The Chadsian: Easter 2016

The Chadsian Easter Term 2016

St Chad’s College Magazine

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Introduction J

oe was our Principal for eighteen years. During that time he firmly established the reputation of St Chad’s as one of the leading University Colleges in Durham.

He developed a culture of learning, promoted financial competence and was able to substantially transform the College accommodation by investment in the buildings and physical fabric.

He assembled a great team of College Officers, who have been able to continue his legacy across all aspects of College life. Joe was a man of many talents, from deep spiritual beliefs to project managing the upgrade of College buildings. The ‘Cassidy Quad’ and the en-suite bedrooms across the College are some of the legacy.

He retained an independent spirit, vigilant in protecting St Chad’s many assets. He was acutely aware of the College’s origins in Doncaster and our history as an Anglican foundation. He also saw that the College reached out across the world, to communities in South Africa and alumni in New York. He was very much a modern thinker, aware of many of the moral and ethical issues which he did much to address in College outreach activities.

The North East of England fascinated him. He actively promoted the College as a centre for regional studies and debate. Many round-table debates have been held in St Chad’s as a result of his encouragement and support. He also supported the arts and culture and attracted many scholars and practitioners to join him at College formal dinners. Joe had a presence, a charisma, captured well in his portrait which hangs in the Moulsdale Hall and the Cassidy Quad. His legacy to the College is immense. With the appointment of Dr Margaret Masson as our new Principal, the College is in good hands.

St Chad’s College Durham University 18 North Bailey Durham. DH1 3RH +44 (0)191 334 3358 www.stchads.ac.uk chads@durham.ac.uk

Contents The Magazine of St Chad’s College, Durham University The Chadsian

2 Chair

of the Governing Body

Easter Term 2016

4 Rector 6 Fellow 8 Alumni 10 Colleague 12 Senior

Common Room

13 Middle

Common Room

14 Junior

Common Room 15 Principal 16 Family

18 In

his own words

The Revd Canon Dr Joe Cassidy

22 Scholarships

& Bursaries Endowment Fund

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Rector An address delivered by the Rector of St Chad’s College, our ‘Titular Head’, at Joe’s memorial service in Durham Cathedral during the 2015 Alumni Weekend. Michael Sadgrove retired as Dean of Durham in 2015.

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am honoured to give this sermon in memory of Joe Cassidy. I was among the many, the very many, who loved him. I still can’t take it in that he has gone from us, taken, I want to say, cruelly out of time when he had so much life to live, so much wisdom to impart, so many gifts to offer with which our lives would have been lit up in years to come. His family, Gillian, Emmeline, Marianne and Benedict whom he loved with a fierce and wonderful devotion, are in all our thoughts and prayers.

When I came to Durham twelve years ago, Joe was one of the first to welcome me. The Cathedral is St Chad’s nearest neighbour on The Bailey. He invited me to be its Visitor, and then its first Rector. He believed that a lively partnership between these two great Durham institutions could only be good for both. I have loved my roles in the College, thanks not only to its warm, generous hospitality but also to Joe’s personal kindness and gift for friendship.

Joe had been a distinguished Catholic philosophical theologian and ethicist whose fine mind was already recognised in awards and prizes gained in undergraduate and postgraduate days. His specialism was the thought of the 20th Century Jesuit theologian and fellow Canadian Bernard Lonergan. He joined the Society of Jesus and was deeply shaped by the clarity and focus of the Jesuit way. He became a gifted and much valued retreat conductor and spiritual director. Accompanying others on their spiritual journeys was close to his heart all his life.

It’s not unknown for Jesuit priests to become Anglican. A catholic Benedictine who makes the same journey finds, I think, a natural home in Durham Cathedral so influenced by the Benedictine ideal and, of

course, with its own Benedictine communities. There are no Jesuit communities in the Church of England, probably because the Order was explicitly founded as a Counter-Reformation organisation. Many Anglicans today practise the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius guided by directors trained in the Jesuit tradition. Joe and I often talked about these things at College high table. I mention this because Joe brought spiritual insights into Anglicanism that as a temperamental Benedictine myself, I found stimulating and refreshing. In some ways he never stopped being a Jesuit in his energetic outwardfacing openness to the world, his attention to the interior life, his mentoring and spiritual guidance, and the spiritual, social and intellectual vision he brought to St Chad’s.

