History is, of course, the weapon of choice in any culture war. John F. Kelly, the subject of this lively and sympathetic biography, was the third director of Melbourne’s CEO; he took over in 1955 and relinquished the post to Pat Crudden in the late 1960s. Crudden’s own story is also well worth the telling, but that is beside the point for the moment. Kelly’s biographer, Robert Pascoe, is the partner of Susan Pascoe, who was herself, until recently, the director of the Melbourne CEO. Whilst Robert Pascoe is a far too meticulous an historian to allow the present to blind him to the uniqueness of the past, there is no doubt that many of the themes of this book are still live wires. Kelly embodied a type of theology that wanted to start with the experience of the believer.

Kelly was the author of My Way to God, two volumes of catechism which were accompanied by two books for teachers. These were the backbone of Catholic religious instruction throughout Australia during the years when the baby boomers were at school. A good many of those boomers remember more about the nuns and brothers who taught them than they do about what the nuns and brothers were teaching, a fact that seems to reinforce Kelly’s conviction that faith is handed on through relationships between teacher and pupil.

Nonetheless, if you happen to find Catholic boomers in the mood for religious nostalgia, their thoughts will soon turn to My Way to God. Book One was green; Book Two, curiously for the time, was red. Those books sold in numbers that would impress even Dan Brown and helped shape the souls of a generation. Pascoe’s biography is a wonderfully lucid and thorough account of how the books themselves were shaped. Pascoe understands their immediate social context. But he also diligently probes the theological and other reading with which Kelly tooled himself for the task. Kelly was an autodidact and compulsive reader who tried to give up bookshops for Lent. Fortunately, he failed. The title of the My Way to God series say a lot about their underlying conviction: the journey of faith is a personal one. But it is not one which should be undertaken alone.

To the naked eye, Kelly was entirely a creature of the Catholic Church. But Pascoe’s biography reveals a startling gap between the public and private Kelly. People remember Kelly as articulate and confident. He dressed his wit in elaborate language. For example, he used to say of a prelate whom he disliked that he was ‘appointed bishop by the grace of God on April the first’. Kelly kept a good table and enjoyed the baroque banter of clergy who dread getting to the end of a sentence. By all accounts, he possessed a scathing wit, but he also had a perceptive intelligence and was serious about spirituality. He used to meditate on the New Testament in Greek.

The private Kelly was far less secure and confident than his public persona suggested. For this book, Pascoe had access to a diary Kelly began in late 1934, when he was twenty-four and soon to be ordained. Kelly was still writing that diary shortly before he died in 1986. It filled twenty-five volumes and it is a remarkable document by any standards. Its most tender intimacies are with writers, Virginia Woolf conspicuous among them. But the author hardly says a positive thing about himself. Self-doubt is not surprising in a young man who grew up in pubs, who never felt close to his parents and who had difficulty making friends. But Kelly kept up the self-excoriation for years. There are the makings of a tragedy there. It makes you wonder how he negotiated his own way to God.