We wish to thank Mr Ferdi McDermott, the headmaster of Chavagnes International College, for sharing with us this essay on the place of the liturgy and the Extraordinary Form in a Catholic education. Mr McDermott is a graduate of the universities of Edinburgh and Buckingham, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, the Chartered College of Teaching, and the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland. When not busy teaching and administering Chavagnes, he is currently completing a doctorate in Education at the University of Buckingham.
At Chavagnes International College, our English Catholic boarding school for boys, situated in the west of France, near Nantes, Mass is celebrated daily in the main College Chapel, Monday to Friday according to the 1962 missal, for all boys and Masters. On Sundays, Mass and Vespers in the Extraordinary form attract parents of pupils and a growing local following of friends and supporters. In addition, there are confessions, adoration, Benediction and other devotions held regularly in our chapel. The strains of Gregorian chant can be heard every day. Why, might you ask, do we place the Church’s liturgy at the heart of our life as a school? Perhaps I may answer this by an attempt at telling the story of Catholic education from an English standpoint, and with a very long view.
 |
Solemn Mass in the chapel at Chavagnes
|
At Chavagnes, we take as our blueprint the checklist for Catholic schools from Vatican II’s
Gravissimum Educationis: a broad education not just confined to religious teaching, a deep education which creates a habit of intellectual discipline, a moral formation and, lastly, a formation in prayer, especially in the context of the Sacred Liturgy. That document is nearly sixty years old now. But its philosophy is much older, as I will try to show.
When, about twenty years ago, I was setting up Chavagnes International College, I studied the handbooks of several leading English public schools for inspiration. Browsing through the correct and crisp prose on the arcana of uniform, haircuts and sports gear, I noticed a common feature of several leading boarding schools that surprised me. Boys were not only expected to attend daily chapel services, but especially obliged to be present in chapel on a Sunday, to keep the Sabbath day holy. In cases where parents took their sons home for the weekend, they were asked to provide the name and telephone number of the incumbent of the parish their son would be attending, to enable the school authorities to check that he had been to church. I even heard anecdotes of rich step-fathers waiting outside English country churches in their comfortable convertibles while their sleepy stepsons who had been hauled out of bed after a night of partying, dozed through Prayer Book Mattins and a dreary sermon in a discreet pew near the back door.
Nowadays such happenings are rare. Priorities have sadly changed. And with covid and its lockdown, many things will never be the same again. But within living memory, our nation’s leading places of education recognised strongly the centrality of worship to education. Moreover, the only mandatory elements of State education until the 1980s were Christian Religious Instruction and a daily act of worship. No other country in Europe had a similar law. The roots of this tradition are very deep. In England today we still have hundreds of schools founded during the first millennium of English pre-Reformation Christianity. That is unique. And despite the trauma of the Reformation, many had, until perhaps the last decade, held on to the idea that the best education is one which has the worship of God at its heart. As I approach 50 next year, I remember with fondness the country primary school where we read the Bible, prayed several times a day and sang traditional hymns. It all seemed completely normal then.
Later on, at senior school, there were perhaps fewer prayers, but there was much more study of Scripture, and as a chorister I got to sing plenty of Palestrina, Bach and Mozart. I was a Catholic boy in an Anglican school. But I could tell it was a good one. And a positive experience of both primary and secondary school got me interested in education at an early age.
Let me tell you about the first ever Catholic boarding school for boys … in the late 2nd century, in the shadow of the great library of Alexandria, where, three centuries before, the chief librarian Eratosthenes had first calculated the circumference of the globe, St Clement of Alexandria ran a school for boys where the mathematics of Pythagoras, the oratory of Cicero and the epic poetry of Homer were taught alongside not only Sacred Scripture and Christian doctrine, but also Greek athletics and dance. And every day, the pupils would recite the psalms and attend the liturgy. In fact they spent an incredible amount of time singing, and here is a hymn that Clement composed for them to sing, probably outside of the liturgy, and perhaps as they danced! I give it in an English translation which, although it omits many of the beautiful metaphors (the boys are untamed foals; Christ is the bit in their mouths; they later go out with him to haul in the fishes, etc) it is at least rhyming, metrical and easy to sing (to the melody of “Thou whose almighty Word” Translation by H. M. Dexter, 1909-14, in Hymns of the Christian Church, The Harvard Classics.).
SHEPHERD of tender youth
Guiding in love and truth
Through devious ways;
Christ our triumphant king,
We come Thy name to sing;
Hither our children bring
Tributes of praise.
So now, and till we die,
Sound we Thy praises high,
And joyful sing.
Let all the holy throng
Who to Thy Church belong,
Unite and swell the song
To Christ our King!