As an Anglican, Joe contributed significantly to the councils of the Church of England, including the General Synod where he and I would sit in the back row and commiserate about the Byzantine processes of ecclesiastical decision-making.

He championed theological education and formation in the national church where he looked for seriousness, rigour, Christian wisdom and well-earthed familiarity with ordinary human life. I wonder if his own intellectual acuity as a theologian has been sufficiently realised. In 1997 he came to Durham as Principal of St Chad’s. If he thought that being head of house in a Durham college would allow lots of time for leisured literary and scholarly output, reality quickly set in. Running a college nowadays is an allconsuming enterprise.

It is to Joe’s enormous credit that he succeeded in stabilising St Chad's which was then going through demanding times. His prodigious energy always in the fast lane, his practicality, his capacity to solve problems, his sheer appetite for hard work were all important aspects of his leadership.

It was a joy to watch the College flourish. It’s true that the fortunes of any institution are not simply down to the person who leads it. You can’t be a leader in the church or higher education unless you understand that every institution these days is an organisation of consent. Collaboration and teamwork are fundamental; old-fashioned command-control techniques won’t work and aren’t respected any more. Joe would be the first to ascribe St Chad’s successes to the teams he led and was justly proud of. But leaders identify directions, inculcate values, set the tone, are influential in aligning and

shaping their communities. Joe never wavered in his energetic pursuit of these goals. For him they were an act not just of duty but of love.

If you ask Chad’s students and alumni what they will remember ‘Papa Joe’ for, they will tell you about his wisdom, his warmth, his quick-witted love of repartee and his intellectual liveliness. He thought and spoke fast: you had to keep up. You will also hear about his belief that a higher education institution like a Durham college should – indeed, must – be a living community of human beings in which people care about one another and about the world they are part of so that everyone can flourish. This was the kind of college he set out to shape at St Chad’s: a humane society in which wisdom, truth and social justice are cherished. In this, he was brilliantly successful.

I last sat with Joe at the Chad’s Domus Dinner in March 2015. For some strange yet providential reason that only made sense after Joe had died, a number of us there, students, staff, alumni, wanted to pay special tribute to Joe’s leadership. Some of us decided we would get up and say something that evening. I’m so glad that just before he died Joe was able to hear these tributes expressed publicly on that lovely occasion and that he could know how much he was honoured and loved. In his modesty, he did not want to make too much of it. Selfdeprecation was more his style, arising out of his genuine humility, always a beautiful quality but especially so in those who lead.

When Chad’s was in the Cathedral for the College Day service in March, at the end, Joe suddenly produced

from nowhere a green College hood and invested me with it, saying that the Council had resolved to make me a life-fellow as a sign of the importance it attached to its relationship with the Cathedral. ‘Now this relationship is for life’ he said and gave me a fond embrace. Looking back, how moving that was for me personally, and how poignant.

‘Si monumentum requiris, circumspice’. ‘If you want a monument, look around you.’ So runs Christopher Wren’s famous memorial in St Paul’s Cathedral. What will Joe’s monument be? Talk to Chadsians across the world; or look into the life of this remarkable community for yourself. It’s written on the hearts and lives of the men and women he served so devotedly – and loved.

And I believe this is because of what he fundamentally believed about God and about humanity. His beloved Bernard Lonergan wrote about what it means to be created in the image of God. Such a person practises ‘total surrender to the demands of the human spirit’ – others’ and his own. ‘Be attentive’ he said, ‘be intelligent, be reasonable, be responsible, be in love.’

And always cherish and honour the mystery at the core of human life for, as Blaise Pascal said, the great thinker to whom Lonergan owed so much, ‘the heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing.’ This was Joe. ‘Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God; everyone who loves is born of God and knows God.’ St John’s grasp of the central insight about human life, how everything is transformed by our capacity to be loved and to love lies, I think, close to the centre of Joe’s view of things. It inspired him to be as he was. It inspired us who saw it in him. You knew that his God was as St John says he is: ‘God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them.’ This was his way, his truth, his life.

