John Molony describes his childhood and education in Luther’s Pine. The book closes in 1950 with his ordination in Rome as a priest. He was then 23. Luther’s Pine was a tree under which the Australian students at Propaganda College used to gather. Propaganda was established in Rome for students from mission countries. The pine tree was later cut down.
As you would expect from a historian of Molony’s distinction, his autobiography is written chastely, elegantly, self-critically and charitably. He describes a young man of exceptional decency and courage, whose journey towards self-knowledge takes him from the Mallee to the cosmopolitan, if sheltered, world of Rome.
He has a gift for vivid description. Through simply told stories, people significant in his story live in the imagination. They range from his parents to his cousin Bill, who is a Footscray boy, to the cold but just Jesuit Henry Johnston, his passionate and encouraging mentors Charlie Mayne and Felice Cenci, and his malevolent lecturer, the future Cardinal Pietro Parente.
Molony had to overcome many obstacles to achieve what he had always wanted, and on the way he discovered his intellectual gifts. But his book breathes a deep and pervasive sadness. Luminous stories of people living with great vitality are followed by a note that the light later failed or was extinguished. The book also becomes more edgy as it draws to its conclusion. Not that the writing ever loses its grace and control, but its melancholy becomes exquisite. In one memorable paragraph he describes his re-reading of the letters that he had written to his mother:
The boy, the young man full of ideals and dreams who wrote them, has long gone and the realms he lived in have become another world. The shape of the boy and his world remain, but in some measure only as listless ivy hanging on the outline of a building that once had its own beauty. With few exceptions, the people whom the boy knew and loved in the distant past are now dead. The writer, his youth and his manhood spent, has yet to find his own peace. The world of the early 21st century is young. It also strives for peace.
The tone of Luther’s Pine is elegiac. Although its theme is a young man’s arrival at a longed-for destination—Paradise gained—the writer now experiences this journey as Paradise Lost. That young man, most of his friends and his