<em>William Cash talks to the Rector of the Venerable English College about an important fundraising campaign to widen access to its archives.</em>
The Caffè Peru’ on the Via di Monserrato may look from the outside like any normal bar <em>tabacchi</em> in Rome, selling strong espresso from a gurgling Lavazza coffee machine, cigarettes, lottery tickets and <em>bomboloni</em> (Italian doughnuts). By night it is a late haunt of Roman Bright Young Things. But its past – originating as a 14th-century pilgrim hospice – makes it perhaps the most historically important café in the city, being adjacent to the Venerable English College (known as the Venerabile, or the VEC) which owns it.
As Fr Stephen Wang, rector of the VEC explains, the College’s origins began as a guest house for people travelling to Rome at a time when English and Welsh pilgrims would walk 1,200 blistering miles along the Via Francigena, from Canterbury.
“This place was always about hospitality,” Fr Wang says in his study. “It was set up by laypeople as a charitable institution to support poor pilgrims. And when you arrived here, if you could prove you were English or Welsh, you were given eight days of free board and lodging. But then it became much more than that. It became, eventually, a royal foundation, and it became a place of great intellectual life in the humanist period. And it became a centre of devotion and pilgrimage.”
Then came the Reformation, when it became impossible to train Catholic priests in England. Because the anti-Catholic pressure was so great in the 1560s, Cardinal William Allen set up the first continental seminary, known as the English College, at Douai in the Spanish Netherlands (now in France); it was a predecessor of the seminaries at Ushaw, near Durham, and Allen Hall in London. His foundation in Rome was established as a pontifical seminary in 1579, by Pope Gregory XIII. “So we’ve had 450 years of seminary life,” Fr Wang explains, “and the first 100 years was the time of the martyrs. That was a really heroic age.”
Which brings us onto why the Venerabile is about to launch a campaign to raise up to £9 million to ensure that the uniquely documented living history of this “heroic age” will soon be accessible to all, through a comprehensive restoration, cataloguing and digitisation of the college’s truly remarkable archives, overseen by its archivist, Prof Maurice Whitehead.
The VEC archives are a unique historical window on 650 years of Church, social and religious history, from its beginnings in the 14th century as an English guest house, through its famed period of martyrdoms – 40 names (from 1581 to 1679) are commemorated on a huge marble plaque in the main corridor – to today. It remains a flourishing seminary; there are currently 21 students preparing for priesthood from all over the world.
“The archives form the oldest British archival collection outside Britain,” says Fr Wang. During a tour of the library, I was given a chance to see the College’s famed Liber Ruber, a large, red leather-bound book in which each new seminarian, dating back to the 16th century, has signed his name, age and where he was from.
“Known as the Book of the Martyrs, it is the book in which all seminarians made an oath that they would go back to England, whatever the risk was,” Fr Wang adds.
This priceless and fragile book has been rebound, and was among the very first to be digitised as part of the new digitisation programme. “We need investment today to preserve our unique records and secure the VEC’s archive for future generations,” says Fr Wang. The collection includes lists and records of the seminarians, guests, students and pilgrims who have visited or studied at the Venerabile over the centuries. In addition, there are financial records going back over 600 years, and a unique collection of photographs and personal papers about leading figures associated with the VEC.
When I ask if any particular martyr’s story stands out, Fr Wang says it is impossible not to think of the College’s first martyr, St Ralph Sherwin. “He came here as a young man. He was an ordinary student priest in Rome. But he always knew that he was going back to this place of terrible persecution in England. And he was willing to lay down his life for his Faith and for the priesthood. He was the first student to sign the Liber Ruber.”
There was no doubt of the ends that might await some of the students. In the gallery of the college church, Fr Wang shows me wall murals depicting the gruesome fates of the martyrs of England and Wales from the earliest days of British Christianity. They feel like a sort of Instagram equivalent for the 16th century, forever reminding the young seminarians of the gory risks involved. Anyone who has seen BBC One’s Gunpowder knows how brutal it frequently could be.
One of the interesting aspects of the Liber Ruber is that the College records the names of the seminarians under two names, because each one used a pseudonym for security. “There’s a little bit of doubling up,” says Fr Wang. “Our martyrs are at the heart of our identity and Martyrs’ Day on December 1 is our biggest feast, apart from Easter Day. We have a big Solemn Mass, followed by a big lunch with drinks before and after.”
“But the most special thing on that day is the veneration of our relics in the evening. We gather in the chapel and bring them out from underneath the altar; we read out the life of one of the martyrs, a different one every year – so it will take us decades to get through them all. And then we sing the Te Deum, the hymn of praise, in front of the altar in the college church. We’re doing exactly what the community did back in the day when they heard the news that one of their members had been martyred.”
Back in the 16th century, when the College received the grim news – about a month after his death – that St Ralph Sherwin had been executed at Tyburn, they rushed into the church and sang the Te Deum in front of the great depiction of the Trinity over the altar – which has become known as “The Martyrs’ Painting” – in thanksgiving for his life and his witness. “It’s incredibly moving that we’re standing in the same place under the same picture, singing the same hymn.”
But there has been one change this year that is significant. For centuries, seminarians signed the oath in the Liber Ruber in private. This year it was signed together, with the new men sharing evening prayer together and listening to a short lecture from Prof Whitehead on the significance of the Missionary Oath.
Fr Wang makes an interesting point of comparison with today’s seminarians and those who travelled from Elizabethan England. Today it is not so much religious persecution that they are having to deal with, but rather the forces of secularisation which are just as present and dangerous as the shadowy agents of William Cecil’s Elizabethan police state.
“Yes, it’s strange that now in our culture, we’re closer to the 16th century than they were 50 or 100 years ago,” says Fr Wang. “Fifty years ago, this seminary was training people to go back to ordinary Catholic parishes and live their whole priesthood within the Catholic community. Now, we’re training missionary priests but their parishes are much smaller, partly because of the culture of the Western world, but also because of what John Paul II, Benedict XVI and Pope Francis have been saying for so long. So they need to be more missionary in purpose because the danger is that as the Catholic parishes become smaller they become more introverted. We need to be more and more open to the world outside us.”
There is no better way of sharing the VEC’s extraordinary history than helping to support its donor campaign to restore and digitise its extraordinary history so students and historians can access what for so long has only been available to those travelling to Rome. In the past, donors like Urs and Francesca Schwarzenbach have generously paid for the refurbishment of the college church, and transforming a 17th-century chamber in the college into a state-of-the-art archives area. Their portrait now hangs in the archives reading room. With a target of £9m, there is plenty more wall space for portraits of similar benefactors who might step forward to support this important cause.
<strong><strong>This article appears in the June issue of the <em>Catholic Herald</em>. To subscribe to our award-winning, thought-provoking magazine and have independent and high-calibre counter-cultural Catholic journalism delivered to your door anywhere in the world click <a href="https://catholicherald.co.uk/subscribe/?swcfpc=1"><mark style="background-color:rgba(0, 0, 0, 0)" class="has-inline-color has-vivid-cyan-blue-color">HERE</mark></a></strong></strong>.