Thank you Joe for everything you gave us. May you rest in peace, and rise in glory.

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Fellow The sermon given at Joe Cassidy’s requiem mass in Durham Cathedral on Friday 17th April 2015. David Stancliffe is a former Bishop of Salisbury and a College Tutor and Fellow.

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oe was passionate about Bach’s Trio Sonatas for organ, and his favourite was the 5th in C major. The three equal voices played by the right hand, the left hand and both feet on three different divisions of the organ and always moving independently of each other intrigued him; such independence, such inventiveness and such harmony. Mutual interdependence of this kind is difficult to achieve in performance: we tend to think of one line being a solo part, with the others providing an accompaniment. That’s certainly why singers – encouraged to think of themselves as soloists – feel a trifle unsettled when they discover that the aria in the Bach cantata they are singing is in fact a trio with an obbligato instrument, the voice and bass line, and they are only one of three equally important lines. So trio sonatas are good practice for people who like to play first fiddle, who think that leadership is about knowing all the answers yourself, and telling others just what to do. Trio sonatas teach you that you are not the only pebble on the beach, and that the most important thing in life is to learn respect for the other, to listen before you pronounce. This is ultimately the way of love in the Christian tradition, where the life of the divine Trinity – the interpenetration of Father, Son and Holy Spirit – is described as perichoresis, the eternal dance of the persons of the Godhead; and I offer you the movement of Bach’s Trio Sonata in C as a worked example of what I want to say to you When I first met Joe Cassidy, he was introduced to me as a renowned homilist and teacher of ethics in La Sainte Union in Southampton University. His brilliant mind and gift for teaching had been nurtured by his formation as a Jesuit, and that persona had been tested in the fires of reality by periods in Jamaica and Nicaragua.

He was not just passionate for social justice but had a deep-seated belief in the potential of the human

community. These were not just outworkings of an abstract theological position but a faith being lived.

What had changed the course of his life as he described it to me was the experience of his father’s death – or more precisely of witnessing in the final hours of his father’s life the quality of the love shown between his mother and her husband. The channelling of Joe’s emotional energy into the love of God and of the human race no longer seemed enough: he had glimpsed a third strand that he knew he could not be without. So when he came to England and met Gillian, he had already moved away from his life as a Jesuit. But he had come to see me because he had discovered that as well as a vocation to teaching and to marriage and parenthood he had an enduring vocation to the priesthood. With his background and experience, could he be considered for priesthood in the Church of England? So within a couple of months the Diocese of Salisbury was being enriched by Joe’s creative and generous humanity and shrewd theological acumen.

This third strand unlocked what was to be the hugely creative and fruitful period of his life that most us here in Durham knew. A college in dire straits financially and demoralized by near collapse was transformed by his energy and entrepreneurial vision. First, there was the College’s spirit to attend to. For communities to thrive, people have to know that they matter, that they are listened to and that their contribution is vital and valued.

The leader of a community needs to believe that the members of that community have something to teach him or her, and that they are capable of reaching beyond where they can get on their own; and while the leader’s contribution is to keep the vision bright and expectations high, it all depends on the members of that community.

That is why Chad’s has become the community it is, and why Papa Joe’s place in its life has been and will continue to be so significant. But that was not all: within a year or so, the College was not only solvent, but attracting funding for a wide range of intellectually demanding pursuits. The common rooms began to buzz with the kind of cross-fertilisation that breeds creative imagination, and the College’s guests and links began bringing a range and depth of experience to its life.

