Farewell to St Benet’s Hall

Aug 8, 2022 by

by Joseph Shaw, The Critic:

How a Catholic institution capitulated to the non-binary gods of diversity:

[…] As the Catholic priest and psychologist, T.V. Moore, noted in the 1950s, there is a deep incompatibility between Catholic teaching and what I am calling the therapeutic approach. The replacement of the first by the second in the heart of what should be the spiritual powerhouses of the Catholic Church, the monasteries, is part of a profound loss of self-confidence. Inevitably, such conflicted institutions attract few vocations, and their future is not bright.

This lack of self-confidence was reflected in the attitude the community had to their bridgehead into one of the world’s greatest universities. Although a great deal was said about the Catholic ethos of the Hall, and the usefulness of its Benedictine traditions in establishing an environment for academic enquiry, there seemed to be no understanding of the Hall’s potential as an academic institution as such: the value to the Church and also to the world of a place where Catholic traditions of thought could be discussed and developed, and where students and scholars could encounter a Catholic academic community in the wider context of Oxford University.

As the supply of monks diminished and the role of lay academic staff and lay trustees increased, this incomprehension of the Hall’s potential as an academic institution continued to be on display. Appointments, visiting speakers, Junior Common Room policies, and everything else, were consistently judged on the basis of whether they increased or displayed “diversity”, which meant that as often as possible they had to cut against the grain of the Catholic identity of the Hall.

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