Row as order's schools close

BY ANGUS MACDONALD
BELmoNT Anauv School in Hereford, one of the country's best known Benedictine schools, is to close after nearly 70 years, it was announced this week amidst signs of a growing crisis in Benedictine education.
The news follows hard on the heels of last week's announcement tO shocked Parents and staff that the popular Buckfast Abbey Prep School is to close in July.
Only last September, the two prep schools attached to Ampleforth Abbey Gilling Castle and the Junior House of Ampleforth were merged, and the Benedictine school at Port Augustus also closed last year.
The Abbot of Belmont, Fr Mark Jabale, said the closure of the abbey school had been forced by a dramatic downturn in numbers, especially amongst boarders: "Economies and careful budgeting have enabled us to get through the last few years, but the monastery is unable to continue to sustain the growing losses from the school, which are approaching six figures this year."
A headmaster of the school for 14 years, Fr Jabal& said Catholic parents were increasingly sending their children to non-Catholic schools.
"There has been a fantastic drain away from boarding, but it has hit us even harder because, since Vatican II, we have stopped insisting that the first choice of Catholic parents should be Catholic schools."
He denied there was a general widespread crisis. "Benedictine education is facing difficult times, but so is everybody else."
At Buckfast, angry parents yesterday held an all-day vigil to protest against the closure of the 104-pupil Preparatory School, with some threatening to take legal action if the decision was not reversed.
"We see no reason to close such an excellent school and cannot understand why the Abbot refuses to meet us or discuss what could be done," said Alastair Gunning, who heads the parents' protest group.
"He's rejected our plan to form a charity and rent the buildings and he won't tell us what he's going to do with them."
In a recent letter to the Daily Telegraph, Lady Clifford of Chudleigh wife of the South West's leading Catholic peer wrote that she was "stunned and angered" by the decision. "All of us with children at the school feel a cocktail of emotions: shock, disbelief and anger."
In his letter to parents, Abbot Charlesworth cited declining numbers of boarders, an earlier take-up by senior schools and a looming financial crisis as the reasons for the closure.
There was a decline in boarding pupils, he said, whilst many day-pupils were leaving at 11 instead of the usual 13.
"The sapping of numbers in the middle of the school has now made numbers in the two senior forms too small to be viable," he said.
But other parents accuse the Abbot of running down the school because of declining numbers of Catholic pupils, and point to a 25-year record of academic excellence under its previous headmaster, Fr Benet Conlon.
There was controversy two years ago when the highlyrespected Fr Conlon, a cofounder of the school who welcomed Catholic as well as non-Catholic children, was obliged to take abrupt early retirement.
Since then, overall numbers applying to the school have fallen dramatically.
"I can understand the argument that there are insufficient Catholic boarders," said one irate parent. Mut why not make a conscious effort to increase the number of Catholics, instead of shutting the place?"
Recent years have seen a decline in the direct involvement of monks on the staff of Benedictine-run schools. Trained lay teachers have increasingly become the norm, as have rising numbers of non-Catholic pupils.
Nobody from the school or the abbey was available for comment.