News Briefing: from Britain and Ireland

Boarding school to shut
One of Ireland’s best known Catholic boarding schools, Cistercian College in Roscrea, is to close due to the continuing decline in student numbers.

The 112-year-old college said enrolments had fallen by 45 per cent over the past 10 years, with pupil numbers currently around 167, down from 300 in 2009. Just nine students enrolled in the first year last September.
Abbot Richard Purcell OCSO admitted that the decision to close the school has not been an easy one for the monastic community. However, he stressed that “running the college with these numbers is not financially viable”. Other options, including inviting day students and enrolling girls were explored, but were also not considered viable.

In a statement, Bishop Fintan Monahan of Killaloe paid tribute to the Cistercians and the school which, for over a century, has contributed to Catholic education and through its alumni to sport, politics, public service, business as well as other key facets of Irish life.

Five religious-run Catholic schools in Ireland currently offer boarding facilities.

Labour MP and committed Anglican Frank Field (above) has argued that society’s failure to replace Christian ethics with another code of conduct has led to a rise in antisocial behaviour. Delivering the Henley Henson Lecture at Durham University last week, Mr Field argued that Christianity’s code of conduct had not been replaced by another to which the vast majority of citizens would subscribe. “The effects of this failure are all too obvious – a marked increase in incivility, greed and antisocial behaviour,” the Birkenhead MP said. Mr Field has invited Liverpool faith leaders including Archbishop Malcolm McMahon to work together on a “Social Highway Code” encompassing the moral conduct common to most of the world’s religions.

Cardinal Vincent Nichols has consecrated England and Wales to the Immaculate Heart of Mary. The consecration took place during the visit of the National Pilgrim Virgin Statue of Our Lady of Fatima to Westminster Cathedral on 18 February, part of the centenary year of the 1917 apparitions. The consecration ceremony, a modified version of the one used by Cardinal Griffin in the Abbey grounds in Walsingham on 16 July 1948, took part at the end of Mass, which was celebrated by the cardinal and attended by priests from several dioceses.

The Lutheran Council of Great Britain will hold a number of ecumenical events in Britain in 2017 to commemorate the 500th anniversary of the Reformation. London, Cambridge and Liverpool will join cities in 18 other countries to host a touring exhibition that reflects the impact of the Reformation. The former Archbishop of Canterbury, Lord Williams of Oystermouth, was due to speak at the event in Cambridge, at the Church of St Edward King and Martyr on Thursday this week, followed by Bach Vespers with the Lutheran Bishop of Munich.

In his address to open a theological symposium at Trinity College Dublin marking the quincentenary of the Reformation, the Church of Ireland Primate, Archbishop Michael Jackson, argued that Christianity, in its dealings with other world faiths 500 years ago, had got some things “spectacularly and disastrously wrong”. “We too in our day have no other option than to rub shoulders and to shake hands with those of world faiths other than our own. Ecumenism simply is no longer sufficient,” Archbishop Jackson said.

He cited Osney Abbey in Oxford, a medieval monastery and the second largest in England in its day, which was dissolved as part of the Reformation. Its stones were then used to build Oxford University.

In 2017, the challenge to universities, the archbishop suggested, was whether they should be so anti-religious.  

“Is it still really necessary to find faith in God so problematic a concept, even if it is ‘not for you’, when today it seeks not to dominate and to indoctrinate but to contribute values of altruism and adventure to the human experiment and is open to criticism and to contradiction in a spirit of tolerance which goes beyond toleration?” he asked.  

“Do we all not need the freedom of reformation at some level of our operational existence even if we resist it at the pit of our stomach?”

Diaconate to be set up
The Diocese of Salford has announced plans to establish a Permanent Diaconate. This follows the 2015 consultation document, “Preparing the Way”, after which 90 per cent of respondents came out in favour of setting up the diaconate. Fr Philip Caldwell, director of Diaconal Formation, said he was “delighted” by the outcome. “Not only does this give us the chance to bless, through ordination, the work of certain men who have a desire to follow Christ, but this new ministry itself will make an invaluable contribution to the discussion of what it means for a parish to be missionary,” he said.

An innovative project bringing together the worlds of the Arts and Divinity saw young composers’ work performed with Sir James MacMillan, the leading Scottish classical composer and conductor, for the first time last weekend.
Run by the University of St Andrews, the initiative matched six doctoral students in theology with six upcoming composers and asked them to create a piece of music based on passages from the Old Testament. For example, one student used her fire-spinning skills to inspire a piece on God speaking to Moses through the burning bush. Sir James said: “It’s no surprise that composers and musicians have been described as the ‘midwives of faith’, bringing something to the expression of Scripture, and indeed the expression of prayer, through organised sound which opens a window on the Divine.”

Track honour for Farah
St Mary’s University, Twickenham, has officially named its athletics track in honour of its most famous alumnus, the distance runner Sir Mo Farah (above).

The Olympic and World gold medallist, who attended the naming ceremony in Twickenham last week, trained at the university from 2001 through to 2011.

At the ceremony Sir Mo repeated his criticism of US President Donald Trump’s travel ban. “I believe that was an unfair decision,” he said. “Suddenly for your country, when you’ve been there for six years and done everything right, overnight to tell you that you can’t come back to your kids is unfair. It wasn’t right – it wasn’t fair. It was unfair to be treated that way and that’s why I made that statement.”