An evaluation of Corpus Christi Catechetical Institute.

Recently returned from the Summer Session of the St John Vianney Society, which I will post about in due course, I want first to continue my posts about Corpus Christi College. In this post I want to post some comments by way of evaluating this 1965 to 1975 phenomenon.

First, neither Cardinal Heenan nor the other Bishops of England and Wales were ready for what took place after the Council, and the ‘modernising’ project, promoted by some, to superimpose a new agenda onto the teaching and directives of the Council Fathers went ahead under its own steam. It is hard to think that there was any Bishop, at the time, who was sufficiently aware and ready to deal with such a circumstance; Corpus Christi College took everyone by surprise. Those who were involved in this project, which was something much more defined than simply the zeitgeist of the 1960s, did not wait for the Council to end, nor did they even want it to teach; but rather they wanted to teach their own religion – a new form of Modernism. The Corpus Christi experiment was a terrible mistake. It would not be proper, however, to blame Cardinal Heenan for it; rather, he should be commended for way in which he acted as the disaster unfolded.

Secondly, the greater problem with Corpus Christi Catechetical Institute was that it took part in the worldly movement of secularisation that has been taking place since the Enlightenment, and which has its roots in the Reformation. This movement is one that thinks that human beings can and should wriggle out of the human condition; by putting all considerations about Original Sin and Grace in a back room, and by deploying all our human energies, we will be able to build a better world on our own. For this project, the Christian Redemption is something which must be set aside; human resourcefulness alone can make it through. This is the movement that is forming the prevailing culture today. The terrible thing was that the architects of Corpus Christi College aligned themselves with the secular project, and in so doing attempted to set aside the relationship between nature and grace which Christ uniquely has established, and so attempted to lead the Church into the contemporary secular movement. Even now, as far as I know, the architects of Corpus Christi College have never been asked to account for the way in which they tried to bring the Catholic Church in England and Wales in line with the great error of our age: that our lives should be built without recourse to Christian Dogma, and that ultimately, the God of Revelation should not be the basis of human life.    

Thirdly, why were Frs Ripley and Drinkwater, who were already involved in the new Catechetical Movement and who were producing genuine Catechetical materials, not chosen as the principal staff of the College, but that Richards and de Rosa, who were not previously involved in the Catechetical movement, were? This is a mystery to me.

Fourthly, at another level, Corpus Christi College looked like a plan whose design was to graft a new religion into the Church in England and Wales through the ecclesiastical structure of the schools. 

Short gap.

This coming week I shall be away with the priests of the St John Vianney Society, taking part in our summer fraternity week in Germany. I will resume posts next weekend.

Insight.

After the closure of Corpus Christi Catechetical Institute in the summer of 1975 there was a sort of hiatus; it seemed that no one quite knew where the catechetical experiment had got to, or where it would now go. One commentator remarked in 1976 that the College would “rise from the ashes like the Phoenix.” It didn’t. What had been an extraordinary mistake was now ended. Its legacy however, would be felt in other ways. What did take place was a coming to terms with what had taken place at Corpus Christi; a seeking to better understand what had really occurred at Corpus Christi by a Church that had simply not been ready for such a reckless experiment.

Fr George Telford, Director of Southwark Archdiocesan Catechetical Centre wrote to The Tablet in January 1972 to suggest about Corpus Christi that, “If, for instance, the impression is being given that the Resurrection was merely a psychological experience on the part of the Apostles, rather than an historical, physical fact; or that original sin is merely the accumulated effect of man's inhumanity to man, rather than a wound intrinsic to man's very being; or that the Eucharist is merely a symbol of human love and unity, rather than the absolute reality of Christ's Body and Blood; or that children cannot know moral guilt and therefore have no need of the reconciling grace of sacramental absolution — if this kind of dilution appears to be taking place, then the bishops have the right and duty to take whatever action they consider necessary to protect the integrity of the faith.”

Of course hindsight is a great perspective, and in this context I came across a very good article on the Internet about Corpus Christi College and the nature of the problem. I recommend this article warmly to you. It was written by Dennis Barton and appears on his Website, which you may like to investigate further as it has a whole raft of interesting material. Dennis Barton makes some very perceptive points in his article. Note for instance this sentence, which describes succinctly the context of the 1060s, which itself called for a new catechesis:

“But during this period the parish lost its central role in local life and the ethos of family life and society became secular.”

Note also the comment about the theological underpinning which the first staff of Corpus Christi brought with them into the College:

“For them, the Gospels were merely the thoughts of ‘creative’ theologians at the end of the first century, rather than being historical eyewitness accounts of the life and teaching of Christ.” And again, on the same lines: “When the study syllabus was published, it provided ample evidence that the new college was not going to confine its activities to catechetical formation. It had an aura of an institute of speculative theology. Doctrines disappeared or were demoted to subjects for discussion and doubt.”

