St Mary’s University, Twickenham has established a Benedict XVI Centre for Religion and Society aiming to bring together research on religion and the social sciences. The university said that the name of the centre had been approved by the Vatican’s Secretariat of State. The Pope Emeritus visited the university in 2010, leading a “Big Assembly” with 3,500 schoolchildren and meeting the leaders of different religions. St Mary’s also has a Benedict XVI House, where a lay community made up of staff and full-time students pursue a life focused on prayer. The new Benedict XVI Centre, according to its website, was “founded upon the conviction that interdisciplinary research, in which the sciences are brought into direct engagement with theology and ethics, is central to the life of a Catholic university (cf Pope St John Paul II, Ex Corde Ecclesiae, 46)”. One of its first projects is to mark the 50th anniversary of Paul VI’s encyclical Humanae Vitae with a book that draws together different scholars. The centre’s director, Dr Stephen Bullivant, who is also a contributing editor of the Catholic Herald, said the centre expressed a “dual conviction”. He said: “First, the importance of religious and theological concerns being brought to bear on social, cultural, economic and political questions. But secondly, the need for theological answers – to be constantly informed by rigorous research in the social sciences. I hope and pray that we live up to the name.” Founded in 1850, St Mary’s was granted the title of university in 2014.