Of all the events to mark the destruction of St Benet’s Hall in Oxford, one might have thought that the optimistically-titled mass in “Thanksgiving for 125 years” on Saturday 24 September might have been at least the most moving. Instead it was thoroughly depressing, even beyond the fact that Benet’s has gone to the wall thanks to Ampleforth Abbey’s sale of its buildings to St Hilda’s College.
If anything was a party, it was a gathering of alumni back in June; the mass of thanksgiving was effectively a funeral. Given Benet’s distinction and standing in the wider Catholic community it seemed sensible to ask the Oxford Oratory to host it; on the day a sparse congregation trickled in and was almost lost in the cavernous, if beautiful, setting. The Chancellor of the University, Lord Patten of Barnes, was there; so was the Archbishop of Birmingham and Sir Ralph Waller, chair of the St Benet’s Hall Trust.
