FACILITIES & ACTIVITES
The Chapel
Our chapel reflects the passion of its architect, Augustus Welby Pugin, for pre-Reformation Christian art and architecture and his determination to restore its splendour in his own age. The chapel is also central to the story of the return of Catholicism to these lands.
By the time of his death in 1852, Pugin had inspired generations to create religious and secular buildings that echoed the styles typical of the Middle Ages, which touched the human imagination and frequently inspired Christian faith.
Victorian industry in the Midlands created skills in the manufacture of metal, glass, tiles, bricks, textiles and wood, which enabled Pugin’s vision to become reality.
Pugin learnt his skills and developed his ideas by imitating medieval architecture and collecting examples of medieval art to incorporate into his own creations. Some of his combination of ancient and modern can be seen in the Oscott chapel.
Our chapel is not a museum but the beating heart of college life! It plays a key role in helping men to understand their calling to the priesthood and diaconate and in their spiritual formation.
As well as being the focus for the structured times of prayer and worship in the college timetable, this chapel is a place of private prayer and reflection, as college residents and visitors seek to hear and follow their own call to serve God.
Since its consecration on 29th May 1838, the chapel has witnessed historic events in the life of the Church. These include the first synod of the restored hierarchy in 1852, at which St John Henry Newman preached the famous ‘Second Spring’ sermon, and the visit of Pope Benedict XVI in 2010.
This image of ‘Our Lady of Oscott’, designed by Pugin, was later incorporated in various forms into the college crest. Within the central window, on either side of Our Lady of Oscott, stand four saints, all uniquely relevant to the life and purpose of Oscott.
On the left, St Catherine of Alexandria holds a book and a sword, signifying her role as patron saint of philosophers and her martyrdom, respectively. Next to her is St Gregory the Great, who is particularly associated with England as the pope who sent St Augustine of Canterbury and his missionary monks to England.
On the right-hand side stands St Cecilia, the patron saint of musicians, and St Thomas Becket, the patron of the parish clergy. The two scrolls carry the words (in Latin) ‘pray for the people’ and ‘intercede for priests’, commending both priests and people to the care of Our Lady of Oscott.
The altarpiece, or reredos, demonstrates Pugin’s talent for combining the medieval and the modern, and reflects the ideas and images he collected from English and European pre-Reformation churches.
The carved pelican feeding her young with blood from her pierced breast was a universally familiar medieval image of Christ’s sacrifice of his own blood. Despite the Reformation destruction of such images, Shakespeare referred to it in the first decade of the seventeenth century in King Lear, confident that it would still be understood.
Within the reredos, Pugin inserted medieval painted carved wooden panels, salvaged from a European church, almost certainly dedicated to St Hubert, in the area now known as Belgium, portraying the Annunciation, the Nativity, the Visit of the Magi, and the Miracle of St Hubert.
Pugin built the pulpit into a corner of the chapel, accessed by a hidden staircase. The Cross is at the centre of the design, as it is at the centre of our Christian faith and life, and is adorned with the words, ‘Hail, O Cross, our only hope’.
The angel supporting the pulpit from beneath quotes the words of St Luke (11:28), appropriate to both the preacher and the listener, ‘Blessed are those who hear the Word of God and keep it’. The words inscribed around the base of the pulpit are an apt motto for any preacher: ‘Teach me kindness, discipline and knowledge’.
Many influential preachers have spoken from this pulpit, but only one is recognised by the Church as a saint: St John Henry Newman. On 13th July 1852, he preached from this pulpit to the first synod of the restored hierarchy of the bishops of England and Wales. This was his most famous sermon ‘The Second Spring’, in which he spoke of the renewal of Catholicism in England after the long years of persecution. ‘The Church in England has died, and the Church lives again’.
Images of the Virgin Mary and the child Jesus naturally abound throughout St Mary’s College, but among the most ancient, and the most evocative, is the medieval wooden statue above the door into the main part of the college.
This image, known as ‘Maria Lactans’, was a very popular image in religious art in the Middle Ages, showing Mary breastfeeding her Son. This tender, motherly image of Mary expresses her motherhood of Christ and the Church, and reminds us of her Son’s humanity. It originates in the exclamation in Luke’s gospel (Luke 11:27), ‘Blessed is the womb that bore you, and the breasts that you sucked’.