But for Joe, there was never a moment’s pause. In the Christian life, it is neither the past nor the present that has the final word, but the future. Yes, the past is important: in this eucharist, we are recalling that last supper, that cross and passion and that resurrection; for the disillusioned disciples who walked wearily to Emmaus and took their fellow-traveller in for supper, the penny finally dropped the moment when he broke the bread. Yes, the present is important: in the eucharist we

are bound together in one body by the fact of sharing the one bread and one cup; by the fact that in the one body we are united with Christ in the love of God, from whom neither life nor death nor anything else in all creation can separate us. But it is the future that shapes what we are becoming: this eucharist is but a foretaste of the heavenly banquet, to which we believe we are all summoned.

Joe’s death feels like a terrible and absolute separation. For members of Chad’s who said a cheerful goodbye to Papa Joe at the end of Epiphany Term, as well as his own dear family, his sudden absence is hard to accept, let alone bear.

But Joe’s life was lived neither in the past, nor in the present, but in the future: what has God in store for us?

With whom is our life being shaped? What are we becoming? These are the questions that any catholic priest, who takes his continuing formation seriously, wrestles with day by day; and the restless and enquiring Joe constantly surprised his colleagues by having more thoughts before breakfast about what the future held in store than they had had hot dinners. ‘In my Father’s house are many resting places,’ says John’s Gospel, and the word the writer uses means lodging houses or

caravanserai – temporary stopping places on the way, with enough room for everyone. That is the kind of hospitality that Jesus holds out to his very different followers, and for Joe the ultimate community – of which he was trying to make St Chad’s a foretaste so that people could experience a kind of trial run – was just that: a hospitable space where people could be completely themselves, and yet where that generous acceptance of infinite diversity could marry a strength there with a need here; a gift here and an opportunity there. That is the context in which people – young and old – could be free while being supported to become what they perhaps never knew they had it in them to be. And if it was a profoundly generous vision for St Chad’s, grown out of his experience of life in a close family, it was also a vision for the University, for the Church and for the whole human community.

That is why Joe had little time for those who wished to turn the University into a factory of achievement and its colleges into mere halls of residence; this is why he couldn’t stomach unthinking fundamentalism on the one hand or wet liberalism on the other in a church he hoped might one day have the courage to be truly radical, genuinely inclusive and so profoundly catholic; this is why he wanted students and members of the wider intellectual community to be engaged in living the life of community and not just taking refuge in thinking about it.

The eucharist has a continuing significance for him and for us. We do remember the past and to grieve for ourselves, though that is deeply important. Our eucharistic celebration is not some memorial meal to remember Joe and take us back to some longed-for past.

Rather the eucharist is a celebration of the constancy of God’s love, into whose hands we commend our brother Joe; and a celebration of the continuity of our life together in Christ which our baptism into his death began.

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Alumni A homily preached in St Chad’s College Chapel at a Roman Catholic Requiem Mass for Joe Cassidy during the September 2015 Alumni Weekend. Fr Mark Woodruff is a priest in the Diocese of Westminster.

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he words of this evening’s liturgy and its prayers are substantially unaltered from the text that St Chad himself knew in Latin, doubtless by heart, when he said Mass for the departed as abbot of Lastingham, then as bishop at York for the Northumbrians and later at Lichfield for the Mercians.

The hallowed use of centuries, therefore, stands behind us as we voice them once more for the repose of Joe’s soul; for the mercy of our God who created him out of love and longed for His creature’s perfection and completion in the Kingdom of heaven; and as we offer the very action of God Himself in sacrifice so that the world might be saved - saved from sin and set free from all that holds us back from the Kingdom and keeps us short of the glory of God; and saved for the new creation we are intended to be when in the last day we will find how we never die because in Christ who was crucified there is none other than resurrection and life without limit.

Not only St Chad but Joe Cassidy treasured these words, and the offering of this sacrifice, from deep within his being from the moment of his ordination as a priest in God’s one, holy, Catholic Church. We know his journey from Catholic to Anglican; from Jesuit to husband and father. We know too that his spiritual formation remained integral to his personality and ministry; and his priestly vocation was of the essence of him. Where I stand now in this sanctuary, he stood once too. And I remember vividly and with some awe, the holy men who stood here before him: John Fenton, a great seer of the Lord in the Scriptures and wise in prayer; and Michael Ramsey, archbishop of Canterbury and an apostle of God’s glory.

