Should the mood take you, and you walk out of Fisher House and take the road directly ahead, past the Corn Exchange and turning right just before Aromi restaurant, next to the pleasant interior furnishing shop called The Ark, you will notice a small church surrounded by a pleasant churchyard, backing onto the Guildhall in one direction, and in the other leadings to with a small alleyway that winds past Corpus Playroom to King’s Parade. This is St Edward’s Church, administered by Trinity Hall and dating from the mid-1400s. It’s usually locked, but if you do get inside, you will have pointed out to you the pulpit. It dates from the sixteenth century, and is particularly celebrated because from here, at Christmas Midnight Mass in 1525, Fr Robert Barnes (a Cambridge Augustinian friar) preached the first protestant sermon ever heard in England, in which he accused the Catholic Church of heresy. In the years that followed, St Edward’s became the hub of a group of reformers who met in secret to discuss the writings of Martin Luther. This pulpit was the platform for many of the most famous Protestant reformers, men such as Hugh Latimer and Thomas Cranmer, whose writings and preaching underpinned the break with Rome and shaped the Church of England.
Cambridge is the protestant city. It is the cradle of the English Reformation. Here, many of the most famous Protestant reformers were educated: Hugh Latimer at Clare College, Thomas Cranmer at Jesus College, Matthew Parker at Christ’s College. Far more than Oxford, Cambridge absorbed and advocated the Protestant faith. One reason for this is geography: Cambridge is close to the coast and the continent, and the consequent danger of Catholic invasion or uprising meant that Catholicism was meticulously rooted out and demonised in this part of England. The thirty-nine Cambridge students who were martyred for the Catholic faith over a century and a half attest to the enduring hostility towards Catholicism, and even though attitudes gradually softened, Catholics were not allowed to attend Cambridge University until 1895. Even today, there is not a strong Catholic presence in the city – only one Church and that a good way south, a small Dominican priory, Fisher House, and that’s it.
I’m telling you this not just as a history lesson, but to draw attention to a deeply felt, even psychological, attitude which, to some extent, still persists among Catholics: that University is a dangerous place for Catholics - a threat to faith, a minefield, a cesspit, and any other unpleasant analogy you can come up with in between. Catholicism at University sees itself as targeted; in this spirit Fisher House was founded as a bastion in a hostile environment, an outpost against the hostile forces surrounding it. That hostility has changed its character as the years have past. As Reformation gave way to Enlightenment – the intellectual movement of the eighteenth century which insisted upon rational and scientific, rather than religious, accounts of the world - Catholicism was faced by a new antagonist, scientific atheism, and more recently by the ‘New Atheism’ of scientists like Richard Dawkins, or our own Professor Stephen Hawking of Caius who famously said, ‘Modern physics leaves no place for God in the creation of the Universe.’ The modern University, founded on Enlightenment principles, privileges free-thinking, unbridled and atheistic influences. Cambridge in particular, renowned for its research and innovations in science, technology and genetics, promotes science as self-sufficient and a fully adequate explanation of creation. Perhaps more than at other university, at Cambridge the oft-declared polarisation between religion and reason is especially acute; academics snort with laughter at the notion of a supreme deity, and of all religions Catholicism is dismissed as that which most opposes scientific reasoning and creative speculation.
Hang on, because I haven’t finished yet. Alongside academic hostility to Catholicism, Catholics face moral indignation from a society whose liberal values employ vocabulary effectively lifted from the text-books of religion and turned now against the Church. The Catholic Church is opposed these days in the name of freedom, human dignity, love of neighbour. Catholicism is condemned as anti-freedom, anti-women’s rights, anti-progessive values. When the Catholic politician Jacob Rees-Mogg expressed his opposition to abortion – in terms which were no more than main-stream Catholic - he was castigated in the media as ‘harmful and dangerous’, ‘extreme’, ‘wildly at odds with public opinion’. Particularly within the heady, experimental, radical setting of student life, if you express Catholic teaching on same-sex marriage or contraception, you will not simply be ignored, but denounced as bigoted, homophobic and reactionary.
And for you, this is aggravated by a factor that previous generations have not had to deal with. The child abuse scandal within the Church has effectively undermined its moral voice. More than previous generations, you will face unprecedented criticism of the Catholic Church because of the moral failings of those within it, which simply re-inforce what critics already knew about Catholicism - that it is pernicious, a force for evil, and corrupt to its roots. Any moral pronouncements made by the Church are ridiculed. I predict that you will find colleagues, friends, supervisors, who will express astonishment that you could continue adhering to such an evidently corrupt organisation. It will reinforce their opinion that you cannot think for yourselves, that you have surrendered your independence of thought, that you do not have the courage to break out of the confines of childhood.
