Category: Articles

An old mill is turning into a spiritual hub at Stonyhurst

Post author By stefan
Post date April 6, 2018

Friday 6th April 2018

The CHC @ The Catholic Universe

An old mill is being turned into a spiritual hub at Stonyhurst

Building work on Theodore House began on May Day last year. It is the ruined Victorian mill in the heart of Lancashire’s Ribble Valley now being transformed into a residential centre for families, pilgrims, schools and visitors to England’s Sacred County.

A building that once fed bodies will now feed souls and minds.

Theodore House is a free standing charity, at the heart of the Christian Heritage Centre project at Stonyhurst. The trustees have raised £3 million towards the building costs and borrowed a further million to be repaid over the next eight years. They are within shouting distance of the finishing line.

To complete the project this year, the trustees are tantalisingly close to raising the remaining £400,000 – and they hope to do it with one more heave.

Theodore House will have accommodation for 34 people – and include a refectory, library, lecture theatre, two seminar rooms, an atrium and an Oratory dedicated to Teresa of Calcutta and John Paul II.

Bishops and Catholic lay leaders have been deeply committed to the project. They have pointed out that the arbitrary closure and sale of retreat houses and other facilities has deprived Catholics of places geared to spiritual renewal.

To help remedy this, Liverpool Archdiocese has contributed to the project – and given some beautiful stained glass depicting the Baptism of Jesus. Originally commissioned in 1923 by Fr John McKinley for his Toxteth church of St Malachy, the building was closed in 2001.

In Greek Theodore means ‘gift from God’, and the charity’s trustees believe that in our increasingly secular society Theodore House will be a wonderful gift to the Church in England and beyond.

A Syrian Christian who escaped the fall of his town to Islam, St Theodore was sent to England by the pope and became the eighth Archbishop of Canterbury.

Even the account of his remarkable life is itself a gift to contemporary Christians who take so many of today’s freedoms and opportunities for granted.

The plight of the worldwide persecuted Church will have a special place in the work of Theodore House, and Christian Leadership courses will be run to equip Catholics to become ‘servant leaders’. Retreats can be parish led and a team from Aid to the Church In Need, will be involved in leading school retreats.

Theodore House will mark the notable, and sometimes courageous, Christian contribution to society through the naming of rooms – sponsored by benefactors to honour family members or great figures from our Christian story.

Stonyhurst’s celebrated archivist, David Knight, has been preparing short biographical details.

Among the rooms will be one named after Shahbaz Bhatti, the Catholic Minister for Minority Affairs in Pakistan, shot dead by the Taliban in March 2011.

Others will include St Maximilian Kolbe and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who both died in Nazi concentration camps, and St Margaret Clitherow, married with three children and pregnant with her fourth child, who was crushed to death for harbouring a Catholic priest.

William Wilberforce, best known as the leader of the movement to stop the slave trade, and celebrated Christian writers G K Chesterton, C S Lewis and J R R Tolkien will also have rooms named after them, along with Dame Cicely Saunders the English Anglican nurse, social worker, physician and writer, best known for her role in the hospice movement, and Phyllis Bowman, a Jew who became Catholic after seeing the effects of abortion on women and unborn children.

Other rooms are being dedicated to the memories of Baroness Sue Ryder and her husband Lord Leonard Cheshire, Cardinal Basil Hume OSB, Blessed John Henry Newman and Matteo Ricci SJ, an Italian Jesuit missionary who introduced mathematical and astronomical knowledge to China.

The ‘special relationship’ between Britain and the US will be celebrated in rooms named for John & Charles Carroll, the Leo Family and the Knights of Columbus – the world’s largest Catholic fraternal service organisation, founded in the USA in 1882. Other bedrooms are being sponsored, among others, by the King Family, the Cowdall Family and the Brinkley Family.

One of the two seminar rooms is named after Lancashire’s Bowland Trust, the lecture theatre for Ben and Kim Chang, the library for the late Bridget and Peter Hardwick – kindly funded by Mark Thompson, of The NewYork Times, who was taught by Peter Hardwick, and the Oratory, which will include the work of Aidan Hart, is being generously supported by Graham Hutton, chairman of Aid to the Church in Need.

There are still naming opportunities available for the family annexe, a seminar room and some of the bedrooms. Potential benefactors should contact Anton de Piro: Tel: +44 7748272908 [email protected]

Among the very first of the groups to be booked into Theodore House later this year are some young Catholics working in Washington – some in the US Congress. They will link up with some of their British counterparts – a great investment for the future.

Those staying at Theodore House will be able to visit the historic libraries and see the unique Stonyhurst Collections, providing access, for the first time, for the 850,000 children in 2,200 British Catholic schools. These inspiring collections – which have been featured each month in The Universe – belong to the whole of the Catholic community.

Objects can tell the old story in a challenging and fresh way, reminding us who we are and challenging us to renew the Faith as others have done before us.

Frances Ahearne is organising bookings and may be reached at 01254 827084 or by writing to [email protected]

Nor will physical needs be neglected.

J R R Tolkien and the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins both had direct connections and there will be access for visitors to our Tolkien Trail and Hopkins Trail – with walks by the beautiful Rivers Ribble and Hodder and onto the Lancashire fells.

There will also be access to the Stonyhurst campus sports facilities, swimming pool, and golf course, which has a direct link with George Walker (forebear of President Bush and Walker Cup fame). Walking and cycling in the area will add to the perfect holiday or short break.

The charity’s website www.christianheritagecentre.com contains details of the Christian Heritage Centre Trustees and Patrons – including Lord and Lady Nicholas Windsor, Cardinal Vincent Nichols and Bishop John Arnold. Other Patrons include Ann Widdecombe, Baroness Cox, Sir Edward Leigh MP, Frank Field MP, and Field Marshall Lord Guthrie.

To help complete this labour of love the trustees’ immediate need is to raise £400,000. If you are able to give any help or would like further details please email the Chairman Lord Alton at [email protected] or Anton de Piro at: [email protected] telephone 07748272908.

Tags Stonyhurst, Theodore House

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We appreciate true beauty when we contemplate the divine glory of God

Post author By stefan
Post date March 2, 2018

Friday 2nd March 2018

The CHC @ The Catholic Universe

We appreciate true beauty when we contemplate the divine glory of God

Ilyas Khan, KSG

If there is a purpose in Art, it is that it serves to simplify not to complicate. This is one of the lessons of the greatest theologians of modern times, Hans Urs Von Balthasar.

Pope Benedict, amongst others, considers Balthasar to be the very greatest of Catholic intellects since Thomas Aquinas.

Described by De Lubac as “perhaps the most cultured man of his time”, Balthasar’s life spanned the course of the 20th century and his work, by any measure, is immense in volume and in influence.

The centre piece of his theology is an exhilarating trilogy that was written over the course of 30 years, covers 15 volumes and extends to over 10,000 pages.

The first part of this trilogy, Glory of the Lord, is a study of Balthasar’s renewal of foundational values as seen by an approach to aesthetics framed through the prism of the classic transcendental values – Truth, Beauty and Goodness.

My own path to Hans Urs Von Balthasar emerged through the age-old debate of “reason vs revelation”. I was 18 when I first came across his writings at Netherhall House, and too ill formed in my philosophical grounding to take more than a superficial ‘dividend’ from those readings.

As my career has progressed – I spend most of my time in science, particularly mathematics and quantum computing – what once were sharp edges have become softened – but in wholly unexpected ways.

Balthasar brooks no compromise, and this certainty has helped me to see that there was, is and ever shall be Christ at the core of everything that we try, in our own way, to rationalise. From the very largest to the infinitesimal, God is the only constant.

Balthasar provides a beautiful counterpoint to the 19th century philosophy of “L’art pour l’art”– itself an inevitable outcome of what he describes as the anthropocentric tendency of Western thinking since the time of the renaissance – where objectivity and form drift away from each other.

Vast industries have been built on the back of this shallow tradition where artists, galleries and curatorial staff all jostle in an echo chamber where they tell each other how wonderful they all are.

Balthasar draws a line in the sand, as it were, and brings us back to the patristic approach of the Church fathers, with an elegant pre-Thomist reminder of what the modern world has all but forgotten – that beauty (and art) can only be appreciated when it leads us to an appreciation of the splendour of God. “Beauty is the disinterested one, without which the ancient world refused to understand itself – a world which both imperceptibly and yet unmistakably has bid farewell to our new world, a world of interests, leaving it to its own avarice and sadness.