Tonight it is the turn of Catholic Chadsians – with thanks to the gracious invitation of Dr Ashley Wilson the Chaplain of our College - to add our most sacred act to all the other prayers that have gone before. We do so in

the same spirit of unity in grief, affection, missing what has been lost, desiring to do something generous that will aid Joe and this College to which he dedicated his life, and so in a spirit of close meeting and solidarity.

With these ancient words and conventions, it is the most loving thing to do, to pray for the forgiveness of Joe’s sins, not because we fear for him or accuse him but because we are assured that the Lord, seeing our condition, has nothing but unconditional mercy. It is the most loving thing we can do to plead for the repose of his soul, because we are believers in God’s inexhaustible promise of Paradise. It is the most loving thing we can do to ask for his admission to the glory and joy of heaven, because we and Joe had long been united in confidence that we shared it, by this very foretaste of it in this world.

Much has been said of Joe’s capacity for love and inspiration, as well as his passion for justice and righting what was wrong. I speak for not a few alumni, who had mourned our belonging to St Chad’s through too many difficult episodes in its history or ours, leading to what looked at one point like its almost inevitable demise. We had become strangers in our own land. Joe reached out to us and restored what was lost. He enabled us to take pride once more in our place in St Chad’s life and history.

He did not approach us merely because as alumni we could be useful; he just wanted us to be part of everything. “Not the things that are yours, but you yourselves” (2 Corinthians 12.14) - Non vestra sed vos, indeed.

And now it is our turn to reach out with the same love and zeal for him to be brought in, from the night of repose to the glory of living eternally in the midst of God’s light and truth. A contemporary of mine at St Chad’s reminded me this afternoon that in one of John Fenton’s great sermons he had said: “People tend to think of heaven as all clouds. Another image of heaven in the Bible is a feast. I know which I would prefer it to be.”

When Joe came to St Chad’s it was under very heavy clouds. By the grace of God, he made it into a banquet of life, belonging, love, learning and joy. We pray that out of the clouds of passing out of this world into the Kingdom of Heaven, like his Ascended Lord before him, aided by our prayers and the power of this sacrifice, Joe will enter upon the eternal feasting of life and love and joy.

Dr John Hall, the Dean of Westminster, welcomed the College to St Margaret’s, Westminster Abbey in December 2015 for an Advent Carol Service & Commemoration of Joe Cassidy’s life. He preached this sermon.

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y first year at St Chad’s. 1968.

Advent Sunday. The Principal, Fr Fenton, was preaching at the High Mass – compulsory attendance in cassock and surplice at 9 am. The theme of the sermon was what religious professionals call ‘realised eschatology’.

The Kingdom of God is not to be thought of as a future reality, a moment of fruition, the eschaton, the last thing, when the Son of Man will return in power and great glory to judge both the living and the dead, the last judgement. Rather, the Kingdom of God is here already, is among you. Search for the kingdom. Live for the kingdom. Be part of the kingdom.

Spread the kingdom amongst your relations, friends, acquaintances, the community, the nation, the world.

Make a difference. The following Sunday, Fr Bates, the Chaplain, was preaching. His theme was eschatology too, but frankly and directly contradictory of what Fr Fenton had preached.

I was to discover that there is a solution. The Kingdom of God is now. The Kingdom of God is also not yet. Now and not yet. We find both ideas expressed strongly in our Lord’s parables. The sower went out to sow: now. The wheat and the tares (or weeds): not yet. The pearl of great price: not yet. The mustard seed: now.

We see the same now and not yet-ness clearly expressed in this evening’s service. St Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians, ‘Listen, I will tell you a mystery! We will not all die, but we will all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we will be changed.’ Not yet.

The great O Antiphons, anciently sung before and after the Magnificat on the last days of Advent before Christmas itself, are strongly Not yet. ‘O Dayspring, Brightness of Light everlasting, and Sun of righteousness: Come, and enlighten him that sitteth in darkness, and the shadow of death.’

