Educating in Faith: A History of the English Catholic Public School
Mark Cleary
Sacristy Press, 256 pages, £19.99
The cover of Mark Cleary’s Educating in Faith is something of a parable: “a projected but unrealised plan” for Downside Abbey, near Bath, with monastery and school either side of a fine church – two lungs, if you like, of the same monastic body. A differently splendid version of Downside was built, but that did not meet expectations either. The same could be said of Ampleforth and Ealing, to name a couple of other schools which later became notorious bywords for the appalling abuse of children.
