It is harder to stand firm and make a life-long commitment to the Lord in today's "culture of the temporary", the Pope has said in a special audience with seminarians and staff at the Venerable English College in Rome.
The Pope made the address as the oldest English institution outside of the UK is marking a number of anniversaries.
"It is good to see young people preparing to make a firm and life-long commitment to the Lord. But this is harder for you than it was for me, because of today’s “culture of the temporary”, he said "To overcome this challenge, and to help you make an authentic promise to God, it is vital, in these years in seminary, to nurture your interior life, learning to close the door of your inner cell from within. In this way your service to God and the Church will be strengthened and you will find that peace and happiness which only Jesus can give."
More than just a seminary, this year the “Venerabile” - founded as a hospice for pilgrims in 1362 and later growing into an important centre for the English in Rome is marking 200 years since its re-opening in Rome after Napoleon’s occupation of the Eternal City; 450 years since the English and Welsh seminary was founded in Douai, France, and 900 years since the birth of St Thomas of Canterbury, its patron saint.
Along with the papal audience, a special exhibition charting its remarkable journey has been opened in the college’s crypt and is open to visitors until 11 May.
On display in the exhibition are some remarkable artefacts which bring Catholic history to life, including the eyeball of one of the English post-reformation martyrs, the Jesuit priest Edward Oldcorne, and a white zucchetto worn by Pope Benedict XIV, the great surveyor Pope who commissioned a magnificent map of Rome in 1748 which was used by town planners until the 1970s.
It draws from a wealth of patrimony, including items from the Jesuit school Stonyhurst College in Lancashire: for two centuries the “Venerabile” was run by the Society of Jesus. They have provided the cassock of Lorenzo Ricci SJ, the superior-general of the Jesuits, whose imprisonment in the college on the orders of Pope Clement XIV was a major step towards the papal suppression of the order in 1773.
Among other exhibits include a biretta belonging to Saint Charles Borromeo (1538-84), former Cardinal Archbishop of Milan, who had given it to Welsh priest and later bishop Owen Lewis, who had been Vicar General of Milan. It ended up at the English College when it was Douai during the French Revolution. A report in The Tablet on the biretta’s re-discovery in 1927 is included in the exhibition.
Today it could be argued the college’s links with the Jesuits have come full circle with one of its former students, Archbishop Paul Gallagher, being chosen by the first Jesuit Pope to be the first English priest to serve as the Holy See’s foreign minister.
While the college has undergone various twists and turns it continues to operate as a spiritual home for the English Catholic diaspora in Rome and is still training men to serve as priests in England and Wales.
And that history of surviving persecution has imbued in English Catholicism with a deep rooted faith, a relatively small but vibrant church and a loyalty to Rome which the Holy See has long appreciated. Francis also seems to appreciate it too, not only by his appointment of Archbishop Gallagher, but in the respect and trust he has in Cardinal Vincent Nichols, Archbishop of Westminster, whom he has made member to a number of important Vatican dicasteries.
“Memory, Martys and Mission” - which took two years to organise and was overseen by Maurice Whitehead, the Schwarzenbach Research Fellow in the college’s archives - takes visitors on the journey the English Church has travelled. It starts with St Thomas Becket and a relic from his hair shirt and goes right up to the Second World War when English college seminarians were evacuated to St Mary’s Hall, Stonyhurst.
Jan Graffius, Curator of Collections at Stonyhurst College who worked on the exhibition, points out that the diaries of the students from that time “reflects their astonishment at their “astonishment at the restrictions of rationing in England, their determined attempts to keep their Roman traditions alive in the Lancashire countryside, and their appreciation of the beauty of the landscape (rain notwithstanding).”
The exhibition aims to tell the extraordinary story of an institution that is more than 650 years old and one that, despite the massive upheavals of history, has persevered in a mission of service both to the Church and to the wider world. And as the “Venerabile” marks this important anniversary many will raising a toast to the college with these words: “Ad Multos Annos” (“to many years”).
PICTURES: The white zucchetto worn by Pope Benedict XIV; the eyeball of Jesuit priest Edward Oldcorne ©Christopher Lamb
Loading ...