But there is Now too. We shall sing a hymn with a strong Now sentiment. Indeed, The race that long in

darkness pined adopts the last judgement imagery of harvest time and adapts it to its own purpose. ‘To hail thy rise, thou better Sun, the gathering nations come, joyous as when the reapers bear the harvest-treasures home.’

So, how does this work, both Now and Not yet? The ‘better Sun’ is Jesus Christ our Lord. This is he who is from of old with the Father before the creation of the universe: ‘Of the Father’s heart begotten, ere the world from chaos rose, he is Alpha: from that Fountain all that is and hath been flows; he is Omega, of all things yet to come the mystic Close, evermore and evermore.’ ‘This is he, whom seer and sibyl sang in ages long gone by; this is he of old revealèd in the page of prophecy.’ This is he who is born into flesh as Son of Mary and who is still Son of God. This is he who preaches the Good News that God’s will is for love and life to conquer hatred, fear and death. This is he who takes upon himself the pain and sorrow, the suffering and cruelty of sinful humanity and bears it on the Cross. This is he who is raised from the dead and appears to his disciples.

This is he who sends his Spirit to inspire and transform them from wee cowering beasties into brave and bold preachers, proclaimers of the truth that Christ is alive, that death is conquered, that sin can be forgiven, that hatred can be overwhelmed by love. This is he in whom Christians live and move and have their being, who inspires us and enables us by his grace to live the life of the kingdom in the here and now. This is he who will come in glory, who we hope and pray and believe will ultimately defeat the power of evil, of death and destruction.

This is he, Jesus Christ our Lord, in whom Joe Cassidy lived and for whom he lived and by whose grace he lived.

This is he into whose life Joe Cassidy was born when he was baptised, dying to himself and living to Christ. The Christian life, lived and exemplified by Joe Cassidy, for whom this evening we sincerely give our thanks and praise to almighty God, offers us hope.

There is a need for hope. As St John put it, ‘This is the judgement, that the light has come into the world, and people loved darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil. For all who do evil hate the light, and do not come to the light, so that their deeds may not be exposed. But those who do what is true come to the light, so that it may be clearly seen that their deeds have been done in God.’ The hope above all is that good men and women, people in whom the light of God’s love shines, can make a difference, as Joe Cassidy made a difference, that the light might overcome the darkness. It could be a result of our thanksgiving for the life and work of Joe Cassidy that we would all re-commit ourselves to live and work to bring about that transformation. That God’s kingdom might come on earth as in heaven.

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Colleague A tribute given at the September 2015 alumni weekend.

James Randle was Commercial Director and Director of Music at St Chad’s until 2012. He was a student at St Chad’s 1999 - 2002. James is now the Director of Music of The Chorister School at Durham Cathedral and an Honorary Fellow of St Chad’s College.

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t is very good to see so many people connected to the College here to celebrate Joe’s life. He would be truly humbled and overwhelmed to know how many people have made the journey to Durham for this special reunion weekend, dedicated to his memory.

Having known Joe for sixteen years, there are many stories that I could share that would all ultimately reach

the same conclusion – that Joe was a remarkable man, a humble man, and a good friend to many people. He was a man who cared deeply and passionately about those around him. He was also a man with a vision.

It was Joe Cassidy’s vision, dreams, dedication, perseverance, and sheer hard-work that has shaped this College, that we all know and love, into the fine academic community that it is today. There was nothing about its history, heritage and buildings that he didn’t know. Joe gave all that he had to St Chad’s College, and those of us who were privileged to know him, to learn from him, and to work alongside him, will be forever in his debt. We will never forget him, for we are marked by the love and the wisdom that he shared with us.

Of course, there was going to come a point in the life of the College when Joe would be gone, for he was starting to look forward to a well-earned retirement. At that point there would have been the opportunity for students, alumni, colleagues and friends to say farewell to him as our Principal, whilst reflecting on and celebrating his distinguished career. Most importantly Joe would have had the opportunity to say his farewells to the College and to express his gratitude to those around him.