“No longer loved or fostered by religion, beauty is lifted from its face as a mask, and its absence exposes features on that face which threaten to become incomprehensible to man.

“Our situation today shows that beauty demands for itself at least as much courage as do truth and goodness, and she will not allow herself to be separated and banned from her two sisters without taking them along with herself in an act of mysterious vengeance.”
Balthasar’s “line in the sand” goes deeper than reminding us of the indivisibility noted above. In the early stages of the first book of his trilogy, Balthasar focuses on Beauty and draws our attention to the fact that the aesthetics of beauty cannot possibly be understood unless we also understand that the role of beauty is to draw us to a deeper purpose; that there is no “form” of earthly beauty that can be truly beautiful unless it withstands this deeper scrutiny.

“The awareness of inherent glory gave inspiration to works of incomparable earthly beauty in the great tradition of the Church. But these works become suitable for today’s liturgy only if, in and beyond their beauty, those who take part are not merely moved to aesthetic sentiments but are able to encounter that glory of God to which the Creator wanted to lead such works.

“Those who hear only the beautiful and are moved only by that can have a quasi-religious experience – like the many who listen to Saint Matthew’s Passion on Good Friday – but they are deceived regarding the true meaning of what they are hearing.”

Balthasar’s position on the sacred within aesthetics is not to try and differentiate between liturgical or church art and ‘normal’ art. He avoids simplistic differences between, for instance, the beauty of a great painting, a Mozart concerto, or a poem.

Here, his views run contrary to the intuition of the modern world and are in stark contrast with the vested interest that has grown up and surrounds the so-called “Art world” in its broadest context.

As G K Chesterton said: “Every Artist knows that the form is not superficial but fundamental, that the form is the foundation. Every sculptor knows that the form of the statue is not the outside of the statue, but rather the inside of the statue, even in the sense of the inside of the sculptor. Every poet knows that the sonnet-form of the poem is not only the form, but the poem.”

This quote by Chesterton is a refreshing reminder of the depth that Balthasar refers to. All of us draw on the role of icons, beautiful liturgy and gorgeous vestments, but Balthasar states something much more fundamental.

His message is that beauty always has meaning and this meaning is credible only when the link with divine splendour is first and foremost. In fact it is the study and contemplation of questions such as this that I hope will be part of the activity that is made possible when Theodore House (part of The Christian Heritage Centre at Stonyhurst) is completed.

There is also an inherent warning in this uncompromising message. Beauty that enchants without leading us to an appreciation of God’s divine splendour is misleading and modern society, through the collective efforts of people who run and raise money for museums, the patronage of the rich and influential and curatorial zeal which places a premium on “L’art pour l’art”, takes us further away from our relationship with the only splendour that really matters – that of God. “When one experiences startling beauty (in nature or in art), what confronts us is overpowering, like a miracle, and only as a miracle can it be understood. It can never be tied down by the person having the experience. The appearance of its inner unfathomable necessity is both binding and freeing, for it is seen clearly to be the appearance of freedom itself.”

Only in this way, Balthasar says, can we unite the (necessary) subjectivity of our individual circumstances with an all encompassing objectivity that God provides. Art, after all, is merely human or earthly and even at its best can only hint at the splendour of the beauty that is God. After all “in the liturgy, everything is relative to and oriented towards God’s glory”

He goes on to say: “But whenever the relationship between nature and grace is severed …. then the whole of worldly being falls under the dominion of ‘knowledge’ and the springs and forces of love immanent in the world are overpowered and finally suffocated by science, technology and cybernetics …. a world in which art itself is forced to wear the mask and features of technique.”

The story of Christianity is ultimately the story of God’s love for mankind. Our Christian heritage reminds us of the power of that love, and in celebrating the beauty of that heritage we should not forget that beauty, for beauty’s sake, is merely a fragment of the whole.

When we start to chase beauty, and become drawn in the outward aesthetic, we participate in one of the failures of modern life.

This article provides a glimpse of Balthasar’s teaching. He wrote in equally direct, compelling and simple ways on many other subjects. Prayer, the structure of the Church, the sacred covenant that Christ Our Lord has made with mankind. He wrote about music, about literature, about history and is a towering influence in the modern Catholic Church.

I hope that for those who have yet to discover the beauty of his work, this article serves as a prompt for further reading.

“Quia per incarnati Verbi mysterium nova mentis nostrae oculis lux tuae claritatis infulsit: ut dum visibiliter Deum cognoscimus, per hunc in invisibilium amorem rapiamur.”

“Because through the mystery of the incarnate word the new light of your brightness has shone onto the eyes of our mind; that knowing God visibly, we might be snatched up by this into the love of invisible things.”

Ilyas Khan, KSG, is a Patron of the Christian Heritage Centre at Stonyhurst

Tags art and faith, beauty, von Balthasar

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Fr John chose to die rather than yield to Protestantism

Post author By stefan
Post date January 5, 2018

Friday 8th January 2018

The CHC @ The Catholic Universe

Fr John chose to die, rather than yield to Protestantism

Br Samuel Burke, OP

“I am willing to die, and I had rather die than doubt of any point of faith taught by our holy mother, the Roman Catholic Church.” In his ‘last testament’, St John Plessington, a Catholic priest, foretold his own fate.

He died a martyr’s death. He was hanged, drawn and quartered at Gallow’s Hill in Boughton Cross, Cheshire, overlooking the River Dee, on 19th July, 1679. His offence: taking Orders in the Church of Rome and returning to the realm as a Catholic priest contrary to Act 27 of Elizabeth, 1585.

For his troubles, for his fidelity, for his ultimate sacrifice, as Paul VI declared in 1970 along with 39 others, Plessington numbers among the Saints in heaven. But the story doesn’t end there because the question remains: how do we honour the memory of this Saint and others like him?

Our first task is to remember, which is easier said than done. At least in the case of recent Saints, remembering is not a matter of fabled legend, it is an historical exercise, which often requires diligent research. Good, accurate information is important because it bring us closer to the person; they serve to make their memory more real to us; the details matter.

John Plessington was born around 1637, the youngest of three children, at Dimples Hall near Garstang in Lancashire. His father, Robert, was a committed royalist and Governor of Greenhalgh Castle, which stood on a hill overlooking a boggy plain about a quarter of a mile from the family estate. The family were both Royalist and Catholic.

During John’s childhood, Robert fought for the Crown in the Civil War, for which he was later imprisoned and forfeited his property. The Parliamentarians also destroyed Greenhalgh Hall and a lone western tower is all that now remains of the fortress. As Catholics, the family kept a priest and a chapel.

Their chaplain, the Venerable Thomas Whitaker, was captured and martyred in 1646. Perhaps this was one of John’s earliest memories, aged about nine. Did the martyrdom of the family priest inspire his own priesthood and martyrdom?

Educated by the Society of Jesus, John left the family home first for Scarisbrick Hall, near Ormskirk, and subsequently leaving Lancashire for St Omers in France, a forerunner to Stonyhurst College. The Jesuits were famed not only as “the schoolmasters of Europe”, they have also been dubbed “the shock troops of the Counter-Reformation”, a glib remark that fails to do justice to valiant mission and unparalleled sacrifice which they made to the Greater Glory of God and for the preservation of the faith in England during penal times.

If our first task was to remember, our second task, I think, is to understand the human context. Part of this is speculative, of course, but we must seek to understand the motivations and challenges that the martyrs faced if we are to appreciate their witness in its fullness.

From France to Spain where John, taking the pseudonym ‘Scarisbrick’ — perhaps in tribute to his early educators — studied at the Royal College of St Alban, Valladolid, along with five other fellow seminarians in November 1660.

As a welcome gesture, they were given a good supply of tobacco to help them settle in. Within a very short time, John was ordained a priest on 25th March in 1662 at Segovia. Not long after, ill-health curtailed his studies and, though a priest, he returned to England with his theological studies incomplete. Little is known about his early ministry in Lancashire. What is known is that he subsequently lived and ministered at the St Winefred’s Shrine at Holywell in North Wales. The area had a strong Catholic community supported by secular priests, including Plessington, based at a local Inn, Ye Cross Keyes, and a Jesuit mission based at another pub, Ye Old Star Inn, a pub which plays another role in Plessington’s tale to which I will return.

Some time before 1670, perhaps as early as 1665, Fr Plessington is to be found at Puddington Hall, home to the Massey family near Burton, on the Wirral. Officially, he was tutor to the Massey children but in reality he was the resident priest, supporting the family and Catholics in the surrounding area. For a brief time, there was relative toleration for Catholics and Fr Plessington would have probably gone about his ministry discretely but without too much trouble. This was not to last.

