The Charles Plater Trust awarded more than £500,000 in grants to 19 charitable projects at a ceremony on London on Wednesday 25 May.
The Bishop of Arundel and Brighton, Richard Moth, chair of the trust, was the chief celebrant at a Mass at Allen Hall seminary in London, and presided with Cathy Corcoran, chair of the grant-making committee, at the awards ceremony.
Recipients of small grants of up to £5,000 included Catholics for AIDS Prevention and Support, a pastoral ministry to people living with HIV, and the Vincentian Volunteers, a programme which places young people with charities to work for a year while living in community.
Large grants of up to £50,000 went to charities including DePaul UK for its “Nightstop” programme in London, which provides emergency accommodation for young people at risk of homelessness, and Citywise, which runs mentoring projects in schools in Manchester.
Soundabout, an inclusive choir for people with profound and severe learning difficulties, was another recipient, and provided the music for both the Mass and the ceremony in Allen Hall’s library.
Ms Corcoran, a former chief executive of the Cardinal Hume Centre, said that this year’s grant was the largest the trust had made, funded by the release of capital.
“We’d love to find other philanthropists who might like to join us in funding more of the high-quality project proposals we receive, so that we could do even more in the future to support the work of charities at the coal face,” she said.
The trust originated in the closure of Plater College, Oxford, in 2005, deriving its funds from the sale of the college’s buildings. Founded in 1922 as the Catholic Workers College, Plater College had offered vocational courses to adult students.
Charles Plater SJ was a central figure in the Catholic Social Movement of the late nineteenth century, prompted by Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical Rerum Novarum which addressed the grim condition of labour in the period. Plater began a ministry to working men in Oxford in the 1890s, combining spiritual courses with practical education.
Distinguished by his great charisma and energy, Plater was also a teacher and companion to many wounded soldiers hospitalised in Oxford during the Great War, and his bulldog Jimmy became well known as “the famous RC dog”.
He was sent to Malta in 1920 to recover from exhaustion – in a postcard exhibited at the awards ceremony he wrote “I feel a guilty wretch for deserting my post” – but died there in 1921. The college was founded nine months later in Plater's memory.
In his sermon, Bishop Moth noted the parallels between Charles Plater and the Venerable Bede, whose feast day coincided with the event, particularly in the common interest in “upright purpose and learning”. He emphasised the pertinence of Plater’s message when “the slavery of the working classes of the nineteenth century is lived out in new ways in modern times”.
Archbishop of Westminster, Cardinal Vincent Nichols, had been scheduled to say the Mass, but was required to attend Buckingham Palace at short notice. Bishop Moth replaced Cardinal Nichols as the chair of the trust in January this year.