Over the years I learnt never totally to predict what Joe might say or do in any given situation. However we did know each other well, and we knew what made each other tick. For Joe, his ministry as a priest and his commitment to social justice underpinned everything that he did. He would not tolerate injustice or suffering, and was quick to remonstrate with anyone who felt that they were entitled to something just because of their status or background.

If Joe had been able at a farewell occasion to offer some of his own words, I am certain that he would have included some of the following thoughts: He would have wanted to thank the alumni of the College, who have supported the College, its Fellows and its current students. He would have thanked us for the messages of support in difficult times, and the messages of congratulation in times of celebration and joy. He would have thanked us for the financial

support that enabled the College, through its various ministries, to live out the work of the Magnificat.

Joe would have thanked all of his colleagues – especially his Vice-Principal, Chaplain and Bursar – the strongest collective team of College Officers that St Chad’s has enjoyed and all its dedicated staff. He would have thanked them for their often un-sung hard work and dedication, and for their patience and love.

But most importantly, Joe would have thanked his family for all that they enabled him to do and achieve, and for their understanding of what it is to lead a community whilst also being a husband, a father, a brother and a son.

As a College it is right and proper to pay tribute to Papa Joe. However, I would also like us to pay tribute to Joe’s family, to his beloved wife Gillian and his amazing children Emmeline, Marianne and Ben. I would like for us to thank them for sharing Joe with us for so many years, for enabling him to save St Chad’s College and build it into the flourishing community that it is today. For giving Joe the time simply to be present in College, to walk alongside those he served, to drink in the bar with us, to pray with us in the Chapel, to dine with us in the Hall, and to wear green morph suits on St Chad’s Day! We all owe Joe’s family our most heartfelt thanks for their part in the life of the College and share with them the deep loss and grief that he is gone. I am fortunate to have known Joe as both a mentor, a boss and as a family man, and I spent many happy evenings and days with Joe and Gillian and their children. I visited Canada with them all and Joe taught me to ski in the Rockies. I watched Emmeline, Marianne and Ben grow into the fine people that they are today (and gave them their first piano lessons). But most importantly, I experienced the love that Joe had for them all and the delight that he took in their many achievements and successes. He was bursting with pride every time he spoke of them. We must continue to hold them in our thoughts and prayers.

On the night before Joe’s body was moved to the College Chapel, ready for his final journey to the Cathedral for his Requiem Mass, I went to the undertakers to see him. I needed to thank him again for the numerous things that he had done for me and for Katie, and to pray with him and for him. I sang to him:

Sons of St Chad, eternity is dawning, And soon our glorious Lord shall come again; Worship and work; till breaks that wondrous morning, When Chad, and all the saints, with Christ shall reign.

Joe, we love you and we miss you so much. We are sure in the knowledge of Christ’s saving Passion and glorious resurrection, and in all that you taught us, that we will be reunited in the eternal kingdom, where you are now preparing the way for us. Where we know that you will welcome us with Chad, Ignatius, Cuthbert, Bede, Mary and all the Saints to feast with our Lord in a place of happiness, light and peace.

Sons of St Chad, whose work on earth has ended, Brothers, whom we no longer here shall see; Keep them O Lord from Satan’s power defended, Grant them refreshment, light and peace in thee.

�

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SCR A tribute given at the memorial service in Durham Cathedral on Saturday 19th September 2015. Fred Robinson is a Professorial Fellow of St Chad’s and a College Tutor.

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ll of us have our own memories of Joe. All of us have our own reasons to be grateful for his life, grateful that we knew him.

We are grateful for all he did to nurture us and our College. He devoted enormous energy, enthusiasm and commitment to St Chad’s. He had a vision of what a university college should be; and, perhaps especially, why its independence mattered. Joe saw possibilities: for the buildings, for the students and for the staff. And he worked hard to bring possibilities to fruition. He worked hard because he believed in what he was aiming to do. It couldn’t be just a job; for him, being our Principal was a vocation and a responsibility, at times a heavy responsibility.

Joe’s legacy is everywhere in the College. To me, it’s most evident in the way we are with each other, the way we do things at St Chad’s. It’s a remarkable community. And, in my experience, it’s quite different from most other parts of the higher education ‘industry’.