In 1678 Titus Oates’ feigned to reveal an elaborate conspiracy to assassinate Charles II and replace him with his Catholic brother, James. Catholics, especially priests, were rounded upon by authorities.

They stood accused as conspirators in the ‘Popish Plot’. In all, some 45 Catholics were executed in this wave of persecutions. On the Wirral, directions came from the King’s Ministers in Whitehall for the local authorities to exercise great vigilance and near panic ensued.
It seems that Fr Plessington was targeted following the report of a Protestant landowner who was grieved at the refusal of a match between his son and a Catholic heiress. It was presumably on the basis that a Protestant husband would be unwilling to risk keeping a priest, and, as a consequence, such matches would inevitably result in the falling away from Church.

On 28th December 1678, the priest hunter Thomas Dutton raided the house at Puddington and, despite the house having a priest hole by the chimney, Fr Plessington was found and taken into custody. Dutton received a handsome reward of £20 for his troubles.
The trial of Plessington, which followed was defective in several respects. Three lapsed Catholics testified against him but their evidence was seemingly insufficient. The first witness was deranged, as confirmed by her father and neighbours, and the second Fr Plessington had never met. This left only a third valid witness, a man named Robert Wood.

However, for a capital offence, at least two witnesses were required for a conviction, as Fr Plessington pleaded in the court. Nevertheless, the jury still convicted him. Such was the ill-feeling at the conviction that the judge granted a reprieve only to have this overturned by Whitehall.
Though awaiting death for nine weeks in a damp underground cell at Chester gaol, Fr Plessington maintained a lively sense of humour. When his friend, Sir James Poole visited him at the same time as an undertaker who was apparently measuring him for a coffin, Fr Plessington joked that he was giving orders for his last suit!

Dragged on a hurdle through the city of Chester from the Castle to Gallow’s Hill, overlooking the River Dee, Fr Plessington was hanged, drawn and quartered on 19th July 1679. His body was later committed to Puddington Hall, where it was ordered that the body parts be displayed on the four corners of the property. In open defiance of this charge, the Massey family laid out Plessington’s dismembered body on an oak table.

Where the martyr’s remains are is a matter of some debate. 140 years after Plessington’s death, a collection of bones bearing fractures consistent with his death, wrapped in children’s clothes of the period were discovered in a trunk in Ye Olde Star Inn. There is good, albeit circumstantial, evidence to suggest these are the bones of St. John Plessington.

A few years ago, an appeal was made by the Bishop of Shrewsbury to conduct DNA tests on the bones. Let us hope that will happen soon so we can honour the relics and memory of this martyr.

This brings me finally to our third task in honouring the martyrs: learning the lessons of history. It is to this third task especially that the new Christian Heritage Centre at Stonyhurst is committed.

This special museum is housed at the very school at which Plessington was educated, no longer in exile on the continent but in his native Lancashire. We will strive not simply to retell his story, important though that is, and not only to understand the human context, but crucially to ask also what lessons we can draw from the witness of martyrdom, even as they are made today.

Bloodshed, oppression and discrimination against Christians takes place the world over. One thinks particularly of the genocide of Christians in the Middle East.

There is much to learn from the life and death of St John Plessington about the importance of Catholic education; the mentality of the mob and scare-mongering; about the importance of legal process; about maintaining a sense of humour in the face of adversity; about faith and, yes, about Christian heroism – if we can learn some of that, we will have truly honoured the memory of the martyrs.

Br Samuel Burke, OP, is a Trustee of the Christian Heritage Centre at Stonyhurst.

Tags England, John Plessington, martyrs, Reformation, witness

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St Edmund’s rope binds us to the memory of his sacrifice

Post author By stefan
Post date November 3, 2017

Friday 3rd November 2017

The CHC @ The Catholic Universe

St Edmund’s rope binds us to the memory of his sacrifice

Christopher Graffius

At Stonyhurst there’s a rope. Among all the treasures of the College this receives the most honour. Housed in a reliquary, it is placed on the altar on the great feast days. The pupil who carries it there, amid the candles and the incense, on its feast day on 1st December, will never forget the experience.

A simple rope, some five hundred years old. The rope that bound St Edmund Campion to the hurdle on which he was dragged to execution. A rope smuggled away from the butchery and worn by Fr Robert Persons, the founder of the college who escaped the martyrdom of his companion, round his waist for the rest of his life. What’s the point of a rope? Is it merely a cultural artefact collected amid the gore? Or does it hold a greater meaning? As the new Christian Heritage Centre rises at Stonyhurst these are questions worth asking.

Museums must have some relevance or the exhibits are merely dry as dust. That simple rope holds a message as important to us today as it was when it played its part in Campion’s sacrifice.

As Westminster Cathedral, Stonyhurst and many other buildings are floodlit red on 22nd November – Red Wednesday – and Christians commemorate the killing of today’s modern martyrs, there is a direct link to Campion and others who have died for their faith.

Campion epitomises the heroism of recusant England.

Fr Clement Tigar, who championed the cause of the Forty Martyrs, wrote: ‘In June 1580, when Campion landed on these shores in disguise, he brought with him the spirit of chivalry in defence of the ancient Faith. By his holiness of life, his unquenchable good humour, his charm of manner, his burning eloquence, he put new heart, new courage, new enthusiasm, into the persecuted, dejected Catholics of England.’

It hadn’t always been so. Campion was a scholarship boy and learned early to please the establishment. He was chosen to speak before Queen Mary on her visit to the City and later, as a student at Oxford, to debate before Queen Elizabeth. He was described as “one of the diamonds of England”. Great men offered him patronage. In the turmoil of the Reformation this promised safety. His friend, Tobie Matthew, urged him to embrace the opportunities. Campion accepted ordination as an Anglican deacon and barred himself from the sacraments for twelve years.

His conscience troubled him. Matthew, who told him not to bother, went on to become the Anglican Bishop of Durham and Archbishop of York. As Evelyn Waugh says in his classic biography of Campion: ‘Tobie Matthew died full of honours in 1628, there but for the Grace of God went Edmund Campion.’

‘Hope, greatest and
ever-present to the Dead,
Hope is the Host
which I behold;
Here, be assembled
here,I pray;
Here celebrate God, and for
the afflicted seek peace.’

– An extract from Anima. The
original copy of Anima, which
Edmund Campion composed in
Latin in 1581 as he was
returning to the mission field in
England – and to certain death
– is held in the Collections

Nevertheless, many remained loyal to the Church, and Catholicism was particularly strong in some of the great aristocratic households of the Thames Valley and the Sacred County of Lancashire. It was to these houses, with their secret Catholic chapels and holes in which the sacred vessels and vestments (as well as the priests themselves in time of emergency) could be hidden, that Campion went to minister. In disguise he travelled extensively ‘through the most part of the shires of England’ (Persons) hearing confessions and saying Mass for the faithful who would have had no access to the sacraments for many years and yet who had kept faith.

During this time Campion wrote Decem Rationes defending the claims of the Church against those of the state church. This document was widely circulated and led to an increase in the government.

He escaped overseas and was reconciled at Douai. He walked to Rome to join the Jesuits. He was assigned as a school master to the college at Prague. He might never have seen England again. A life in community and academia beckoned.

The call to the English mission came as a surprise. Campion answered it despite his fear that he had not the “constitutional courage”. He entered the country disguised as a jewel merchant and with Persons and others began the reorganisation of the scattered and dispirited Catholics. He travelled across the country between safe houses, confessing, offering the Mass, putting new spirit into those worn down by fines and imprisonment. “The harvest is wonderful…I cannot long escape the hands of the heretics; the enemy have so many eyes…I am in apparel to myself very ridiculous…”

With Persons he set up a secret printing press to circulate his ‘Ten Reasons’ for being a Catholic and his ‘Brag’ a justification of his mission and a challenge to the authorities. ‘And touching our Society, be it known to you that we have made a league—all the Jesuits in the world…cheerfully to carry the cross you shall lay upon us, and never to despair your recovery, while we have a man left to enjoy your Tyburn, or to be racked with your torments, or consumed with your prisons. The expense is reckoned, the enterprise is begun; it is of God; it cannot be withstood. So the faith was planted: so it must be restored.’

