he is now completing an M. Litt. degree in Ancient History at the University of St. Andrews. His interests include ancient Greek religion, cricket, the films of Eric Rohmer and the novels of Anthony Powell. Smoke in the Sanctuary is his first novel.

The earliest intimation I had of trouble was at my first Sunday Masses. When I arrived, I found that there were two of these, one at eight o’clock and one at eleven. Not having had time to move it, I said the eight o’clock Mass from behind the wooden altar, but found the whole experience so underwhelming that I decided to lug it off into the sacristy before the eleven o’clock. This wasn’t particularly difficult as it was incredibly light, seemingly built of plywood or possibly even cardboard. There was no music at the earlier Mass, and the congregation seemed largely to consist of a few old ladies who enjoyed getting up with the lark. I’d been told that Father Hicks, my modernist predecessor, had wanted to suppress this Mass, on the grounds that to have two Masses on a Sunday was ‘divisive’, but that the old biddies had complained so much that he had been forced to continue it. My suspicion is that Hicks is a lazy swine who doesn’t enjoy keeping early hours, but that may be uncharitable. At any rate, the Mass went ahead, but I later learned that Hicks got his own back by bringing in the cardboard altar at about this time. The biddies had complained again, but had been told by their pastor that the Vatican Council had made specific provision for the introduction of portable altars. Asked why this had never happened before, despite the fact that the Council had ended in 1965, Hicks had lamented the slowness of the people to accept change and the timidity of the priests in charge before him. The biddies had gone off in retreat to consult their liturgical manuals and for a while an uneasy status quo had reigned.

After a hasty breakfast, I had returned to the church to prepare for my eleven o’clock appointment. Despite my early arrival, I was greeted by the sight of a small, rather wizened man in his fifties trying to drag the wooden altar back onto the sanctuary. Despite its portability, he seemed to be having a great deal of trouble and I hurried up to him with the intention of assuring him his efforts were in vain. He, however, managed to get in first.

‘Hello, Father,’ he said, somewhat tetchily. ‘I’m just putting the altar back. Some idiot seems to have moved it.’

He now approached me, wiping his brow with a handkerchief extracted from the pocket of a rather grimy pair of trousers. With a large nose and sparse hair, he did not look in the best of health. His face was pale and his jacket hung from his body as from a scarecrow. He also seemed to have a limp.

‘My name’s Desmond O’Grady,’ he continued. ‘I’m in charge of the altar servers here.’

I explained that I was the idiot who had moved the altar.