Downside holds back from electing new abbot

A senior English Benedictine house is considering its future after the retirement of its abbot and the decision not to immediately appoint a successor.

A Prior Administrator has been appointed to lead Downside Abbey, in Stratton-on-the-Fosse, Somerset, after Abbot Aidan Bellenger, who had served a single eight-year term, retired.

Dom Leo Maidlow Davis was appointed Prior Administrator by the English Benedictine Congregation (EBC). Downside might have been expected to hold an abbatial election on 8 August, the day that Abbot Aidan’s term of office was due to expire.

But instead the monastery announced Dom Leo’s appointment which lasts for two years and can be extended to four years. 

According to the constitutions of the EBC, an administrator is appointed if a community is unable to reach a majority decision on who should be abbot. In the case of Downside, the decision to appoint a Prior Administrator took place before any election.  Abbots can serve continuous eight-year terms.

In a statement, Downside said: “the monastic community is now looking to the future and in Dom Leo has a uniquely qualified person to take it into the next stage. His special function is to create space and time to enable the community to reflect with greater freedom on its mission and to prepare a dynamic vision for the future, then to elect as its abbot the person who will lead it for the next eight years.”

The community has 20 monks – of whom 12 are resident in the abbey – and has a promin­ent independent senior school attached. Its first lay headmaster took up post earlier this year.

In its statement the monastery, which this year celebrates 200 years in Somerset, said it remained committed to “Catholic, Benedictine education” and that Dom Aidan remained chairman of the school’s governors.

There have been difficulties in recent years following allegations of sexual abuse levelled against some in the community. In January 2012 a Downside monk, Richard Nicholas White, was sentenced for abuse of boys at the school in the 1980s. The monastery is an important part of the Church in England and Wales and runs eight parishes in the Dioceses of Clifton, Birmingham and East Anglia. Downside also founded the monasteries at Ealing, in west London, and Worth, in West Sussex.

Downside said it was grateful for Abbot Aidan’s term in office that had included a review of Downside School’s governance and the restoration and updating of the monastery library.