John Charmley, Author at Catholic Herald

John Charmley

How our Catholic university is making the most of its roots

October 24, 2019

“Diversity” is one of the buzzwords of our age, and those of us in higher education have been vigorous in advocating it. The news that St Mary’s University, Twickenham, will be hosting the pontifical faculty which has, since 1614, been awarding pontifical degrees is a sign that diversity really does incorporate a genuine pluralism. The

St Mary’s shows a Catholic university can flourish in Britain

August 22, 2018

Higher education is a ruthlessly competitive business, but St Mary's shows Catholicism and higher education go hand in hand

The new idea of a university

August 16, 2018

There is a heatwave, and it is clear that Victorian buildings, however beautiful, are not ideal places in which to work in such weather. The marked absence of neckwear among the senior management team suggests that even the more conservative among us have decided to accommodate ourselves to the times. If only it were that

Justin Welby needs a history lesson

February 01, 2018

I first encountered the name of Bishop George Bell more than 40 years ago when working on Churchill’s official papers. His stand against the area bombing of Dresden and other German cities in 1944 was a valiant example of Christian witness at a personal cost; when Archbishop Temple died, Bell was not considered for the

John Charmley: I haven’t lost faith in universities

September 28, 2017

As I watch the new students arriving, I reflect that this is the 43rd year that I have been involved in the process. In 1974 I arrived as a fresher at Pembroke College, Oxford, one of the smaller and friendlier colleges; now I watch as pro vice-chancellor at St Mary’s University, Twickenham, one of the

Triumph of the box-tickers

July 13, 2017

The old Soviet system of over-bureaucratisation did not die with the USSR; it transmigrated into Britain’s higher education system. When I started lecturing nearly 40 years ago, universities were responsible to the University Grants Committee, a benign set of mandarins in London who exercised a hands-off supervision of British universities. Academics were largely free to

John Charmley: A Churchill or a Nero?

March 30, 2017

The “good clean tradition of [our] politics has been weakly surrendered to a half-breed American whose main support was that of inefficient but talkative people of a similar type”. This is not, as you might think, the reaction of a member of the Washington political establishment to President Trump, but that of a member of

Why I’ll be returning to Flame in the future

March 13, 2017

Flame 2017, Britain’s leading Catholic youth event, was hardly my natural environment, but it proved a moving experience

Britain’s latter-day Reformation

July 28, 2016

The referendum campaign majored on the idea of “getting back control of our country”. It is quite unclear what that meant in a world where even the greatest powers accept some curbing of their sovereignty, but it clearly struck a powerful resonance in England and Wales; that was not the case in Northern Ireland and

A national controversy based on whispers

April 07, 2016

Those of us who have long admired Bishop George Bell will welcome a new biography – the first written with access to the archives. There was much to admire about Bell, Bishop of Chichester from 1929 to 1958. He was one of the earliest churchmen to denounce Nazism as utterly incompatible with the Christian faith,

The Pope is right: we have an image problem

March 31, 2016

Whether it recognises it or not, Christianity has an image problem. At a recent lecture at the University of East Anglia, the former home secretary Charles Clarke spoke of how he had seen Christianity before coming into closer contact with it while in office. Like so many members of our political elite, Clarke was neither

The long march of Catholicism

January 28, 2016

News headlines tend to focus on the decline of religion in this country. This feeds into a hermeneutic of decline, in which the mission of the Church is to manage that process. The assumption is that mankind has evolved beyond the need for religion. As long as the Church is happy to fund its schools,

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