By now, you will be wondering why you came here this evening, rather than gone for a pleasant drink in the college bar. The picture of gloom I am painting for a Catholic student in Cambridge jars with the optimism, excitement and amazement of these first days of the academic year. But I say these things because to some extent this is what you will face, to some extent this is what you will be anticipating, and to some extent this is not true at all.
It is undoubtedly true that if you are a student in Cambridge who takes your faith remotely seriously, you will face challenges. You will need resourcefulness, imagination and dedication as you work out how to live out your Catholicism at university. You will anticipate awkward conversations and negative responses from colleagues, but I think you will be surprised at how accepting and interested most people are. And you will find much more engagement, conversation, and genuine enquiry than you expect, bringing you the chance to learn about and deepen your faith, and have a good deal of fun while you are about it.
Let me address first one great issue that is raised particularly in this university environment. The encounter with reason, and the oft-declared polarisation between faith and reason. British Universities, formed by, and modelled on, the Enlightenment, insist upon practical experience and observation as the basis of knowledge - all the rest is, in the words of David Hume, ‘nothing but sophistry and illusion’. Little has changed from when Cardinal Newman asked: What answer do we Catholics give to the allegation … that we demand … an assent to views and interpretations of Scripture which modern science and historical research have utterly discredited?
Cambridge, famed for its pioneering work in science, technology and medicine, is a lively arena for this conflict – a conflict shaped most famously by Richard Dawkins. He, with others who uphold the self-sufficiency of science, maintain the incompatibility of reason and religion. The assumptions that science, and religion, make of what we can know about the world rely on methods of knowledge which have nothing to do with each other. It’s not necessarily hostility (although that can be the case); more usually it’s not seeing the point of religion, pitying why anyone would need it in their lives. Many of your friends at University will see your Catholic religion as an eccentricity - a relic from another, pre-scientific, unenlightened, age with no place in a modern intellectual formation.
But things are not as stark as all that, and it is important not to take the assertion of Enlightenment values as the end of the affair. Many non-believers themselves criticise the account of reason offered by Dawkins et al. as a meagre, reductionist, and inadequate. Reason is not simply ticking boxes on a maths exam. Catholicism has a fuller, richer description of the world to give, which enables the encounter with reason to be truly creative. For Catholics, our sacramental way of looking at the world means that creation is not divided up into the world on the one hand and God on the other. God doesn’t sit above or apart from creation. He enters our world, using elements from it to encounter us, seek us out. Catholicism is fundamentally positive about creation, and humanity’s role in it, seeing in the advances of the human mind (which includes science, medicine, technology) wonderful evidence of God’s enlightening and empowering presence. Accordingly, the encounter between faith and reason need not be one of opposition or mockery, but rather mutually enlightening and challenging. God is always there, and science, when allied with a true sense of wonder and humility, can find him there waiting. Never let anyone tell you that Catholics they have a less than meticulous attitude to research and evidence. Remind them that 35 craters on the moon are named after Jesuit scientists, that a Catholic priest (who studied here at Cambridge) articulated the Big Bang theory, that a Catholic monk is the father of modern genetics. A Catholic at Cambridge should not fear the challenge to faith in the modern university, but rather be ready to engage, argue, investigate - not despite, but because of his or her faith.
That sacramental sensibility, that sense that God takes up human and created things to allow us to meet him, is also (I suggest) important when considering the moral state of the Church, particularly amid the current abuse scandal. Many Catholics, myself included, feel angry, anxious, depressed about the unremitting revelations of evil acts and corrupt complicity that go beyond individual failings, and point to an structural, institutional failure in the Church. It’s hard to know what to say, when you feel so undermined as a Catholic yourself. Yet we must remember that the Church itself is a sacrament – that is, it is visible and present as a human, earthly reality through which we encounter the divine. That’s how all sacraments work.
But that earthly reality is, by definition, something of this world; and as such it can be sinful, tainted, broken. The wine used in the Eucharist can be sour; the oil used to confirm may not be the finest olive oil but something grabbed from a kitchen cupboard - yet the reality it makes present still enables us to meet God. Yes, when the earthly sign is deformed, stale, sinful, the inner divine presence is obscured and made more difficult to discern – but it is still there. The inward holiness of the Church is never overcome, never extinguished. Renaissance Popes with mistresses, the Spanish Inquistion, the manipulation and abuse of children by clerics – all are scandalous, all make it harder to see God at work. But they never extinguish the presence of God. Never overwhelm it. We need hope, courage, and imagination to hold onto that vision of the holiness of the Church, despite the crimes of some of its members. We need to do that for ourselves first, so that we can defend the Church before others.
