About a week after my ordination, one of my neighbours asked me about the parish to which I was going to be sent. When I replied that I was going back to Rome to study for one more year, she looked rather perplexed and observed: ‘That’s funny, ‘cause I’ve always heard that you were a bright lad!’ Thankfully, the Lord had taken her before I went to Germany some years later, as, at that point, she would have considered me really stupid! This reflected something of the prevailing attitude of the times: as a young person you trained for your life’s task, and that was adequate for most professions. For my neighbour (and not a few priests), theology was something you did in seminary to prepare you for ministry and, to the end, was deemed to be perfectly sufficient for life. In Maynooth jargon, there was ‘stuff /bull’ to be learned; once you got through whatever had to be done for your exams (bull), you retained the basic knowledge (stuff) for working in a parish! Most of what you learned, of course, remained very much in the background and might even be forgotten.