05/04/02
April 05, 2002
Reportage
A seminary on the rack
by Martin Fletcher
A Spanish seminary which has been training English priests for the past 400 years is threatened with closure because of dwindling numbers of recruits
One hundred miles northwest of Madrid, in a city called Valladolid - once the Spanish empire's capital - stands an ancient and extraordinary English institution whose future is as precarious as its past is dramatic. It is the Colegio de Los Ingleses - the English College - founded by Philip II in 1589, one year after the defeat of his mighty Armada, to pursue his war against post-Reformation England by other means. Its purpose was to train Englishmen as Catholic priests, then smuggle them home to preach the faith in a Protestant land where - if caught - they faced torture and execution. No fewer than 23 of its students met their death that way. Most were hanged, drawn and quartered. Six were subsequently made saints. The college continued to train English priests throughout the Inquisition, the fall of the Spanish empire, occupation by Napoleon's troops during the Peninsular War, the Spanish Civil War, the Second World War and General Franco's dictatorship. It has amassed breathtaking treasures, including some of the world's oldest and rarest books. But after 413 years, it faces perhaps the biggest threat to its existence - an almost total dearth of students. Barely a decade ago the college was full to capacity, with 30 or 40 young men training for the priesthood. In 1907 it boasted a soccer team that trounced Madrid Football Club, the Spanish champions and precursors of Real Madrid, 6-2. But today its 12 academic and domestic staff have just two young men training for the priesthood, and four others doing a nine-month preparatory course before returning to England. With one of the two finishing his six-year course this summer, next year could be even bleaker. The college is hidden away behind austere brick walls and barred windows in the busy Calle Don Sancho in the heart of Valladolid, which has become an industrial hub, with the largest Renault factory outside France. It occupies its original 16th-century building, but few voices now echo in the broad, oak-beamed corridors and central quadrangle. The magnificent refectory, where Philip II once dined when he was the world's most powerful man, has been partitioned to hide the empty pews and tables. The 150-seat theatre - a more recent addition - has not been used for five years, and the sports hall is rented out. "It's very sad," says Father Peter Dooling, the affable 60-year-old Yorkshireman who serves as rector. "We couldn't possibly go on with just two students, or even one, which is possible next year . . . we've never been this low, but every seminary will tell you that." Indeed, a commission set up by England's Roman Catholic bishops is to report soon on the future of this and the six other seminaries, serving England and Wales. There is a real possibility that a couple will be closed. Father Peter refuses to believe that the English College could suffer such a fate, given its long and unique history, but he does accept that its role must change. It may, for the first time, have to accept foreign students, or offer post-ordination courses. After four centuries, he candidly admits, "the college is entering a new era, whatever that era is". The English College was founded in an age of intense hostility and suspicion towards Catholics. Henry VIII had broken with Rome half a century earlier, and England saw papal plots around every corner. The Armada apart, Elizabeth I had executed the Duke of Norfolk, England's leading Catholic peer, in 1572. In 1587 she had executed her Catholic rival, Mary, Queen of Scots, for allegedly conspiring against her, and Guy Fawkes's Gunpowder Plot would follow in 1605. But while the practice of Catholicism was banned, the faith was not entirely snuffed out. There were two seminaries for Englishmen in northern France, though the presence of English spies meant that their trainee priests had frequently been identified before they returned home. So, in 1589, six young Englishmen arrived on foot from France at Philip II's court in Vallalodid seeking to be trained for the priesthood. Initially they were treated as spies and thrown into prison. An English Jesuit, Robert Persons, finally persuaded Philip that they were genuine, and the monarch agreed to establish a seminary for the Englishmen financed by alms and run by Spanish Jesuits. All students had to swear to return to England on completion of their training. The newly ordained priests were then smuggled home through Ireland or the Spanish Netherlands. There they travelled the country disguised as servants of sympathetic nobility and hiding in the concealed priest-holes of English manors. The College's Corridor of Martyrs testifies to the bravery of those men, and the peril of their work. Hanging on