I’d be sad if the impression you took from this talk was one of persecution. One of the reasons we go to university, the main reason we go to university, is because the experience of confronting new systems of thought, having one’s views challenged, is essential not just for a healthy faith, but for a mature, and rounded person. On this subject, we cannot for long ignore the figure of our new saint, Cardinal Newman, who in 1852 published: ‘The Idea of a University’. In case you should assume that books written long ago have nothing to say to us today, ‘The Idea of a University’ was recently referenced in a speech by the Universities and Science minister in Liverpool, and continues to influence debates about higher education around the world.
For Cardinal Newman, universities are places where students should learn ‘to think and to reason and to compare and to discriminate and to analyse.’ Far more than educate the student in a particular subject for a specialisation, the point of a university is to form a whole person, in ways that far exceed the narrow limits of academic ability. Cardinal Newman speaks of the importance and the joy of ‘thinking uselessly.’ In all this, he argues, the primary role of the university is to educate the individual so that he or she will make good judgements. No Catholic could argue with that. But Cardinal Newman is surprising in what he says about faith at University. It has no controlling role, he says. While faith opens the student to his or her potential, university is not a Convent or a Seminary or a Monastery. At University, faith should seek what Cardinal Newman calls ‘some antagonistic activity’ – it should seek to argue its case, test its propositions. Here at University, says Newman, knowledge should seek to be its own end – this he views this as more important even than faith. This broad, all-embracing view of education provides a powerful critique of the utilitarian way universities are seen today, when they are seen as places to turn out sufficient numbers of engineers, teachers, medics, to fill the government’s economic and political programme.
The key thing to say about being a Catholic at Cambridge is that, because of and not in spite of your faith, you should embrace the challenge, diversity, even unwelcome experiences that it brings. Do not be afraid to be taken out of your comfort zone. Try new things, dare to question suppositions that you have held for a long time. With an open mind, an attitude of wonder and bold exploration will assist your formation as a whole person, and in the process, confirm or modify your own judgements or pre-judgements in a way that leads to a mature, more deeply rooted, faith. A good Catholic should never simply accept propositions about his or her faith on trust. He or she must tussle with his or her faith, should develop what St Thomas Aquinas calls our innate cognitive faculty, our ability to learn, to question, to grow; that (rather than a faith that accepts dogmas without ever questioning or testing them) is a good Catholic faith. This is the ‘constructive dialogue’ so dear to Pope Francis, which views others as valid dialogue partners, worthy of being listened to. It is a dialogue guided by truth, anchored in a secure identity, but motivated by humility. It is, as he says, a journeying together.
That said, to set out on this intellectual and spiritual journey of discovery, you will need some provisions. Most of us can’t be muscular survivalists, finding what we need to survive as we go along. Living a life of faith at university needs resources, preparation, both in reserves of energy and of knowledge. That is the role of the Catholic Chaplaincy at Cambridge; to support Catholic students through its sacramental and social life, and deepen their knowledge through talks, lectures, and its library.
A basic and essential element of support that the Catholic chaplaincy provides is community. Our faith, most especially our Catholic faith, is lived in common with others. Even the most engaged, assured, most crusading Catholic among you will need some down-time, when you can just be yourself with other Catholics, when you do not have to explain yourself, when you can use language that will be naturally understood by others. This is not an inward-looking ghetto mentality: Catholic community looks outwards; our communion with each other leads to engagement. Nor should you imagine that the only topic of conversation at the chaplaincy is religion. On the whole, there is remarkably little religion talked about in Fisher House. It is healthy, from time to time, to be with others who know what it’s like, who share your same basic outlook, who do not judge your Catholicism as odd or eccentric.
But a healthy Catholicism, as Cardinal Newman pointed out, needs more than safe space. For faith to mature, it must engage actively, go out from its familiar setting, and that needs resources. Your faith needs nourishment. The Chaplaincy strengthens through the sacraments, principally the Eucharist and Confession. In a University environment, the Eucharist really becomes food for the journey. It is what everything in this chaplaincy is built upon: Fisher House is not simply another society with lots of events. It is a community that is created at Mass, and everything else is an outworking of that. All our clubs, societies, social life, religious life, is intimately connected with, and a consequence of, the Mass we celebrate together as a community on Sunday. Regular attendance at Mass keeps you grounded, keeps Christ close, gives you a sense of God being with you. Amid the whirlwind of challenging experiences, unaccustomed views, Mass is a point of reference. Confession is a roadmap through the unfamiliar terrain of University. Where new experiences can confuse, intimidate, or overwhelm, Confession keeps you on the path. It’s not so much about mopping up sin (though it is that) as about processing experiences, consulting the map, and keeping going.