In the summer of 1581 he rode out of London, pausing at Tyburn to pray under the gallows. “Because”, says Persons, “he used to say that he would have his combat there.” He stopped at the Catholic house of Lyford Grange to say Mass, but there was a priest hunter in the congregation. The Gospel of the day was prophetic, ‘Jerusalem, Jerusalem, thou that killest the prophets.’

Captured, he was bound to his horse with the sign ‘Campion, seditious Jesuit’ pinned to his hat. He disappeared into the Tower for four months of interrogation and torture. Rumours flew, he had recanted, accepted a bishopric, betrayed his hosts. When he emerged, brought to debate with the Anglican divines, it was the same gentle, eloquent Campion who confounded his adversaries. Except, at his trial, he couldn’t lift his right arm to take the oath because of the racking.

Condemned to death by perjured witnesses and a packed jury, Campion spoke for all Catholics: “In condemning us, you condemn all your own ancestors, all our ancient bishops and kings, all that was once the glory of England; the island of saints, and the most devoted child of the See of Peter.”

He was dragged to execution on 1st December, his feast day. He greeted the crowd “God save you all, and make you all good Catholics.” His final words were to pray for the Queen; that “we may at last be friends in heaven, when all injuries shall be forgotten”.

So to the rope. We all face the same choice, whether to conform or stand for the truth. Today, we will probably not be called to a physical martyrdom. Instead we face the hostility of secularism, of licence masquerading as liberty and the marginalisation of spirit and faith. That’s as much a threat as anything the martyrs faced. Meeting it demands the constant courage and faithfulness that Campion inspires

That’s what the rope means.

Tags collections, Edmund Campion, England, martyrs, Reformation, relics, Stonyhurst

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College hopes Theodore House will be God’s gift to the faith in England

Post author By stefan
Post date September 1, 2017

Friday 1st September 2017

The CHC @ The Catholic Universe

College hopes Theodore House will be God’s gift to the faith in England

St Theodore of Tarsus, whose feast day is celebrated on 19th September, holds a special place in the hearts of Catholics, Orthodox and Anglicans. Born in Syria, he lived between 602 AD and 690 AD and was Archbishop of Canterbury from 668 AD until his death.

Derived from both Latin and Greek, the name Theodore means ‘God’s gift’ – and, as St Theodore’s feast day approaches, the trustees of the Christian Heritage Centre at Stonyhurst have been reflecting on both God’s generous providence and the life of a man who proved to be such a gift to English Christianity.

Perhaps best known for the way he reformed the Church in England, and for the priority which he gave to education, Theodore was a Syrian Christian of Byzantine descent, who was forced to flee from Tarsus, when it fell to Islam. His own story is especially poignant as today’s Syrian Christians face their own Calvary of genocide, sustained persecution and flight to unknown lands.

His story reminds us of the ever-present challenge of persecution and the exodus of the Middle East’s Christians fleeing Syria and Iraq.
St Theodore studied theology, medicine, Roman Civil Law, Greek rhetoric and philosophy, Latin literature (both secular and ecclesiastical), astronomy and mathematics in Antioch, Constantinople and Rome. He was the embodiment of faith and reason.

When Pope Vitalian sent Theodore to Britain it was just after the Synod of Whitby had, in 667, confirmed the decision of the English Church to follow Rome. But this was a difficult time for the Church in England – with conflict between bishops such as Wilfrid and Chad.

Today, Theodore, Wilfrid and Chad are each remembered as saints of the Church.

Objects like St Chad’s relics – and those of St Thomas Becket – martyred and assassinated at Canterbury in 1170 – are held on behalf of the Society of Jesus at the Stonyhurst.

They are objects with a purpose and their own preservation tells its own story.

In Chad’s case, some of his relics were hidden from Henry VIII’s desecrations and kept by the Dudley family of Lichfield. Later passed to a Sedgley farmer, Henry Hodgetts, a Jesuit priest Fr Peter Turner SJ, asked Hodgetts why, on his death bed, Hodgetts kept seeking the intercession of St Chad. He told Fr Peter that it was “because his bones are in the head of my bed”. The dying Hodgetts told his wife to give the relics to the priest who in turn took them to St Omer, the precursor of Stonyhurst. Many of the relics would ultimately return to England and to Pugin’s cathedral of St Chad in Birmingham.

Why do these stories matter? Because, in the 21st century, the challenge for Britain is to overcome its increasing loss of memory, and to recall again its Christian story and Christian heritage.

Collective amnesia is affecting the way in which the nation thinks and acts. You are in deep trouble when you forget what makes you who and what you are. Isaiah said you should always “remember the rock from which you were hewn, the quarry from which you were dug.” In so many diverse ways Theodore speaks into our own times. He is celebrated for healing divisions, reforming the Church and for the entrenchment of Christian education. His promotion of biblical commentary, sacred music, knowledge of Eastern Christianity and the possible creation of the Litany of the Saints, added richness and beauty to the liturgy and a more profound understanding of other traditions within the Christian faith. A saint, then, for our troubled times.

Last year, when the Theodore Trust was wound up, its trustees generously decided to transfer their remaining funds into the Christian Heritage Centre at Stonyhurst, a freestanding registered charity which, blessed by a fruitful partnership with Stonyhurst College, enabled Phase Three of the Christian Heritage Centre at Stonyhurst project to go ahead. This phase is the transformation of the college’s old mill, which had become a ruin, into a retreat, study and leadership centre.

Other generous benefactors include The Knights of Columbus, The Bowland Trust, The EL Wiegand Foundation (USA), the Archdiocese of Liverpool, the Stanhill Foundation, the Catholic Association Foundation (USA) and Kim and Ben Chang and many benefactors who wish not to be mentioned. Next summer, when the work is due to be completed, Theodore House will provide accommodation for 34 people – enabling individuals, parishes and school to visit. Theodore House will also provide visitors, students and those on retreat with study space, seminar and lecture rooms and a small oratory. The oratory will be dedicated to two of the great saints of the 20th century, Pope John Paul II and Mother Teresa of Calcutta.

And, if more donations are received, an annex will be built for families with children to stay in.

Fundraising is also under way to establish the Stations of the Cross, ‘the Northern Stations’, in the grounds of Theodore House, representing both the traditional Stations of the Cross and also the Via Crucis of those whose lives are destroyed or maimed on their own modern day Calvaries.

Abutting the old mill are the disused kennels which were home to the hounds that may have inspired a young student, Arthur Conan Doyle, who studied there, between 1869 and 1875, to write his Hound of the Baskervilles.

Doyle’s description of the fictional Baskerville Hall bears an uncanny likeness to the view from Theodore House: ‘The Avenue opened into a broad expanse of turf, and the house lay before us. In the centre was a heavy building from which a porch projected…. from this central block rose the twin towers, ancient, crenelated, and pierced with many loopholes.’

On 1st of May, feast of St Joseph the Worker and in the month of Our Blessed Mother, an early morning procession with banners culminated at the dilapidated old mill, for a blessing by Fr John Twist SJ of the building and those construction workers who would work on transforming it into Theodore House.

The procession was led by Mexican student, and Stonyhurst’s new Head of Line, Nicolas Mariscal Palacio. Patrons of the project include Lord and Lady Nicholas Windsor; The Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster, the Provincial of the Society of Jesus; Field Marshall Lord Guthrie, former head of the armed forces; John Bruton, the former Irish prime minister; Baroness Cox and the Rt Hon. Ann Widdecombe.

Theodore House will facilitate programmes for people of all ages and cultures. There are plans for summer schools and festivals (with accommodation for up to 400, outside of term time). This would surely have appealed to St Theodore.

If alive today St Theodore would have carefully studied a recent survey that found that the number of people identifying as Christians in the UK is around 64 per cent but that, on present trends, this number will fall to 45 per cent by 2050. The proportion of Muslims would rise over the same period from five per cent to 11 per cent and the number of atheists or people claiming no religion would rise from 28 per cent to 39 per cent.

These statistics indicate the scale of the challenge, but also the opportunity which living in a free society still offers. Theodore would put his faith in God and set out to do something about it. Let us do the same.

In celebrating his coming feast day, the trustees of the Christian Heritage Centre at Stonyhurst hope that Theodore House, will play its part in renewing the Christian foundations of our nation. Please help if you can.

Tags Theodore House, Theodore of Tarsus

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A world of treasures from the Holy Sepulchre to Paraguay

Post author By stefan
Post date July 7, 2017

Friday 4th August 2017

The CHC @ The Catholic Universe

A world of treasures from the Holy Sepulchre to Paraguay

Jan Graffus

Stonyhurst College houses an impressive array of artefacts from all over the world, collected by Jesuit missionaries and former pupils, for the purpose of education, edification and the prompting of discussion about the universality of the search for God in the heart of mankind.