the whitewashed walls are the portraits of 23 alumni who were executed at places such as Tyburn, Lancaster and Newcastle between 1595 and 1675, and the artists spared few details. The college's first martyr was Henry Walpole, who converted to Catholicism after being splashed with blood while watching another Catholic priest being hanged, drawn and quartered at Tyburn. Walpole went on to become the college's vice-rector. He was seized when he landed in England and tortured 14 times before being hanged at York. Prominent in the background of his portrait are a set of gallows and a man spreadeagled on the rack. In addition to the six martyrs from the college who were later canonised, six were beatified and 11 venerated. Three other former students died in prison and William Weston, a former rector, died in exile after years of imprisonment. One alumnus whose portrait does not hang in the college is Titus Oates, re-putedly a spy sent from England in 1677 to infiltrate the college by posing as a student. He was rumbled and expelled after five months, but is believed to have taken a list of the students with him. The students were more than the clerical equivalent of Special Forces, however. They were also men of learning and letters, as the college's astonishing libraries bear witness. The most impressive is called the Pigskin Library, because every one of the 2,883 ancient books that line its walls is bound in pigskin. Its treasures include a rare copy of The Nuremberg Chronicle, an account of the principal cities of the world that was published in 1493, just 43 years after Gutenberg invented the printing press. The additional 6,765 volumes in the "Biblioteca" upstairs include not only priceless first editions, but also numerous books that were censored, either by the Inquisition itself or by college priests seeking to pre-empt the Inquisition's dreaded henchmen. Open them and you can actually run your fingers across whole passages crossed out in black ink by those religious zealots. John Speed's 1707 Historie of Great Britaine, for example, is only lightly censored until the chapters on Henry VIII, when the Inquisitors went berserk; some pages were so full of heresies that they were cut out altogether. The college used to own a first-edition Shakespeare folio, published in 1618, from which the Inquisition had excised anti-papal references in the historical plays such as King John and Henry VIII. Unfortunately, it sold the book to Washington's Smithsonian Institution in the early 20th century for about £10,000. Today it would be worth tens of millions of pounds. The exquisite college chapel contains, and is dedicated to, another treasure - Our Lady Vulnerata. This is a wooden statue of Mary that British sailors seized from Cadiz cathedral when they sacked the city in 1596. The desecrated statue was retrieved by the Count and Countess of Santa Gadea, and the college's students begged to be given it so that they could make amends for their compatriots' atrocities. Four centuries later, the "Wounded Virgin" still stands above the altar, her nose cut off, her right cheek disfigured by the deep gouge of a sword, her arms mere stumps and, on her lap, the feet of the infant Jesus broken off at the ankles. The college's students and staff still perform an "act of reparation" before the statue every Wednesday evening. The college's key role in keeping Catholicism alive during its darkest days in England does not guarantee its continued existence, of course. Father Peter acknowledges the intense pressure on England's bishops to send their increasingly rare recruits to struggling seminaries much closer to home. "There's hardly a bishop in England and Wales who would not support this college, but the answer they give us is that they have no one to send us, and I believe them," he says. When Father Peter lobbies the bishops on visits to England each year he argues that sending trainee priests to Valladolid broadens their horizons and makes them realise that they are part of a worldwide Church. He argues that the college has unsurpassed facilities, including a country retreat. "There are not many seminaries with a swimming pool and sauna," he laughs. But he also argues - perhaps most tellingly - that the college's overwhelming sense of history, and the martyrs' inescapable presence, give young men entering the priesthood the sort of inspiration that they will desperately need in modern England. "You are on holy ground here," he says. "Great and good men have walked these corridors. By studying, here they built up the moral fibre to go back to England and face almost certain death. "The students today are doing much the same thing, in the sense that they are preparing to take a very unpalatable message back to a largely unlistening society. These lads won't suffer martydom, but they will suffer rejection. They are going to suffer for what they believe in an unbelieving world.