Along with the sacraments, regular prayer will enable you to put your experiences in context, to process them. Either quietly in your room or in the chapel, or joining in some of the religious activities here at Fisher House, prayer is essential to a healthy Christian life. Thomas Merton, (who was eventually a Cistercian monk and a giant of spirituality, but who during his time at Cambridge used to riot in the pub just outside our front door), used to say that there are no tricks and gimmicks to prayer. We just have to do it. Bump it up our priorities. Make it part of our daily routine. Like going to the dentist, prayer requires that you make an appointment. Missing it now and then seems neither here nor there. But give up on it altogether and you will notice a difference. Decay sets in, the quality of your faith will suffer.
In the realm of prayer, you have some special companions at Cambridge, who are keen to help. 39 former students of Cambridge, who witnessed to their Catholic faith with their lives, now stand at the throne of God. The Cambridge martyrs are listed in the chapel. They knew the streets you walk, they experienced the ups and downs of university life - many of them were at your own colleges. The Cambridge martyrs are your patron saints, especially close to you, knowing the seasons and the joy and stresses of life at this university, who faced the same struggles as you in practising and professing their faith, and who now will have an especial care for you, and will not be slow to help you with their prayers. Get to know the martyrs. Get to call upon them in prayer in the challenges and joys of University life.
To live your faith, then, you need the strength of the sacraments and a life of prayer, within an affirming Catholic community. To explain your faith, you need knowledge - you need to understand why you believe what you believe. You don’t have to memorise the Catechism – I really wouldn’t recommend that - but familiarity with basic doctrine, willingness to enter into discussion about it, is important both for the maturity of your own faith, and to give an account of it to others. In the year ahead, you will have discussions - some formal, with colleagues and teachers, in tutorials, lectures, assignments - some informal, late at night over a mug of cocoa, or in the bar, or walking along the towpath, when you will be asked to give an account of your faith. These moments should be enjoyable and exhilarating – but for that to be the case, before you argue your faith with others, you have to argue it with yourself. Catholicism has to make sense to you, to have a coherence, if you are to give any successful account of it.
Alongside learning, you will have to become familiar with the process of unlearning. You will be amazed at what you hear about Catholicism, the misconceptions, prejudices, and misunderstandings you will come up against: that everything the Pope says is infallible; that Catholics worship Mary; that Catholics don’t read the bible. Quite possibly you will spend as much time disabusing friends of what they think they know about Catholicism as you do telling them what they should know. Quite possible the person you will have to disabuse is yourself, as your own pre-suppositions are challenged.
And note that our engagement is not just with atheists, but with other Christians as well. There is every shape and shade of Christian tradition here, as well as the other Abrahamic faiths. Start with the obvious: become familiar with the religious life of your College - this is probably your first chance to experience another Christian tradition at close quarters. Get involved in chapel life; introduce yourself to the chaplain or dean. Experience the beauty of Anglican collegiate worship, evensong or Compline; it will enhance your Catholicism - Pope St John Paul advocated engagement with other Christian traditions as ‘an exchange of gifts’. The Christian Union, CICCU or STAG, is now a very different beast to what it was in my day. Then, they refused to engage with Catholics, denied us the name Christian, even changed sides of the street not to walk past us. Now there is a greater sense of a common calling, common mission. Evangelical Christianity is till very challenging, but it also has an energy and optimism that can strengthen our own faith and help us to be people of mission.
So much for the preparation, the ground rules. What is it like when you engage as a Catholic in university life? A passage from a letter by Pope St Gregory is relevant here: the Christian (he says) should be careful in deciding when to remain silent and be sure to say something useful when deciding to speak. The most difficult problem facing a Catholic in university is knowing when to speak, and when not to; to know how often, and how far, to stand up for one’s faith. Religion must tread carefully in social settings. A public display of religion is not generally welcome in mixed company, certainly in English society. It is considered over-enthusiastic, impolite, embarrassing – and I know this is different from other cultures. Yet there will be occasions when issues touching faith and the Church arise, in conversations, in tutorials, in social media, and you wonder how to react. Do you raise the flag of Christ or not? Do you out yourself as a Catholic?
