Berkley Center

It was my first Sunday in Oxford, and I was running late. Lost, I ran into St. John’s Hall and was greeted by a porter. “Where…Blackfriars?” I gasped. He wordlessly pointed across the street to a building much like any other at Oxford, if perhaps older looking. As I crossed the street, I saw that the building was guarded by a rather ominous-looking set of black gates with the word “Blackfriars” uncoiled across the top. I went inside, five minutes after 8:00 a.m. It was a family Mass, and though the friar looked imposing at first in his elaborate white cassock and green vestments, it soon became apparent that it was here, amid crying babies and harassed-looking parents, that he was most comfortable.

Blackfriars Hall, centered on the Priory of the Holy Spirit, is a chapter of some 20 Dominican friars, of the Order of Preachers, who can claim an 800-year old relationship with the Church. The name “Blackfriars” comes from one of those idiosyncrasies that only the oldest establishments inspire. During the Middle Ages, Dominicans wore a black cappa (or cloak) over white habits, a get-up that inspired the name “Black Friars.” Their uncommon history goes far beyond a singular name. Blackfriars is one of the oldest places where English Dominicans gather to prepare for ordination by studying philosophy and theology (at the studium, or study-house, no less) in a tradition that extends—despite interruption—back centuries.

Oddly enough, it was primarily from the southwest, not the southeast, that the monks who built the first British monasteries sailed. Irish monks proselytized in Cornwall, Wales, and Scotland, choosing to build their monasteries on lonely islands just off the Welsh shore. Isolation and withdrawal from the world was privileged highly as they were thought to allow one to grow closer to God without distraction. Such a hermit-like existence was profoundly transformed by the introduction of the Benedictine Rule, modeled on the practices of St. Benedict. Communities that followed the Rule emphasized living and working together in prayer and fraternity. In 597 CE, St. Augustine transported the Rule to the Isle of the Blessed.

Over the next millennium, several orders of monks and nuns—each professing a different Catholic charism—found their way to Britain. Despite their differences in focus and practice, these communities thrived through physical work, scholarship, and above all prayer. Calls to devotion and service segmented each day, which began early in the morning and lasted until after sundown.

British monasteries offered something else besides religious direction. The rich scholarship for which monks became known thrived even during the height of the Dark and Medieval Ages. It was in the monastic scriptorium that the texts of classics of Greece, Rome, and other civilizations were recorded and handed down. Like as not, monasteries served as repositories of knowledge and provided vital services—healing, teaching, preaching—to towns that grew up around them. Monasteries similarly inspired and facilitated the migration of peoples: religious pilgrimages increased interaction with otherwise autarchic communities throughout Europe. Pilgrims arrived at monasteries to honor sacred relics and the tombs of saints. Given his relative importance in the British countryside, it is no wonder that the monastery's abbot wielded as much if not more secular authority, let alone spiritual influence, as local nobles.

One of the oldest surviving monasteries in Britain was established in Blackfriars Hall, Oxford, by the Dominican order. A small band of thirteen friars sent by the general chapter—while St. Dominic himself was still president of the order—arrived in Oxford on August 15, 1221. The choice of Oxford might seem unusual, given the alternatives of Canterbury or London, which were already centers of British religious and political life. However, Oxford was even then the intellectual heart of the isle, and the canny Dominican friars seized their chance to recruit from among the university's students and masters. The opportunities presented by combining an Oxford education with Dominican preaching must have seemed compelling indeed. In 1245, some 90 friars established the Priory of the Holy Spirit.

The fourteenth century witnessed both the height and rapid decline of British monastic life. The Black Death of 1348 CE decimated the number of monks and nuns. Over a century later Henry VIII broke with Rome, and after appointing himself Protector of the Faith of all Britain, he began to appropriate the lands and possessions of the wealthy monastic communities. Henry dissolved all religious houses in 1538, and many friars fled overseas. Those monasteries that remained were regarded throughout the Tudor monarchy as potential hotbeds of papist dissent.

The next few centuries saw a long absence of ‘official’ Dominican residence at Oxford, until at last the priory was re-established in 1921. The first Dominican to study at Oxford since the Reformation, Father Bede Jarrett, re-founded the Dominican community at the same time. Blackfriars Hall continues to provide instruction to both undergraduates and graduates—religious or not—and offers services to even the most wayward and tardy of visitors.