I believe that a tremendously important comment is made by this article: that an erroneous understanding of Scripture led to an erroneous Catechetics. And here we find the basic problem of Corpus Christi: that the architects of the College were not originally experts in Religious Education, but of Sacred Scripture, and that their plan was to undertake the launch of the College and its catechetical project, and then once underway, to introduce their erroneous understanding of Scripture into the mix; it is this that led their catechetical movement away from the Catholic Faith and towards a new version of Christianity. This is how Corpus Christi went wrong.

The beginning of the end.

At the start of 1972 the staff of Corpus Christi Catechetical Institute resigned. Fr Hubert Richards, its Principal, wrote to the Cardinal saying, "There is between us such a divergence of understanding on the nature of religious education that it would be inappropriate for us to remain as a staff in charge of your College."

Cardinal Heenan appointed Fr Michael Keegan of the Leeds Diocese as the new Principal, and Fr Hugh Lavery of Hexham and Newcastle Diocese as the new Vice-Principal. I knew Mgr Keegan when he joined the staff at the English College when I was a seminarian there. He was a much-respected house Theological tutor to the students. I remember him telling us a little about his time as Principal of the College – he spoke of the very strange culture which he encountered there when he took up his appointment.

After resigning Fr Hubert Richards first spent some time at St Edmunds in Cambridge, then at Pinner in Middlesex before leaving the Priesthood in 1975 and marrying one of his former students of Corpus Christi, the former religious Sister Clare Milward. They settled in Norwich where he died in 2010. Clare Richards, recently retired from her work in Education, lives there still.

In March 1975 the closure of Corpus Christi Catechetical Institute was announced; it closed in July 1975. The reason given for this was an economic one; student numbers, especially from English Dioceses had fallen, and the College was relying heavily on International students. However, I have heard it said many times that the reason behind its closure was not simply financial, but that this erroneous start in the new catechetics needed a radical closure. Even so, the damage had been done, and during the six years that Fr Richards led Corpus Christi, huge numbers of priests, religious and lay teaching staff attended courses and disseminated the errors of the College throughout the British Isles and further afield in the Engish-speaking world.

At Junior school in Leeds, I was aware of some of the Sisters going away on courses and coming back with their habits radically changed in appearance and full of all sorts of weird ideas. However, I was never in one of their classes; the class teachers who I had, at Junior school, never went to Corpus Christi and, as a consequence, we were taught the Catholic Faith. Later, at St Michael’s College in Leeds we had an RE teacher who taught us that Jesus (a human person) received a Divine mission at his baptism in the Jordan. I remember thinking at the time that this was bizarre clap-trap. He also incidentally taught us about all the forms of Contraception. This was 1973 and we were thirteen year olds!

Meltdown.

In June 1971 Fr Peter de Rosa resigned from the staff of Corpus Christi Catechetical Institute. A few days later Fr John Perry also resigned. Both priests had been signatories of a letter to The Times, along with forty eight other priests, in which they contradicted the teaching of the Church in the Encyclical Humanae Vitae. On 2^nd August 1971, following a meeting the previous day with the staff of the College, Cardinal Heenan spoke about the growing criticism of the College and its methods, which had been made by parents, priests and teachers, up and down the country. In the Autumn of 1970 the College was downgraded from its status as a National Catechetical Centre to being merely a Diocesan Catechetical Centre; such was the concern felt throughout the country and particularly amongst Diocesan Bishops. The Cardinal was clearly very embarrassed by what was happening with his Institute; this would not be the last public statement about the College that he would have to make.

Concern about the College was beginning to throw light on the actual problem in Corpus Christi; that there was on the one hand, a question about the value of the new methods of Catechesis, which Cardinal Heenan vigorously defended, and on the other the sense of a deeper theological issue, which was not really understood. In January 1972, Fr Dacey, an Australian priest who was a student at the college, in a letter to the Tablet (22^nd January 1972) said that “most students were quite clear that the real issue was not even a question of catechetical methods, but a theological understanding of what Divine Revelation is all about.”

The resignations of Frs de Rosa and Perry were given, ostensibly, because of their opposition to the teaching in Humanae Vitae, and that, at this stage there was no question of them leaving the Priesthood. Later that year Fr de Rosa left the priesthood. You can read about him here.

On 21^st August 1971, the remaining staff of the College, including its Principal, Fr Hubert Richards, offered their resignation to the Cardinal, but that, in order to honour their commitments, they would be happy to complete the academic year, and step down in July 1972. In January 1972 matters came to a head and the staff stepped down. Cardinal Heenan came to Corpus Christi to address the students. Following that he had to appoint new staff to run his College. New Year 1972 must have been a nightmare for the Cardinal.

The plan.

In the spring of 1965, some months before Corpus Christi Catechetical Institute opened, Fr Peter de Rosa, who was to be the Vice-Principal, published a statement about how the College saw itself and its work. This was printed in The Tablet on 1^st May 1965. I include a part of this statement below; you can read the whole text on-line. It makes very interesting reading and, to the unsuspecting, seems to present a very credible and exciting prospectus. I have inserted a couple of comments of my own, in brackets, into the text.

