ALL THREE of the internal Bachelor of Divinity degrees conferred with first class honours this year by the University of London have been awarded to students of Heythrop College. A further 27 Heythrop students have gained the degree with second class honours, including 12 in the upper division.
The Principal of Heythrop College, Fr W. F. Maher, SJ, commenting on this year's results, said this week: "Naturally we are all delighted at this magnificent achievement on the part of students and staff, which crowns the results of our first five years as a school of the University.
"It shows we are really playing an active part in the theological work of the university, and are also serving the wider community and the Church in this country, by beginning to produce a generation of theologians, both clerics and laymen and women, professionally trained at the highest academic level."
I Ieythrop College, which was formerly the Jesuit College of Theological Studies in Oxfordshire, was moved to London by the Jesuits in 1970 so that it might become a constituent college or London University.
Since then its numbers have steadily grown to include not only an increasing number of candidates for the priesthood, notably fr.:5m the archdiocese of Westminster, and of Jesuit and non-Jesuit religious, but also a significant number of laymen and women undergraduates.
The total student enrolment this year numbers 150, including a first-year intake for the BD honours degree of 35 students, of whom up to onethird have recently left school.