Page 10, 28th September 2007

28th September 2007

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Page 10, 28th September 2007 — Oxford’s Catholic presence is not about to disappear
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Oxford’s Catholic presence is not about to disappear

Catholic private halls did well in the university’s major review, says Fr Leo Chamberlain Oxford hosts the strongest institutional Catholic presence in any university of the United Kingdom. The Catholic Permanent Private Halls of Oxford University – St Benet’s Hall, Campion Hall, Blackfriars and Greyfriars – are at the centre, but there is also a vibrant Catholic chaplaincy, several religious houses of different orders and congregations, while the Oratorians at St Aloysius have transformed that central Oxford parish. The Permanent Private Halls should be better known. These are remarkable institutions, none of them very large, and it happens that four of the seven are Catholic. The halls have both graduate and undergraduate students, who read for their degrees in exactly the same way as students in the colleges, and their senior members have membership of the relevant faculty of the university.
The publication of the University’s first official review of the Permanent Private Halls should help to make us better known, and dispel prejudices. Within the last week or so the halls have attracted a certain amount of media attention. It is a pity that these stories have sensationalised small sections of the review referring to Wycliffe Hall and Greyfriars, one of the Catholic halls. The headline in the Times reads: “Oxford’s Christian Colleges are not suitable for school leavers” and the Tablet claimed “Oxford slams Capuchin College”. It also states that the Permanent Private Halls “are separate from the university”. In fact, they are fully part of the university, licensed by the vice-chancellor. They have their origin in the generous attitude taken by the university to the presence of the Benedictines and Jesuits from the last decade of the 19th century.
Wycliffe Hall is an evangelical Anglican theological college: concerns about its attitudes are particular to it. The Times suggests that the review concludes that the seven Christian halls “risk failing to provide a rounded learning experience in keeping with Oxford’s liberal ethos”. This is just not the case: it is a criticism directed at Wycliffe’s provision for 18-year-old undergraduates. The overall view of the panel is more fairly summarised as supportive of the relationship between “church and academy” in the Anglican halls. As far as the Catholic halls are concerned, the Times then printed a letter from Samuel Jacobs, a Jewish undergraduate who has just finished in his theology degree at St Benet’s Hall. He wrote: “The academic and pastoral provision was excellent, and our tutors were far from the narrow-minded bigots your article suggests.” Greyfriars is the responsibility of the Capuchins. The first lay Warden, Dr Nicholas Richardson, a respected Classical Fellow of Merton College, has just concluded a three year term and Br Mark Elvins OFM Cap has become Acting Warden. The review is critical of Greyfriars. There are serious concerns which must be resolved. If the hall does indeed appear to be “struggling against the odds”, as the panel puts it, that in the main is because the Capuchins have been preoccupied by their own reconsideration of their commitments, and not ready to support Dr Richardson in undertaking the necessary tasks of modernisation. But the report also notes the “enormous goodwill of individual friars, the Warden and the academic and support staff”. In 2006, five out of 13 students who completed the examinations took First Class degrees. That is a good record. I think the reported unhappiness among undergraduates was not the whole picture.
Overall, the recommendations of the review present few terrors for the halls that have taken on the requirements of the present day. It is flattering that the university thought it worthwhile to set up a respected panel to conduct the review, and helpful that concerns, “arising to a significant extent from ignorance of the general arrangements of the Permanent Private halls”, are discussed fully. The review is a careful and coherent document. It correctly identifies the financial and administrative vulnerability of the halls, and not just of Greyfriars. Some necessary steps in modernisation are recommended. The halls could well take more graduate students, supporting the university’s academic strategy, and funds might be raised to appoint more stipendiary tutors while subject groups might be fewer but larger. Here and now, the Catholic private halls subscribe fully to the university’s policies on equality, harassment, and intellectual freedom, and they subscribe to the Common Admissions Framework accepted by all the colleges: but they are entitled to maintain their own character as religious foundations. Contrary to some reports, there is no suggestion in the report that this should change. Indeed, the panel recommends that the university should have cause to re-examine the licence for the Catholic halls if the commitment of their order is diminished. The presence of the Catholic halls remains a reminder of the origins of the great colleges of the university. It would be strange to have a campaigning atheist as a member of a Catholic hall, but it is most unlikely that such would apply for membership. It is not strange at all to have undergraduates or graduate members who are not Catholic, but who appreciate the company which they have chosen to join. It takes a long time, sometimes a lifetime, for people to make up their minds about their fundamental beliefs: it is our business to support them in their search.
Traditionally, the Catholic halls have gone quietly about their intellectual business, rightly grateful for the time and trouble that busy dons have devoted to their students. But things have changed and need to change further. When St Benet’s and Campion Hall were founded, over 100 years ago, it was so that young monks and Jesuit scholastics could take secular degrees. Today, St Benet’s and Greyfriars take lay undergraduates through the ordinary admissions process; Blackfriars takes mature students and a number of visiting American students; Campion Hall provides opportunities largely for graduate studies in the splendid Jesuit tradition: you are as likely to find a Campion Hall man pursuing Egyptology or astronomy as theology, though one of their members, Nick King, has just published an excellently provocative translation of the New Testament. A century ago it was unthinkable to take part in the Anglican faculty of theology. Today, there are Catholics in the faculty and the private halls together make an ecumenical contribution to its work. They bring a fair number of undergraduates. St Benet’s, one of the smaller halls, has between four and six each year reading theology: Christ Church, with its array of Regius Professors, has perhaps two.
The Catholic halls now look to develop co-operation between them, on the one hand to meet the administrative demands of the present day, so different from the informal and personalist past; and on the other hand to develop their contribution and joint purposes within the university. At a time when atheist rancour is so public, we should be clear about our identity and value to the university, and so to the intellectual life of the day – and, make no mistake, from ideas, attitudes and values formed in the university will stem ideas, attitudes and values in our society.
Fr Leo Chamberlain OSB, sometime scholar of University College, Oxford, was headmaster of Ampleforth from 1992 to 2003, and has just finished a three-year term as Master of St Benet’s Hall




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