“It is worth recalling that the First Vatican Council drew up a decree—in the event not promulgated because of the suspension of the Council—for the publication of a universal catechism. Such a decree would, without doubt, be a subject of unsympathetic comment in educational circles at the present time. The desire for a universal catechism is about as respectable as Leibnitz's project for a characteristica universalis, a perfect, all-problem-solving language.

(With hindsight, this rejection of the notion that there should be a Catechism is very worrying. The reasons expressed in the following three short paragraphs are arguable, but the seeking of new methods was to be aligned, by Corpus Christi College, with the  seeking of a new content to the Church’s teaching. To what extent was this already envisaged by the new staff as they prepared for the opening of the College in four months time.)

In the first place, the old catechism method of question and answer, a method which is formal, abstract and unscriptural, was scarcely calculated to touch the hearts of children and make them respond to Christ's loving invitation to them to be his friends.

The custom once in vogue of simply dividing up a uniformly written catechism and insisting that the younger pupils learn the earlier, and the older pupils the later parts of it, took no cognisance of the different stages of psychological development through which all children pass.

Further, people of diverse ethnic and cultural backgrounds require a quite different presentation of the Christian message. It is not a simple matter of language: it involves a radical rethinking of concepts and a like remoulding of the images and the symbols which are for them the vehicles of understanding.

(“Radical rethinking of concepts”, “remoulding of images”: what really was understood here by the writers of this text? And, where had the request for such notions come from? And, to whom would they be accountable for their results?

Also, I heard an echo of this determined rejection of the need for a Catechism in 1994. Bishop Konstant had asked Clare Richards – wife of the former priest Hubert Richards – to speak to the clergy of the Leeds Diocese about the new Catechism, which had then just been published. She told them that she thought that “it would have a shelf-life of four years”. Her opinion reflects the same reality.)

The new college must attempt to present the Christian message as an organic whole — even the youngest child needs a global picture of the faith—and as the gradual telling of the story of God's saving action in history, the climax of which is the Passover death-and-resurrection of Jesus. But it has the task also, as a higher institute, of utilising the latest findings of child and religious psychology and of investigating how best to present the gospel to modern Anglo-Saxons. Whilst we have benefited immensely from the researches and writing of continental scholars, we cannot allow them to do all our thinking for us: their thoughts are not our thoughts and their temperaments decidedly not ours. English-speaking, English-feeling clerics have the right to demand that, if the old catechism method of question and answer is to be relinquished, whatever methods replace it should be conducive to the mental discipline and the sober practices which, for better or worse, we want to cling to, methods that can, besides, be employed with success by ordinary teachers and do not require the special talents of an archangel.

The students of the new college will have the incalculable blessing of daily Mass, followed by a lunch taken together. In the Eucharist they can participate in the sacrificial meal which builds up the Christian community. Their eating together afterwards is not a mere matter of convenience but a direct sharing in the communal life whose holiest fount is the Eucharistic Christ.

This complete participation of all in the life of the college will be the major concern. To ensure success, the whole institute, professors and students, must be engaged continually in a learning process, learning how to improve on past performances, progressing by kind and mutually beneficial criticism. Regular self-study circles will be held so that the suggestions of everyone can be listened to and judged and, if they are thought to be wise and opportune, acted upon. (I’m sorry, but this really does suggest a project of ‘brain-washing’ was being planned.) Thus the principles of social psychology will reinforce a basic conviction that the teaching of Christian doctrine must ever proceed from, and illuminate in its turn, the experience of communal Christian living. Corpus Christi College will be effective by producing not psychotics masquerading as saints, but integrated men and women who are committed to the social purposes of the Body of Christ and who have found themselves as individuals in their reverent service and love of others. The first year's syllabus, which has just been published consists of three sections: theology (the study of the good news of salvation); anthropology (the study of man who receives the good news of salvation); and methodology (the study of the means of communicating the good news of salvation).

In addition to the two residents, Fr. Richards (who teaches scripture) and Fr. De Rosa (the philosophy of man), twenty lecturers are already under contract to give courses on subjects in which they specialise. From abroad will come men like Fr. Bouyer to lecture on "Liturgy and Holiness," Fr. van Caster from the Lumen Vitae in Brussels to lecture on "The Structure of Catechetics" and "Religious Anthropology." From among English professors the college will draw on Fr. Charles Davis, recently appointed to a chair of dogmatic theology at Heythrop, and Frs. Howell and Crichton, the well-known liturgists. Fr. O'Doherty will come from Dublin to teach "General Religious Psychology," and Fr. Enda McDonagh from Maynooth to teach" The Theology of Morals."

Such famous visitors will ensure that the college, even in its infancy, will cast some Pentecostal fire upon the earth. They were invited because their joyous presentation of the good news of salvation makes it seem always good and always news.”

(The legacy of Corpus Christi College cannot be understood as “Pentecostal fire”. But, what was really intended, at the outset, by the original staff of the College, and were they clear about that amongst themselves?)