These objects and many others like them will shortly be displayed in a new museum, set in the refurbished Old Chapel, a space which has been a chapel a museum, a library, a common room and is now to combine elements of all of these past incarnations.

An important area of the museum will focus on the global nature of the college’s collections, reflecting the fact that past and present pupils have come from all over the world to study at Stonyhurst. These artefacts tell important stories which have deep resonance for our own times. This article will examine three representative examples from the Old and New Worlds.

A simple brass mission bell from the Jesuit Reductions in Brazil, which dates from the early to mid 18th century, has a fascinating story. The Jesuit missions or reductions, as they were known, located in Paraguay, Argentina, Uruguay and Brazil, were unique in missionary history.

South America was colonised by Spain and Portugal in the early 16th century, and, from 1609 onwards, the Jesuits set up missions for the indigenous Tupí and Guaraní peoples. In return for the promise of tributes, the people were to be exempt from the usual policy of encomienda, or forced labour, that prevailed in the rest of Spanish and Portuguese South America. The Jesuits also protected them from the slave traders of the region.

The reductions were run on lines that were based on the early Christian communities described in the Acts of the Apostles. The inhabitants worked communal land, and the produce of their labours was shared out equally – food and dress was the same for all.

Free schools and hospitals were established in every community, and the Guaraní were reputed to be a completely literate society. They were skilled craftsmen and made intricate clocks and famously excellent musical instruments. Their working day was six hours long, as opposed to 12 or 14 hours elsewhere in South America, and the remainder was given over to music, dance and worship.

By the mid-18th century there were about 300,000 Indian Catholics in South America living on some 30 missions. In 1759 the Portuguese government, which had long regarded the Jesuits’ work as an attack on their authority, passed a decree expelling them from their territories. In 1767 the Spanish crown followed suit. The Guaraní abandoned their havens and retreated to the rain forests in the years following the expulsion of the Jesuits. Today all that is left of 150 years of a remarkable social and evangelical experiment are ruins. The 1986 Roland Joffé film, The Mission, tells the story of the Jesuit expulsion and the futile war of protest fought by the Guaraní. The film is set in the mission of São Miguel das Missões, which may be the original home of this Mass bell. In 1894, the then provincial superior of the German Jesuits presented the bell to Stonyhurst.

A wood and mother-of-pearl model of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, was created in 1760 by an Italian family of artisans, part of the souvenirs on offer to the thousands of Christian pilgrims who flocked to the Holy Land.

The Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem is built over the most sacred site for Christians – the rock of Calvary where Jesus was crucified. It also encompasses the tomb in which he was laid – the Holy Sepulchre.

This is the place where St Helena, the mother of the 4th century Roman emperor, Constantine, was reputed to have discovered the cross to which Christ was nailed. After the failed Jewish revolt against Roman occupation in the year 70 AD, much of Jerusalem was destroyed and the site of the Crucifixion was hidden below a Temple dedicated to Venus. In 325 Constantine, newly converted to Christianity, started to build a huge basilica, encompassing the Rock of Calvary, the site of the Tomb of Christ, and the place where his own mother, Helena, had found the cross.

In the 7th century, Jerusalem was captured by the Persians and became a Muslim city. The new rulers were generally happy to allow Christian pilgrimage to flourish, and the numbers making the dangerous and lengthy journey grew. In 1009 the Caliph destroyed the church, hacking the site of the tomb down to the bedrock. The shock and outrage reverberating throughout Christian Europe was one of the catalysts for the Crusades, which followed in 1099.

In the 12th century, restoration of the ruined church began, and this continued down to the 16th century when much work was done by the Franciscans. Further work is still needed today, but agreement between the Christian guardians of the site of the Holy Sepulchre is difficult to obtain, and disagreements and tensions are common. Pilgrimages to this most holy of places have been taking place for almost 2000 years, bringing important revenue to the local inhabitants.

People who made the journey in the past invariably wanted a tangible reminder of their efforts, and the souvenir trade has prospered in Jerusalem since the 8th-century German monk, Brother Felix, noted with dismay that the sellers of souvenirs followed him even into the church itself. That did not stop him buying many items. This model of the church was at the top end of the market.

It was aimed at the wealthy and fashionable pilgrim and is made from expensively engraved mother or pearl and carved bone. The model comes apart to show the interior, including the Holy Sepulchre itself. It was made in 1760 by an Italian craftsman, Gioani, whose father Giuse had evidently been in the same business and had gained some fame for himself as a maker of these models.

A pair of beaded deerskin Plains Indian Moccasins has another story to tell. Much of early North American Jesuit missionary history is told through numerous letters known as the Jesuit Relations. In addition to relating the stories of such 17th-century Jesuit martyrs as Isaac Jogues (1607-1646) and Jean Brébeuf (1594-1649), they provide invaluable details of the customs and practices of the Indians.

In the early 19th century the region from Saint Louis in Missouri to the Pacific Northwest was opened up by a Belgian Jesuit, Fr Pierre de Smet (1801- 1873) who arrived in America as a youthful missionary, aged 20.

Following the trails laid out by fur traders and frontiersmen, Fr de Smet travelled tirelessly, forming close bonds with many Indian people, for whom he was the one westerner they could trust. He mediated and defended them against exploitation and fraud by traders, settlers and government agents.

For over 20 years he worked for peace between the civil authorities and the Sioux Indians, and was highly respected for his honesty and plain speaking by their chief Tatanka Iyotaka (1831-1890), better known as Sitting Bull. Fr de Smet made no fewer than 19 journeys back to Europe to seek support for the North American missions. On one of these he travelled to Lancashire and spoke at Stonyhurst College. Shortly after Fr de Smet’s death in 1873, an unknown Jesuit gave the deerskin moccasins to Stonyhurst.

Tags collections, missions, Stonyhurst

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For Hopkins nature was charged with God’s glory

Post author By stefan
Post date July 7, 2017

Friday 3rd March 2017

The CHC @ The Catholic Universe

For Hopkins nature was charged with God’s glory

Fr Samuel Burke OP

Over recent months, a series of articles in this newspaper has showcased the great treasures of the new Christian Heritage Centre at Stonyhurst.

The Stonyhurst Collections serve to explain, cherish and bring to life the inspiring history of the Christian faith in Britain. This final article explores the inspiration that the beautiful countryside of the Ribble Valley, which surrounds Stonyhurst, provided to the Jesuit priest and poet, Father Gerard Manley Hopkins.

Hopkins’ poetry is highly distinctive in theme. It brims with the conviction that the natural world is, as he put it, “word, expression, news of God.” To look upon creation was, for Hopkins, to see God’s glorious majesty or what he called the ‘inscape’ of things: an aesthetic experience which was “near at hand” for those who “had eyes to see it… it could be called out everywhere again”.

He took delight in seeing things as God made them, however small and commonplace. Confiding in his journal, he once wrote, ‘I do not think I have ever seen anything more beautiful than the bluebell I have been looking at. I know the beauty of our Lord by it.’

In an earlier letter written to a friend whilst he was studying Classics at Balliol College, Oxford, Hopkins provides another insight into his playful curiosity and his deep love of the natural world, strikingly evident in the poetry he would later write: ‘I have particular periods of admiration for particular things in Nature – for a certain time I am astonished at the beauty of a tree, its shape, its effect.

‘Then, when the passions so to speak has subsided, it is consigned to my treasury of explored beauty, while something new takes it place in my enthusiasm.’

And it was a ‘treasury of explored beauty’ that he amply amassed during his three periods at Stonyhurst in Lancashire, even if his poetic output whilst stationed there was relatively modest.

With child-like enthusiasm, Hopkins records in his diary his first experience of the arresting beauty of the place when he first arrived at ‘the seminary’ (properly called St Mary’s Hall, now the Preparatory School at Stonyhurst) as a Jesuit Scholastic in early September 1870, aged 26 for his studies in philosophy.

On the night of his arrival, after being shown to his room at the front of the building on the top floor, Hopkins remained awake until dawn in order to witness the ‘beautiful range of moors dappled with light and shade’, a panoramic view that included the majestic Pendle Hill, which he likens to a ‘world-wielding shoulder’.

Hopkins had arrived at the seminary early, in fact. With the other scholastics on holiday, and classes not due to start until the following month, GMH had the leisure of exploring the spectacular environs of Stonyhurst, which he did with abandon, for as he would write in a later poem ‘…nature is never spent; There lives the dearest freshness deep down things’.