We need to move on three hundred years to the Rule of St Benedict in the sixth century to understand how this great tradition came to spread throughout Europe and strike very deep roots in distant England. In his Rule, Benedict calls the monks to practise each day a specific kind of prayer called ‘meditation’ in which the Christian repeats in a low voice the words of a sacred text, over and over, to draw out the meaning. But he can only do that if he can read the words. So Benedict orders that during 'meditation time' the boys, together with any men under 50 who cannot yet read, must be taught their letters. And then in addition the whole psalter should be recited each week, as well as the celebration of Masses. But monasteries, even before St Benedict, were not only places of prayer; they were also the repositories of secular knowledge going back to the Greeks. And schools qua schools, such as there were, were always very much communities of prayer.
These were the places that kept the light of civilisation burning while everything seemed to be collapsing in Europe. And it was the new rule of St Benedict which gave a new impetus to monasticism and to education, thus coming to the rescue of cultural continuity and also of the spreading of the Gospel . But this important role which the Rule of St Benedict played in the promotion of Christian education and culture is really all down to one man, St Gregory the Great.
In the 6th century, Gregory was a rich young man who had set up a community following St Benedict's Rule in his family villa. When he became Pope, he famously sent Augustine all the way to Canterbury with a group of Anglo-Saxon boys discovered in the slave market of Rome. He had seen these fair-haired youths and wondered at their strange appearance. When he enquired as to their identity he was told ‘Angli sunt’, meaning “they are Angles”. ‘Non angli sed angeli’ … “Not Angles, but angels … if only they were Christians” he is said to have answered.
And so the boys were bought out of slavery, then no doubt offered a few hot dinners and fresh clothes, before accepting baptism and the monastic tonsure. Thus was English Catholicism born. They accompanied Augustine across the channel as his translators. And out of this community grew the first English Catholic boarding school, with the worship of God at its heart. First there was Canterbury, then Rochester. Other monastic schools began to spring up everywhere in England, under the influence of St Gregory’s Regula Pastoralis. Several of them still exist today, 1,400 years later. It ought to be mentioned that in the Celtic fringes of the north and west, and in Ireland, the Catholic faith had been present since Roman times. In Ireland, monastic schools, and even whole monastic villages, had existed since the 5th century.
We know all about the adventures of St Augustine of Canterbury from the writings of St Bede, who himself benefited from a 7th century monastic education in the monastery of Jarrow, near Durham, in the north of England. Bede wrote mighty pedagogical treatises too, proof that only a generation or two after the mission to the Anglo-Saxons, the school system was well and truly up and running all over England.
In the 9th century, King Alfred the Great, who himself translated Pope Gregory’s Regula into Anglo-Saxon, trenewed the call across the land, during a substantial 15-year period of truce with the Danes: "education for all." And that meant girls as well as boys. The main thing was to learn to read, so that the knowledge of books and the words of prayer could enter the soul through the window of the eye. And not just Latin, but also Old English. Thus, when the Normans conquered England two centuries later in 1066, they subdued a pragmatic, more egalitarian and more learned race which already had a flourishing written literature in their native tongue, while written French was only in its infancy.
And so in what we came to call the Dark Ages, with the Roman Empire in collapse and the threat of the Norsemen ever present, the English (with the Welsh, the Irish and the Scots) busied themselves with the creation of centres of prayer, culture and learning. In a climate of uncertainty, but in a spirit of faith, the whole of England had taken, as it were, “the Benedict Option.” The teaching of Greek suffered a decline, but the Latin flourished and many Greek stories were retold in Latin, while the mathematical writings of Euclid, translated into Latin, were widely studied. There was no imperial system to keep all this going, but the Church made a surprisingly good job of it, especially in England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland, despite their considerable distance from Rome. Continental Europe was in turmoil, but in faraway Britain even the girls went to school, while in Ireland, the penitential monks were busy reciting all 150 psalms, not weekly, but daily. They were praying like mad … for Europe. While Alfred started his chain of Saxon schools, Charlemagne did the same in France. But he needed an Irishman (St Clement of Ireland) to run his cathedral school for boys in Paris, while an Englishman (Alcuin of York) ran the Palace School in Aachen (Aix la Chapelle).
When at the end of the 13th century, Innocent III asked every religious house in Christendom to open a school, England already had a massive head start. By the time of the Reformation there were Catholic schools in every English town: monastic schools, chantry schools, colleges, grammar schools, all founded with the gifts of the faithful and built on daily prayer and worship. Hundreds of them still exist, although they have sadly departed from the faith that prompted their creation.
.jpg)