Like all wooden carvings of this period it would have been richly painted, but was long ago stripped of its colour. The extraordinary skills involved in creating wooden statues of this quality lay in the workshops of medieval Europe. Known artists can rarely be identified but it was their skills that Pugin sought to revive.
The only addition to the chapel, as it was built in 1838, is the adjoining Weedall chantry. Henry Weedall, in whose memory the existing chantry was built, was the only president of Oscott to serve two terms of office and was revered as a father figure by generations of Oscotians. His death prompted the building of the present chantry, which is dominated by the alabaster statue of the Virgin and Child, under the title of 'Sedes Sapientiae' (Seat of Wisdom).
This statue, acquired in 1862, has been a focus for Marian devotion in the college ever since, although often known, less reverently, as ‘Queen Victoria’. According to legend, it was either mistaken for a sombre statue of the recently-widowed queen when first exhibited, or was later altered from a royal statue.
The stone plinth on which it sits relates the Virgin Mary to the roots of Christianity in the Jewish tradition, portraying the women of the Hebrew Scriptures (the Old Testament) who prefigured Mary in the Christian history of human salvation.
This modest side chapel was Pugin’s last design for Oscott and the altar was his personal gift, dedicated in April 1842. The decorative motifs of red on white crosses and shamrocks represent the two countries of England and Ireland, in an unusual joint dedication.
Ever since, this altar has been a reminder of the closeness of England and Ireland, and the dependence of Catholicism in England on the unique combination of the steadfastness of the English recusants and the determined struggle of Irish Catholics who, in their different situations, refused to be bowed by persecution and political violence.
Religious freedom for Catholics in Britain and Ireland was bought at a high cost in human suffering and resilience, gratitude for which calls to mind the suffering of people throughout the world, persecuted for their religious faith. The large crucifix and figures above the altar were part of a rood screen built for the main chapel in the 1850s, but which only survived for a few years before its removal. No drawings survive.
Stained glass had largely disappeared from English churches as a result of the Reformation, but Pugin and his collaborators in Birmingham, the ‘city of a thousand trades’, recovered the skills and tools in the nineteenth century. His closest partner was John Hardman who, with his heirs, became a world-famous manufacturer of stained glass, and of gold and silver goods for use in churches.
Visitors to the Oscott chapel are often puzzled to see a window containing images of ‘redcoats’ – Victorian British soldiers. The window commemorates a young priest educated at Oscott, John Wheble, who went to Crimea during the war there as a volunteer chaplain. In 1852, he attended the first Synod of Westminster, as Cardinal Wiseman’s secretary. Before the second synod, in 1855, he had died in Crimea.
A few weeks after news of John Wheble’s death arrived, John Hardman quickly produced the design for a window, and it was unveiled at the second synod of Westminster. John Wheble, in Wiseman’s words, courageously gave up the normal life of a priest in England, and ‘preferred to follow the iron march of armies into battle … In place of the sacred chants … he chose to listen to the rude and rough music of war, while he calmly administered the holy rites of religion to the wounded and dying.’
When the chapel was completed, the furnishings were sparse and remained so for generations. The original choir stalls, acquired by Pugin, have dividing uprights carved with tiny human faces, each one unique and with a variety of expressions. They are thought to be French, dating from the 17th century.
The 17th century carved altar rail was originally placed on the white stone step, to divide the stalls used by the clerical students from the schoolboys’ benches, but was sold in the early 1850s. In the 1870s, James, the brother of John Wheble, rescued it and returned it to Oscott and its present position.
By the 20th century, after the closure of the school, the chapel seating was inadequate for the number of seminarians. New stalls were built and decorated by a team of Tyrolese craftsmen brought over to Oscott, who stayed for five months to complete the work, including the decorative finials which display the arms of bishops associated with Oscott.
A student’s spiritual formation is a combination of many different things, from personal prayer to spiritual reading and from learning about the Church’s different spiritual traditions to accompaniment from a spiritual director.
Established in 1839 by renowned, Gothic-revivalist architect Augustus Welby Pugin, our museum collection tells the story of the college and the Victorian Catholic revival.
Want to experience some history? Our tours have been running for over a decade, removing the mystery of the college and giving the general public a sense of what we do here.