He roamed hills, woodlands and Lancashire meadows ‘smeared yellow with buttercups and bright squares of rapefield in the landscape’. Hopkin’s way of seeing the world was deeply influenced by the writings of the Franciscan theologian, Duns Scotus.

A journal entry for 3rd August 1872 records his discovery of Scotus’ Scriptum Oxoniense super Sententiis in the Badeley library on the Isle of Man during a vacation he took from Stonyhurst.

Hopkins describes his find as ‘a mercy from God’ and comments that he was ‘flush with a new stroke of enthusiasm.’ He was to write of his fondness for the theologian in a later poem, Duns Scotus’ Oxford.

This first stay at St Mary’s Hall, Stonyhurst, as a Jesuit scholastic, lasted three years (1870-1873). In those days it was an austere regime, which at times proved challenging for the young man.

Hopkins attended two one hour lectures in the morning and did a further three hours of study from 5 – 8pm. Religious observances and time for recreation were fitted in around these fixed times, and the only permitted conversation was at mealtimes.

Although he might have expected to become a teacher at one of the Jesuit schools, on completing his philosophy studies, Hopkins was initially sent back to Manresa, the Jesuit Noviciate House at Roehampton, to serve as Professor of Rhetoric, before proceeding to St Bueno’s where he was subsequently ordained as a priest.

Later, as a priest, he twice returned to Stonyhurst. His second stay was for a His third lasted for just over a year from September 1882 to December 1883, when – though sad to leave – he was called to University College Dublin. On both occasions he taught Classics as a tutor to the Gentlemen Philosophers, a group of Catholic laymen who received their university education at Stonyhurst.

As Catholics were forbidden to take degrees at Oxford and Cambridge, and indeed forbidden from doing so by Catholic bishops, they enrolled for external Bachelors degrees at the University of London. During the time he spent at Stonyhurst, Hopkins continued to deepen his love of the world around him. As part of his interest in God’s created order, Hopkins developed a great interest in astronomical matters, facilitated by the fine observatory at Stonyhurst, which provided research for the Vatican Observatory and is still in use today.

He writes poetic descriptions of the peculiar sunsets he saw there: ‘A bright sunset lines the clouds so that their brims look like gold, brass, bronze, or steel. It fetches out those dazzling flecks and spangles which people call fish-scales. It gives to a mackerel or dappled cloudrack the appearance of quilted crimson silk, or a ploughed field glazed with crimson ice.’

It wasn’t just the sun which caught his attention. He would find beauty — “the grandeur of God” — in all manner of places, some of them fairly unlikely. Stories abound of his eccentric behaviour at Stonyhurst, such as the time when he hung over a frozen pond to observe bubbles trapped beneath the ice or was seen staring at the gravel outside St Mary’s Hall.

Hopkins had a particular love for “the three beautiful rivers” near Stonyhurst. One of them, the Calder, runs close to the nearby remains of a Cistercian monastery, Whalley Abbey. Another, the River Hodder, sits beneath the school in a thick wood and was used by Hopkins and others for bathing, even if precarious after heavy rainfall.

The third and most significant of these rivers, the River Ribble, gives its name to the Ribble Valley, the wider expanse that surrounds Stonyhurst and the eponymous poem, Ribblesdale, one of at least five poems which Hopkins wrote during his stays at Stonyhurst.

The poem tells how nature cannot speak for itself but must find its voice through a human translator, as it were. And, as the following verses demonstrate, few voices were as finely tuned as that of Hopkins:

Earth, sweet Earth, sweet landscape,
with leavés throng
And louchéd low grass, heaven
that dost appeal
To, with no tongue to plead,
no heart to feel;
That canst but only be, but dost
that long
Thou canst but be, but that thou
well dost;strong
Thy plea with him who dealt, nay
does now deal,
Thy lovely dale down thus and
thus bids reel
Thy river, and o’er gives all to
rack or wrong.
And what is Earth’s eye, tongue,
or heart else, where
Else, but in dear and dogged man?
– Ah, the heir
To his own selfbent so bound,so
tied to his turn,
To thriftless reave both our rich
round world bare
And none reck of world after,
this bids wear
Earth brows of such care, care
and dear concern.

Other poems he wrote at Stonyhurst comprise: The Wreck of the Eurydice, with resonances of his earlier and more confessional Wreck of the Deutschland; The May Magnificat and The Blessed Virgin Compared to the Air we Breathe – two poems in honour of Our Lady, whose image was and remains prominent in various statues inside the building and grounds; as well as The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo. In that poem, Hopkins confronts the dreadful reality of the loss and decay of the beauty that he holds dear:

How to keep—is there any any, is
there none such, nowhere known some,
bow or brooch or braid or brace, lace,
latch or catch or key to keep
Back beauty, keep it, beauty, beauty,
beauty, … from vanishing away?

As the poem progresses, Hopkins proceeds to take solace in the beauty that lies ‘yonder’ in God, who is ‘beauty’s self and beauty’s giver’.

In the midst of a world marked by loss and decay, a walk in the countryside can do us untold good lifting our spirits as such rambles did for Hopkins.

The Christian Heritage Centre is establishing a Hopkins’ walking route around Stonyhurst in his memory to accompany the Tolkien Trail, already available.

On such pleasant walks, we can gaze upon the beauty around us and can say with Hopkins: ‘I walk, I lift up, I lift up heart, eyes / Down all that glory in the heavens to glean our Saviour’.

Tags creation, Gerard Manley Hopkins, literature and faith, nature

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A life of exploration led Waterton to discover the need to preserve nature

Post author By stefan
Post date June 2, 2017

Friday 2nd June 2017

The CHC @ The Catholic Universe

A life of exploration led Waterton to discover the need to preserve nature

Stonyhurst College is renowned for its impressive collections of art, medieval manuscripts, Catholic artefacts, vestments and relics, displayed throughout the school and in its three libraries, home to some 60,000 books including a First Folio of Shakespeare.

What is less well know is that the College also houses many nationally and internationally significant Natural History collections, which reflect important 19th century developments in science and medicine.

Charles Waterton was a pupil at Stonyhurst College in the late 1790s. He came from a landed gentry family descended from numerous saints, including Vladimir the Great, Saint Anna of Russia, Saint Stephen of Hungary, Saint Margaret of Scotland and Saint Thomas More.

The family remained staunchly Catholic after the Reformation and as a result forfeited much of their land and wealth, leaving them only Walton Hall near Wakefield. While at Stonyhurst, the young Waterton’s interest in exploration and wildlife was already evident and the Jesuit teachers encouraged him to explore while attending to his studies at the same time.

They came to an unusual compromise with the 11-year-old boy, as he noted in his autobiography: ‘By a mutual understanding, I was considered rat-catcher to the establishment, and also fox-taker, foumart-killer, and cross-bow charger at the time when the young rooks were fledged. I followed up my calling with great success. The vermin disappeared by the dozen; the books were moderately well-thumbed and according to my notion of things, all went on perfectly right.’

In 1804 he travelled to Guyana to take charge of his uncle’s estates near Georgetown. In 1812 he started to explore the interior of the country, and reached Brazil having walked barefoot in the rainy season. He described his natural history discoveries in his book Waterton’s Wanderings in South America, published in 1821.

Waterton was a skilled taxidermist and preserved many of the animals he encountered on his expeditions for study by scientists and naturalists back in Britain. He employed a unique method of taxidermy, soaking the specimens in what he called ‘sublimate of mercury’, a highly toxic chemical.

Unlike many traditionally stuffed animals, his specimens are hollow and lifelike. Some specimens displayed his anarchic sense of humour, as he created animals which resembled those with whom he disagreed, such as the Hanoverian monarchy, Martin Luther and an unnamed English Customs official who charged him excessive duty to bring his specimens into the country.

Other creations reflect his affection for his Jesuit teachers, including a large crab holding a crucifix, beside which is a poem written by Waterton telling the story of the crab that returned St Francis Xavier’s crucifix when he dropped it in the sea in Goa.

Many hundreds of these remarkable animals are preserved to this day at Stonyhurst College, along with a remarkable painting showing Waterton riding on a cayman

Charles Waterton is credited with bringing the anaesthetic agent curare to Europe. In London, with Fellows of the Royal Society, he immobilised several animals, including a cat and a mule, with the substance which he called wourali, after the Guyanan name for the poison where it was used to hunt animals for food. The mule was renamed Wouralia and lived for years at Walton Hall as a local celebrity. This was the first recorded use of a muscle relaxant in a medical context, and was the basis for modern anaesthesia.

