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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 April 2024
In 1830, three centuries after the Reformation, which had turned followers of ‘the old religion’ into an oppressed minority, there were some 700,000 Roman Catholics (hereafter ‘Catholics’) in England and Wales. The Catholic Emancipation Act had just become law. By 1903 their number had risen to at least a million and a half. During that period the Catholic Church in Britain could be described as made up of three groups: those old families that had hung onto their Roman faith and their English property (the ‘recusant families’); the Irish, new families which had fled from famine and persecution and—devoid of property—had congregated in the larger towns; and the converts from the aftermath of the Oxford Movement. Intermarriage, industrialisation and the emergence of professional classes came to erode these distinctions, as did the power of an increasingly liberalised and fluid secular society to absorb sub-societies into the wholeness of the body. The First World War put the stamp of irrevocability on that process, though Catholics still retain a recognisable community identity.
The story of the cautious renewal in modern times of relations between the CatKolic Church and another ancient institution, the University of Oxford, has something to say to quite a number of people interested in the Church, because it is the story of how the Church has tried to cope with an unusual issue in a situation of social and religious change.
From the Reformation until the last quarter of the nineteenth century the University of Oxford—described by Catholics of the period as ‘one of the two national Protestant universities’—was an Anglican preserve from which professed Catholics were barred.
1 The principal work on this subject is McClelland, V.A., English Roman Catholics & higher education, 1830–1903. Oxford 1973Google Scholar. As to its relation to the University of Oxford, the principal source is the Hartwell de la Garde Grissell papers, now at St Benet's Hall, Oxford. An Old Harrovian, Grissell had been received into the Catholic Church by Manning, and had spent his life as a don at Brasenose, from where he proved the most active propagator of plans for the return of Catholicism to Oxford (and also Cambridge).
2 1856 for Cambridge, thus opening the bachelor's degree to Dissenters. The final abolition of religious Tests had to wait until 1871, when by then the Catholic climate (judging from the pages of The Tablet) was for denominational universities, a Catholic university being mooted.
3 Northcote Report to the sub‐commission on higher education, Universities' Catholic Education Board. Brompton Oratory Archives.
4 Dublin Review, July 1863; reprinted in volume 1 of Manning's Miscellanies, Burns & Oates, 1877.
5 Dublin Review, July 1863, quoted in Cardinal Manning: a biography, London 1985, 191.
6 V.A. McClelland, op cit 194–218.
7 J.C. Hedley, ‘Cardinal Wiseman’, Ampleforth Journal III. 3 (April 1898). 272.
8 W. Ward, The Life of John Henry Cardinal Newman, 1912, vol 2, 195.
9 ibid, 183.
10 Personal reports of Northcote, of Wilkinson, 1872. Brompton Oratory Archives.
11 Barnabò to Manning, 19 Sep 1872. Leeds Diocesan Archives.
12 Report to Propaganda, Rome, 14 June 1872. Leeds Diocesan Archives.
13 ‘Oxford and Cambridge’, Ampleforth Journal II. 1 (July 1896), 6.
14 J.G. Snead‐Cox, The Life of Cardinal Vaughan, 1910, vol 1, 469.
15 ‘The office of the Church in the higher education of Catholics’, The Tablet, 16 May 1885, 792–4. This contained a complete résumé of the question with an emphatic re‐assertion of Rome's authoritative decision.
16 Unpublished Memoirs, 16.
17 Instruction to the parents, superiors and directors of catholic laymen who desire to study in the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge by the Cardinal Archbishop and Bishops of the Province of Westminster (1896). Brompton Oratory Archives.
18 ‘Clerical students acceptance’ file. Greyfriars Oxford Archives.
19 ‘A proposed Newman Memorial Hall in Oxford’. Douai Abbey Archives.
20 In November 1909, Fr Charles Dominic Plater SJ, who inspired the Catholic Social Guild's foundation, wrote in The Month that he was ‘dreaming of a Catholic Ruskin Hall’ on the model of working men's colleges founded in Oxford at the turn of the century. Plater College became in effect his memorial.
21 The life of Ronald Knox, 1959, 213.
22 Chaplain's Annual Report. Statistics have been rounded for convenience.
23 Mgr Valentine Elwes' 13th Chaplain's Report, 1958–9.
24 Cf Oxford University Calendar, until 1975: ‘Ecclesiastical patronage of the University’.
25 J.K.B.M. Nicholas, ‘The new Roman Catholic chaplaincy building’, Oxford Magazine, 3 Feb 1966, 237–9.
26 Congregation 24 Apr 1986, Chancellor presiding: King Juan Carlos I received Degree of DCL. The same degree had been conferred on the recipient's grandfather, Alfonso XIII, in 1926, but its conferment on the present King carries added substance in a new Fellowship in Spanish under Queen Sophia's patronage, and in the recently established Centre of Iberian Studies.
