Of all the events to mark the destruction of St Benet’s Hall in Oxford, one might have thought that the optimistically-titled mass in “Thanksgiving for 125 years” on Saturday 24 September might have been at least the most moving. Instead it was thoroughly depressing, even beyond the fact that Benet’s has gone to the wall thanks to Ampleforth Abbey’s sale of its buildings to St Hilda’s College.
If anything was a party, it was a gathering of alumni back in June; the mass of thanksgiving was effectively a funeral. Given Benet’s distinction and standing in the wider Catholic community it seemed sensible to ask the Oxford Oratory to host it; on the day a sparse congregation trickled in and was almost lost in the cavernous, if beautiful, setting. The Chancellor of the University, Lord Patten of Barnes, was there; so was the Archbishop of Birmingham and Sir Ralph Waller, chair of the St Benet’s Hall Trust.
The last Master, Professor Richard Cooper, also came, but notable by their absence were his surviving predecessors, the vast majority of the Hall’s now redundant academic staff, and any of the monks who had spent formative years high up in the rafters at 38 St Giles. Hardly any recent alumni appeared, either. Many of my contemporaries are very, very angry at how things have played out; much frustration has been inevitably been directed at Ampleforth Abbey, who have continued to maintain that they had no other option.
The Abbot of Ampleforth, Dom Robert Igo, was the principal celebrant at the mass; as his route to the abbacy did not include any time spent at Benet’s he was a stranger to most of those attending. He took as one of his motifs the theme of spiritual failure, telling an anecdote about a kindly but “failed” missionary somewhere in Africa who had built much for the people he had found and ministered to but had not managed wholly to convince them of the truth of Christ and the Gospel. What, then, had been his purpose?
From Ampleforth’s point of view, of course, St Benet’s Hall had long departed from its original purpose of educating its monks at Oxford so they could gain degrees and return to teach at the Abbey school. My own time Benet’s saw at most only three monks resident at any one time, but a dearth of monastic students in the twenty-first century is hardly uniquely Benedictine. It fell to Professor Cooper, at the subsequent wake, to pay tribute and celebrate all that Benet’s had become since admitting lay students.
Had it not been for the Master’s address, the last monk at Benet’s would have gone unmentioned: alumnus, chaplain and prior Fr Oswald McBride. Over the last few years he was the glue that held the place together, especially through the difficulties of Covid; he is much loved and will be much missed. There’s a sad irony that the same period saw Benet’s flourish (regardless of its original purpose) with its best-ever academic results, and a community bouncing back after the nightmares of lockdown.
As St Hilda’s prepares to move in, and as the more valuable fittings are is carted off back to Ampleforth, Benet’s strikes a tragic figure on St Giles. The library is slowly being stripped bare and there are empty spaces on the walls, where paintings once hung. For what was so many of us not just our college but our home, it is incredibly painful to see. Recriminations are still flying about over who is to blame; the claim in this week’s Spectator that a life-saving donation was refused by the University has only made things worse.
One former fellow unhelpfully insinuated in The Critic that “wokeness” was to blame for Benet’s’ downfall, implying that contraceptives were available in the public lavatories of a Catholic institution. That is categorically untrue; after the admission of women sanitary products were provided in the lavatories, while condoms were kept discretely in a cupboard in the basement for individuals to access according to their conscience—and they were the responsibility of the Junior Common Room, which functioned as an autonomous body.
It is impossible not to consider Ampleforth Abbey’s well-documented problems in recent years. They are its own, but they have had their impact far further afield. Clearly, leading Ampleforth at the moment is not without its challenges; as he told the congregation, the Abbot had spent the previous day handing over an Ampleforth parish to the Archdiocese of Liverpool. The Abbey prep school at Gilling Castle has closed, while Ampleforth College has been entirely separated from the Abbey—and the whole world knows why.
The cutting loose of Benet’s is little more than another element of Ampleforth’s retreat from a century of outreach. For reasons best known to himself Abbot Igo chose to couple it to Hugh Trevor-Roper’s assessment of the Nazis’ failure to take Stalingrad in 1942-43, which Trevor-Roper concluded was because Adolf Hitler was a bad strategist who didn’t know when to beat a tactical retreat. It was left to the congregation to work out the implications of the comparison.
Joe Lord read Literæ Humaniores at St Benet’s Hall between 2016 and 2020
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