|
Back to WELCOME and INDEX |
Back to 1. WHAT WE DO |
Back to 1.7 PUBLICATIONS, NEWSLETTER, MAGAZINE |
|
|
Back to WELCOME and INDEX |
Back to 1. WHAT WE DO |
Back to 1.7 PUBLICATIONS, NEWSLETTER, MAGAZINE |
No 164 - 2001
2 Douai Society Dinner, May 18 2001
Extracts from a speech by Fr Abbot
ALTHOUGH most of you would regard archives as dusty and dead, they often reveal surprising truths about us. An archive grows and declines and fossilises like anyone or any institution. It is an organic thing, and it is interesting that in the catalogue of the archives at Woolhampton, the Douai Society, as well as the Douai Magazine, are listed quite separately from the Community or the School. They stand in their own separate right, perhaps to enjoy an independent existence in the future when Community and School are no more.
I know that many of you still feel rather raw at the demise of the school at Woolhampton, and it’s a sadness shared by the Community. Looked at in the long perspective, we have no abiding city anywhere, and you might be surprised to hear that after the closing of the school, I asked the Community whether they wanted to take the radical option and move away from Woolhampton completely. They decided against this, perhaps influenced by the knowledge that they had just completed the abbey church, but if they had so decided, then there would have been no presence at Woolhampton at all. As it is, former pupils from a Benedictine school can return to their real alma mater, the abbey and the Community.
The archives show us that there was a time when the Community did not have a formal school, only the occasional English gentleman to take around the sights of Paris as part of the Grand Tour, but you may be surprised to learn that at this time it did have the equivalent of a Douai Society, for in 1749, the monks in Paris and their friends formed the Society of St Edmund [perhaps that’s a more accurate name, after all, for the Douai Society]. The members of the Society dined together, had their own library and room, and listened to talks from each other. In mid-18th century Paris, rugby and cricket were unheard of. From 18th century grand tourists, to 19th century seminarians, to 20th century public schoolboys, the Community has nurtured all sorts of educational traditions. At the beginning of the 3rd millenium, it stands on the edge of further developments in education which will assure its future; the monks on the parishes are governors and chaplains to two excellent comprehensive schools awarded beacon-status by the government, and at Douai, we have begun this year to teach in Reading University for the first time.
There are, of course, important decisions to be made by the Douai Society. You all know Cardinal Newman’s most famous words: To live is to change often’. And the Society has indeed changed – if you look at the photographs in the archives of meetings a century ago, the Society is made up entirely of clergy with whiskers, wearing top hats. The Douai Society is a unique bridge between the Community and the world outside, and it would be a pity for it to become an ever-declining club of old comrades and veterans.
When the Community took the decision to close the school in the summer of 1998 and I was in Lancashire safely away from the ferment, I derived one crumb of comfort from that decision. It would mean that I could close the archive on the school – as you will appreciate closing an archive does not often happen, because institutions tend to go on, transmogrified. But then, the school revived again, and went on for another year, and so it has taken me longer to catalogue the papers from the school. But it is all there, just waiting for a PhD student to start researching: bits of uniform, school colours, registers, records, fixtures, programmes, reminiscences, even punishment and black-mark books, and a bundle of Father Oswald’s tobacco which he grew in the chemistry laboratory during war-time rationing. There is a fine collection of photographs which take us right back to Douai in France. Notice that, archivally speaking, this is all separate from the Douai Society. What we are waiting for, and desperately need, is a complete listing of all pupils from the mid-17th century, when the monks educated the occasional boy.
It is one of my saddest thoughts that the school at Woolhampton did not survive long enough to keep its century there. In 2003, we keep the centenary of Douai at Woolhampton, and in 2015 we keep the four-hundredth anniversary of the foundation of the Community in Paris. The Community is at present discussing how they might celebrate 2003 and perhaps the Douai Society might like to join us in some way. I personally would like to see published a commemorative volume, like that which appeared in 1913, linking together the story of Community, its schools, and its societies. Perhaps two of our most prestigious historians might be asked to contribute. Henry Mayr-Harting, who came to speak recently to the Community on the Holy Rule, is Regius Professor of Ecclesiastical History at Christ Church, Oxford, the first Catholic lay-canon of the cathedral, and Professor Adrian Hastings, an expert on Africa and the Balkans, retired professor of theology at Leeds. (sadly Professor Hastings died shortly after this speech was made; see the next article. Ed.) I mention them because Douai is dear to their hearts, and both had hoped to publish a joint biography of their teacher at Douai, Oliver Welch, a liberal, independent scholar from a traditional Catholic home. He taught me as well. But except for the minute book of the Thirteen, there was insufficient material on Oliver in the archives, and Adrian Hastings has published a short memoir instead. I conclude my speech to you this evening with Adrian Hastings’ own conclusion to his most popular book, A History of English Christianity, 1920-1985, being sure that you will identify with his sentiment: "Dom Sylvester Mooney represented an older tradition still. On the Berkshire Downs, at Douai, in the Abbey of St Edmund, at the very end of our period, the summer of 1985, Father Sylvester entered his hundredth year, wheeled into the Divine Office, the work of God, in the great monastic church he had himself built fifty years earlier, the prayer which he had attended dutifully for more than eighty years. No medieval monk had practised stabilitas better than he. He had been ordained priest for the monastery in 1911 and ruled it as abbot for forty years from 1929 to 1969. As a boy he had been in the school at Douai in France before the monastery moved back to England in 1903, ending three hundred and fifty years of the education of English Catholics in exile in the little town where in the reign of Elizabeth I Cardinal Allen had first established a college. Of all that long line of thousands of young Englishmen who had gone to Douai for schooling and priesting, Mooney was the last, a gentle, quiet man, witness to the human furitfulness of a Benedictine pattern of life, a monastic stability which had well served the community, as it had served him personally, in the pursuit of God."‡
Index
Fr Adrian Hastings 1929 - 2001
Pre-Vatican II Catholic: The Case of Oliver Welch by Adrian Hastings
Indian Interfaith Encounters by Fr Peter Bowe OSB
Impressions of El Salvador January 2002 by Fr Alexander Austin OSB
Music at Douai March 2001 - February 2002 by Fr Oliver Holt OSB
St Mary's Parish Studley by Fr Paul Gunter OSB
New Mass Setting: Roxanna Panufik's Douai Missa Brevis by John Rowntree
Go to index of Douai Newsletter.