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the great theologian and opponent of Hitler, and who was eventually murdered by the Nazis, was one day in 1934, sitting in a café in Germany with a friend when the triumphant news blared from the loudspeakers that Germany had annexed Austria. The broadcast concluded with the Nazi anthem. Everyone in the café jumped up and made the Nazi salute, includuing – to his friend’s astonishment - Bonhoeffer himself. His friend was stupefied: How could you do that? He said. The Nazis represent everything you most hate! Bonhoeffer said, There will be a time to make a stand, and it will cost everything, but I am not going to prison just for a Nazi salute.
Knowing what battles to fight, and what not, is a skill we learn with practice. Knowing where to draw the line is an art; and it is important not to draw it too close to home. Not everything is an issue for making a stand; not everything is at the same level of importance. If you object on every possible occasion, you will find yourself quickly ignored, your influence repudiated. It takes judgement, patience, and a certain biting of the lip, to let some things pass: remember that our Lord advises those he sends out to be ‘as wise as serpents and innocent as doves.’ You must know yourself where your line is. Do you interrupt the people on the next table in the bar who are using profane language? Do you go up to the lecturer after class and contradict their conclusions? Do you stop your friends as they tell a dirty joke? Do you intervene when you see someone in your College being picked upon? It is not others who can tell you at what point this is. You must work it out for yourself, you must ask yourself what you cannot find acceptable, when you have to own up to being a Catholic. And when you reach that point, then you must be prepared to speak, and take the consequences.
Secondly, your faith should shine from you. I don’t mean that you ostentatiously make the sign of the cross before lectures or set a statue of our Lady of Fatima on your library desk. I mean that as a person whose faith makes sense to you, and makes sense of the world about you, your faith should be revealed an inner peace and a joy. To witness to our faith, we must have joy in our faith. Pope Francis calls joy the ‘identity card’ of our faith, and that he cannot imagine a Christian who does not know how to smile. When asked if it was possible to know that someone had truly been transformed into the image of Christ, our friend Thomas Merton, said, ‘It is very difficult to tell but usually it is accompanied by a wonderful sense of humour’.
Much can be learned about the Catholic faith from books, and from talks and discussions. But a faith that exists only at that level will have little connection to your daily joys and triumphs. A Catholic faith that confines itself only in devotion or debate will become abstract, detached from the realities of your life. Your faith must encompass the whole of who you are. At the conclusion of Mass the priest says: ‘Go forth to love and serve the Lord’ – the word Mass itself is connected to the word ‘dismissal’, sending forth. Our Mass doesn’t end when we walk out of the chapel door; it begins. How will we live out what we have just celebrated? How will we make real in Cambridge the presence of Christ that is within me? You are exceptionally busy people – but will you have time to put the love of the Lord into practice, to feed the hungry, to visit the lonely, to lift a burden? How will you show that God’s kingdom reigns on earth as it is in heaven? Heaven is not for us a distant prospect, something that happens when this present world is finished; heaven underpins our world, it is breaking in, bursting in to our lives each day. You need imagination as much as anything to see it.
It is up to us to live our faith in such a way as to make that kingdom break through. Put your faith into practice. Do some charitable work; do something for others that has no tangible recompense for yourself. One example is the nightly soup-run: from Fisher House every evening students go out to feed the homeless on the streets of our city, to talk to them, to treat them with love and dignity. Or take up a ministry: altar serving, reading, Minister of the Eucharist. It doesn’t need to be a heroic act. A kind word to the person on the check-out in Sainsbury’s; an attentive ear to a neighbour who is going through a bad time; a patient explanation to another student who doesn’t get the question. This is love in action. You can tell a saint, says St Therese, by the way she shuts a door. Look at the ordinary routine things. Do them well. Do them with love. Then, you will be living out your Catholicism, here in Cambridge.
You should be proud to be a Catholic in Cambridge. Our patron, St John Fisher, is not only a martyr, but in many ways the second founder of the University. He loved Cambridge and involved himself in it all his life. In a way that confounds those who insist that faith is opposed to reason, he brought the University curriculum into the modern era, encouraging modern scientific methods, employing the most talented new scholars from this country and abroad. St John’s faith was simply part of who he was. His love of scholarship, his care for the poor, his concern for the truth, were embedded in his Catholic faith. St John Fisher is not just the patron of our chaplaincy – he is the model, assistance, and inspiration, for you to have a full, flourishing and joyous time here at Cambridge.
Fr Mark Langham 22 October 2019
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