Waterton was keen to learn about all manner of poisons, collecting snakes and tarantulas, and used his own body in experiments to discover their effects. He longed to be bitten by a vampire bat, and slept in the rainforest with his feet sticking out of his hammock in the vain hope that the creatures would find them irresistible. He was a passionate conserver of nature, and spent the equivalent of £1million building a nine-foot-high wall around three miles of his estate at Walton Hall, turning it into the world’s first wildfowl and nature reserve.

David Attenborough has described him as a champion of nature conservation and “one of the first people anywhere to recognise, not only that the natural world was of great importance, but that it needed protection as humanity made more and more demands on it”. Waterton was a vehement opponent of slavery, finding the practice inhuman and utterly repellent to his strong Catholic faith. By an extraordinary coincidence one of the slaves with whom Waterton worked in Guyana was to have a significant influence on one of the greatest scientific thinkers of the 19th century

John Edmonstone was a black slave, the property of Charles Edmonstone, an expatriate Scot who owned plantations in Guyana. He learned taxidermy from Charles Waterton, who had married Anne, Charles Edmonstone’s daughter.

John accompanied Waterton on his expeditions into the rainforest to collect animals, learning how to preserve the skins to prevent their decomposition. In 1807 John Edmonstone was freed, and came to Scotland with his former master. He moved to Edinburgh where he taught taxidermy to students at Edinburgh University.

Charles Darwin came to Edinburgh in 1825 to study medicine, but found himself unsuited for the study of human anatomy and surgery. During his first winter at Edinburgh, Darwin hired Edmonstone to teach him taxidermy for one guinea a week. Edmonstone gave Charles Darwin inspiring accounts of tropical rain forests in South America and may have encouraged Darwin to explore there. Certainly the taxidermy Darwin learned from Edmonstone helped him greatly during the voyage of the SS Beagle, and arguably he might have never embarked on the historic journey without Edmonstone’s mentorship

He spent his childhood in Brussels, where his father was Austrian envoy to Belgium, and moved to England in 1867. As a Catholic, von Hügel was ineligible for entry to Cambridge and Oxford and was educated through Stonyhurst College’s undergraduate programme, where he read Philosophy.

Suffering from bad health, he was advised to travel to a warmer climate and embarked on a trip to the South Pacific in 1874. He collected and recorded whatever information and objects he could find. Entranced by the beauty of Fiji, he learned the language, although his passion for collecting led him into difficulties and he was more than once rescued by the governor who described him as ‘half starved, having spent all his money, and having even cut the buttons off his clothes in exchange for native ornaments’. Back in England, in 1883 von Hügel was appointed curator of the new Museum of General and Local Archaeology in Cambridge, which is now the Cambridge University Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.

He was a surprising choice. Although his scholarship was well known by this time, he was a foreigner and Catholic. Throughout his life he devoted himself to Catholic causes and when Catholics were once more eligible for entry to Cambridge and Oxford in 1895, he immediately founded, together with Henry Fitzalan-Howard, 15th Duke of Norfolk, a hall of residence in Cambridge.

Established in 1896, St Edmund’s College soon became the preferred college for Catholic students and scholars in Cambridge and now also houses a research institute named after von Hügel. Founded in 1987, the Von Hügel Institute is a Roman Catholic research institute dedicated to the study of the relationship of Christianity

Tags Charles Waterton, collections, ecology, nature, Stonyhurst

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Stonyhurst Jacobite paintings recall the Catholic ‘kings over the water’

Post author By stefan
Post date May 5, 2017

May 2017

The CHC @ The Catholic Universe

Stonyhurst Jacobite paintings recall the Catholic ‘kings over the water’

Elizabeth Robinson

The extensive art collection at Stonyhurst College has been built up since the foundation of the school itself in St. Omers, France, in 1593. The collection includes works by Rubens,Turner, Dürer and Rembrandt. As might be expected in a Jesuit college, the art reflects Catholic religion and history. Stonyhurst owes most of its paintings to Fr Thomas Glover, SJ (1781-1849), the Jesuit agent for the English Province in Rome.

‘If all our missionaries would save up a few pounds annually, all their chapels and houses might be in a short time devotionally furnished’ he wrote, and his efforts at Stonyhurst College reflect his industrious gathering of art in Rome, including Flemish medieval diptychs, Italian Renaissance and baroque works.

The Alberoni Collection at Stonyhurst holds interesting pieces of Jacobite propaganda. Ten paintings were collected by Fr. Glover in the 1830s from the villa of Cardinal Giulio Alberoni (1664 -1752). Some of the paintings seem to have been given to him by the Stuarts in return for his support and organisation of the two Spanish-led Jacobite uprisings of 1719.

These paintings include one by Benedetto Gennari commissioned by Queen Mary Beatrice of Modena of the infant James Francis Edward Stuart, Prince of Wales. This painting hung in the Queen’s bedchamber and shows the Prince as a strong and healthy baby holding a parakeet, in luxurious surroundings. The painting emphasised the difference between the exiled Stuart royal family and the childless English monarchs, William and Mary, who had ousted the Stuarts.

The Alberoni Collection also includes a full length portrait of the young Prince Charles Edward Stuart, better known as Bonnie Prince Charlie, which was painted by Antonio David in 1726. This is the first official portrait of the Prince, and depicts him in the clothing of an adult. The Bonnie Prince is gesturing towards a crown with the feathers of the Prince of Wales and the motto ‘Ich Dien’, portraying him as the rightful heir to the British throne. Many of the paintings at the college have been donated by various benefactors and old pupils of Stonyhurst, but there was also a collection found in situ at Stonyhurst when the pupils and staff arrived in 1794, having been forced to leave their college on the Continent because of the French Revolution.

Stonyhurst had been the property of the Shireburn and Weld families, and was donated to the Jesuits to form their new school. When the Jesuits and their pupils travelled from Liège in 1794, the Stonyhurst mansion had become dilapidated and empty of furnishings. However, entries in Lady Catherine Shireburn’s Inventory Book of Household Goods at Stonyhurst, dated 1713, describe paintings which were clearly left behind by the family. These are still in the college collections today, depicting biblical scenes such as the Nativity, the Circumcision and the Flight into Egypt.

Stylistically they date from the mid17th century and may well have been bought by sons of the Shireburn family during their time at St Omers. According to the Shireburn Inventory, 20 of these paintings were in the family chapel in 1713 and survive at Stonyhurst as a testament to the spiritual life of English Catholic families trying to live their faith under the government penalties of the late 17th and early 18th centuries.

The painting known at Stonyhurst as The Jesuit Family Tree was acquired in London in August 1834 and contains some two hundred portraits of members of the Society of Jesus. It is described as a ‘Spanish painting’ by Fr Norris, bought from an art dealer who asked £140 for it , describing it to have come ‘from Martin Luther’s house and it was a representation of the First Reformers’. Fr. Norris and Mr Jenkins realised that it was a Jesuit painting, and managed to purchase it with a frame for the bargain price of £52.

The painting was commissioned by King John of Portugal, a great supporter of the Jesuit Missions. It depicts the saints and martyrs of the Society in the mid 17th century, including the English martyrs, Edmund Campion, Robert Southwell and Henry Walpole. The painting contains four large landscape scenes depicting Jesuits working in the missions fields of Europe, Africa, Asia and America. It is a powerful reminder of the global nature of the Jesuit missions in the 16th and 17th centuries.

Of great interest to Stonyhurst is the painting of the college by J M W Turner, painted after his visit to the college in 1799. This is the first known image of Stonyhurst, painted by Turner while he was producing drawings of Whalley Abbey for Dr. Whittaker’s History of the Parish of Whalley published in 1801. This watercolour of Stonyhurst was exhibited in London in 1832-33 at the gallery of Messrs. Moon, Boys and Graves in Pall Mall East. This painting is a fascinating record of the original Tudor house at Stonyhurst.

The Great Triumphal Car of the Emperor Maximilian I is a massive wood engraving that took the artist, Albrecht Dürer, ten years to create. It is part of a much larger work, never completed, which was intended to be around one hundred and seventy-seven feet long. The print, as it stands, shows the Holy Roman Emperor, Maximilian I, processing in a public demonstration surrounded by the four Cardinal Virtues: Justice, Fortitude, Prudence and Temperance. A Winged Victory stands behind the emperor holding a laurel leaf crown with the titles of his military conquests in France, Hungary, Bohemia, Switzerland, Germany and Venice on its wings.

