Deportment was a word much used by school authorities in my childhood. It is rarely used today. Deportment meant not running riot on trams; it meant wearing caps (or gloves), looking interested when bored, and being seen but not heard. Deportment meant acting like a lady or a gentleman.
The concept of deportment, though, was tricky. It disclosed the possibility of a gap between external behaviour and inner disposition. So continual exhortations to deportment aroused resistance because they showed disrespect for our real selves. Inveterate exhorters also became paranoid about their real enemies — those who practised impeccable deportment with a contemptuous gleam in their eye.
This was part of the ordinary tension of school life, lived in the confidence that in general the students 'got it' — that they accepted the values embodied in good deportment. But every now and then came times of anxiety. The standards of deportment were seen to decline; the authorities feared that the students didn't get it; they noted with alarm every uncapped head; for reassurance they insisted on more detailed deportmental compliance: not just caps, but tidy caps at the right angle, had to be worn. It all met with more and more passive resistance until in time anxiety ebbed.
The little dramas of deportment illuminate some aspects of the most recent controversies over sexual abuse in the Catholic Church. The publicity given to abuse and to self-serving responses to it in the European church and the Roman centre has created high anxiety. The behaviour of Bishops and the Pope are under scrutiny, and each day brings evidence of new perceived lapses.
Every day, too, brings new instructions about deportment to the Pope and his Curia. He must sack bishops, resign, apologise personally, submit to independent investigation, reveal documentation, call a church-wide season of penance. To my unreconstructed schoolboy self, these exhortations seem to flow from anxiety that the inner attitudes of the Vatican officials may not match their words. The boy in me says, 'Give it a break. Stop nagging, and try trusting the poor coots.'
Unreconstructed schoolboys, of course, are not good guides, especially for the older self. But neither is anxiety a good counsellor. The question which feeds