The female driver of Maximilian’s car is titled Reason and she holds the reigns of Nobility and Power. The twelve powerful horses which pull the car reflect imperial virtues such as Speed, Providence and Gravity. The print was finally completed in 1522 and it was dedicated to Maximilian’s son, Charles V, the nephew of Queen Katherine of Aragon. There are over one hundred prints by Albrecht Dürer in the collections at Stonyhurst many of which are housed on the ‘Dürer Rocket’, a purpose built display case made by college carpenters in 1911.

The works described comprise a small part of the art collection at Stonyhurst which is used to help pupils and visiting researchers alike. It acts as a visual reminder of the global nature of Catholicism, and the teachings of the Church. The paintings act, as Fr Glover, hoped they would, as a devotional repository of inspirational art.

Tags art and faith, collections, Jacobites, Stonyhurst

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‘The road goes ever on and on down from the door where it began …

Post author By stefan
Post date April 5, 2017

Friday 7th April 2017

The CHC @ The Catholic Universe

‘The road goes ever on and on down from the door where it began ... ’

David Alton

The Christian Heritage Centre at Stonyhurst, in Lancashire’s beautiful Ribble Valley, is a treasure trove of artefacts and memorabilia associated with so many chapters of Britain’s rich Christian story. It is home to over 60,000 objects and 50,000 books, including a Shakespeare folio and manuscripts of the Bard’s relative, the Jesuit poet, St Robert Southwell.

Mark Thompson – a former Director General of the BBC, now editor of the New York Times – who has contributed to the creation of the Christian Heritage Centre, says that the restored historic libraries were a major source of inspiration for his desire to go into journalism: “You read something like Inversnaid and it really brings the texture of that landscape to life. “You’re really lucky to live in that part of the world. You have a feeling that this is a special, unspoilt place. It’s amazing.”

In the Victorian era another young man, Arthur Conan Doyle, honed his writing skills in this same environment while today the Christian Heritage Centre at Stonyhurst is promoting a special connection with two of the Catholic world’s most influential writers – the author J.R.R.Tolkien and the poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins. To help visitors get closer to these two men and to understand their Catholic faith, the CHC is making available two wonderful walking trails – guaranteed to inspire.

The author of Lord of the Rings – one of the world’s top ten best-selling books – was a regular visitor to this beautiful part of Lancashire, the sacred county, when one of his sons, Michael, was a teacher at the college, and another, John, trained there for the priesthood (while the English College in Rome was closed during the Second World War). Tolkien’s name appears in the college visitors’ book many times, along with that of his wife, daughter and sons. Since 1954, 150 million copies of Lord of the Rings have influenced vast numbers of readers. Less well known was the contribution he made in 1966 to the Jerusalem Bible – translating the little Book of Jonah. With his friend, C.S.Lewis, and the other ‘Inklings’ Tollkien used his amazing skills as a storyteller to open our eyes to the only story that really matters.

Tolkien was the son of a widowed Catholic convert – Mabel – whose family rejected her when she became a Catholic. On Mabel’s death in 1904, at the age of 34, a death “hastened by the persecution of her faith”, as Tolkien remarked in 1941, he was shunted between relatives until a lodging was found for him by an Oratorian priest, Fr Francis Morgan, who became his legal guardian.

In 1963 Tolkien wrote about the effect that these experiences and formative years had on him: ‘I witnessed (half comprehending) the heroic sufferings and early death in extreme poverty of my mother who brought me into the Church.’ His great closeness and devotion to Mary, the Mother of God – began with the premature death of his own mother. He said that Mary ‘refined so much of our gross manly natures and emotions as well as warming and colouring our hard, bitter, religion.’

Of Fr Francis he wrote: ‘I first learnt charity and forgiveness from him’ and he said that he taught him the story of his Faith ‘piercing even the ‘liberal’ darkness of which I came, knowing more about ‘Bloody Mary’ than the Mother of Jesus – who was never mentioned except as an object of wicked worship by the Romanists.

In a letter to Fr. Robert Murray SJ, Tolkien said of the Virgin Mary ‘Our Lady, upon which all my own small perceptions of beauty, both in majesty and simplicity is founded’. Elsewhere he had said: “I attribute whatever there is of beauty and goodness in my work to the Holy Mother of God.” Tolkien saw Mary as the closest of all beings to Christ, as literally “full of grace” describing her as “unstained” and that “she had committed no evil deeds”. He saw her as the Christ bearer who paves the way for the Incarnation: about which he says “the Incarnation of God is an infinitely greater thing than anything I would dare to write.”

He would have particularly loved the Lady Statue, erected in 1882, that commands the entry to the Avenue and which leads the walker from the village of Hurst Green into the college grounds. Tolkien attended Mass in the now beautifully restored church of St.Peter – and cultivated his great love of the Blessed Sacrament and nurtured his belief in regularly receiving Holy Communion: “I fell in love with the Blessed Sacrament from the beginning and by the mercy of God never have fallen out again.”

He told his son, Michael, that: “The only cure for sagging or fainting faith is Communion….frequency is of the highest effect.”

He described the Holy Eucharist as “the one great thing to love on earth” and that in “the Blessed Sacrament you will find romance, glory, honour, fidelity and the true way of all your loves on earth, and more than that….eternal endurance which every man’s heart desires.”

The Blessed Sacrament appears in Lord of the Rings as the lembas, the mystical bread – the bread of angels – which both nourishes and heals. Lembas, we are told, “had a potency that increased as travellers relied on it alone, and did not mingle it with other goods. It fed the will, and it gave strength to endure.”

That Tolkien’s faith was based on personal encounter with God and a deep spirituality is revealed in an exchange that he had with a stranger (whom he identified with his wizard, Gandalf) and who said to him: “Of course, you don’t suppose, do you, that you wrote all that book yourself?” Tolkien replied “Pure Gandalf!…I think I said, ‘No, I don’t suppose so any longer.’

I have never since been able to suppose so. An alarming conclusion for an old philologist to draw concerning his private amusement. But not one that should puff up anyone who
considers the imperfections of ‘chosen instruments’, and indeed what sometimes seems their lamentable unfitness for the purpose.”

Tolkien tells us that: “Lord of The Rings is of course a fundamentally religious and Catholic work, unconsciously at first, but consciously in the revision”. Elsewhere he states: “I am a Christian (which can be deduced from my stories), and in fact a Roman Catholic”. In 1958 he wrote that the Lord of the Rings is ‘a tale, which is built on or out of certain ‘religious’ ideas, but is not an allegory of them.’

In 1956 in a letter to Amy Ronald he wrote: “I am a Christian, and indeed a Roman Catholic, so that I do not expect ‘history’ to be anything but a long defeat – though it contains (and in a legend may contain more clearly and movingly) some samples or glimpses of final victory.”

And the Lord of the Rings is full of those glimpses and riddled with wisdom and common sense about everything from the constant battle against evil and the overcoming of seemingly impossible odds, to the nature of friendship to the place of courage: “If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world.”

“I don’t know half of you half as well as I should like; and I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve.”

“It’s the job that’s never started as takes longest to finish.”

“Still round the corner there may wait, a new road or a secret gate.”

“Faithless is he that says farewell when the road darkens.”

“It’s a dangerous business going out your front door.”

“Courage is found in unlikely places.”

But central must be an understanding of power and evil represented by the Ring itself: “The board is set, the pieces are moving. We come to it at least, the great battle of our time.” Principal among those who would face the great battle were Tolkien’s Hobbits – the people of the Shire – and the Christian Heritage Centre at Stonyhurst’s walking trail enables walkers to experience some of the stunning local landscape that, during Tolkien’s visits, would have inspired him.

Appropriately enough, the village of Hurst Green boasts its own Shire Lane while Ribblesdale and Rivensdale seem, at times, interchangeable. The verdant countryside is dominated by the dark shape of Pendle Hill, famous for its association with witches, sorcery and black magic in the 16th century. Inspiration here for Mordor, the Middle Earth’s Misty Mountains and The Lonely Mountain?

And on completion of the ‘Tolkien Trail’ where better to quench your thirst than at the Shireburn, named for the Catholic family who built Stonyhurst:

‘Ho! Ho! Ho! To the bottle I go To heal my heart and drown my woe Rain may fall, and wind may blow And many miles be still to go But under a tall tree will I lie And let the clouds go sailing by’

Tags Stonyhurst, Tolkien