Joe helped create an atmosphere of mutual support and respect across the whole College and instilled a sense of being part of something. At matriculation, he’d emphasise the values, the ethos of the place, and remind us all of the need to take care of ourselves and others.

Since his death, it has been clear to us that Joe built a College that grieves for him, but has the strength to go on. And it’s also been clear that his legacy is precious, and that we honour his memory by holding on to those values he held dear, and by continuing to make St Chad’s a welcoming, caring community.

The making and remaking of the College goes on; it always is a work in progress. I have been so aware of that. In fact, I find myself looking up at that portrait of Joe in the dining hall and, so often whisper ‘Okay Joe, we’re doing our best’.

All of us have our own memories of Joe. One of the things that stays with me is that quizzical way he’d raise an eyebrow. We’d be talking, and he’d raise an eyebrow in a ‘surely not, you’ve got to be joking’ sort of way. I loved that way he’d gently challenge and do it in a manner that was so encouraging and friendly. What a pleasure it could be to spend time in Joe’s company!

We miss Joe and we will continue to miss him. We remember him as a kind and decent man, a good man.

We are grateful that we knew him, that we learnt from him, and that our lives were enriched by him.

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MCR Another tribute paid during the alumni weekend memorial service. Sofia Ropek Hewson received a BA in Combined Arts in 2014 and an MA in Cultural Studies in 2016 part-funded by a St Chad’s Alumni Postgraduate Scholarship. She is currently researching for a PhD in French at Cambridge University.

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first came to Chad’s in 2010 for an open day. I went to a formal dinner and Dr Cassidy gave a speech. I don’t remember exactly what he said, but I remember a group of us feeling moved, almost to tears, because we felt so suddenly part of something important. We felt valued and part of a community, but we also felt energised. We had a collective responsibility to care for and develop our College.

St Chad’s inspires real affection – and a lot of that comes from Joe’s exhortation to us to care. Joe always made us feel like Chad’s was a place where we could make things happen. A lot of us have grown up at St Chad’s, but we’ve also collectively grown the College, sensing the possibilities of our community through Joe. The MCR organised a social justice conference in 2015, which I’d been planning with Joe, and I’m very sad that he wasn’t there to speak or join in. I had so many conversations with him about the detrimental impact, in my view, of government policies, and how Chad’s should be supporting undergraduates and postgraduates as the University changed, as universities across Britain have been changing. Joe cared deeply about social justice and fair access to education and Chad’s reflects his passion and commitment. Editing a talk he gave so that I could include it in the College journal (the talk is re-printed in this magazine), I could hear his voice through the writing and his unfailing focus on community and the importance of strong relationships. He tells us that ‘we learn again and again that divine life and human life are all about relationships [and] our attempts to define ourselves over and against each other.’ He talks about how all of the important identity shifts in his life have been, ‘shifts from me, to we’ – Joe understood the world as ‘relational’ and ‘communal’, as he describes it, and he developed our College community in this image.

We’ll miss Papa Joe – we’ll miss his terrible jokes at Candlemas, his heartfelt sermons and speeches at formals, and his time for us, but, most of all, we’ll miss his kindness and his love for Chad’s.

Foundation Journal Sofia Ropek Hewson was the editor of the St Chad’s College Journal ‘Foundation’ in 2014-15. In her preface to the 2015 edition she tells movingly how Dr Cassidy encouraged learning and thought.

“Reinstating the College Journal Foundation was an inspired initiative of Dr Joe Cassidy and Oliver Burnham, our former MCR President.

The MCR hosted sixteen Chad’s postgraduates at our Research Forums during the 2014-15 academic year: they spoke on subjects ranging from Middle Eastern politics, to digital embodiment, to fishing in Iron Age Britain. I quickly became aware of the exciting intellectual diversity of Chad’s Middle Common Room.

But I also became attuned to a common lively curiosity about each other’s work. I know that the Foundation journal will continue to be a great resource and inspire further curiosity. I would also like to thank Chad’s, for being home, and for helping the MCR to develop a warm, friendly and stimulating postgraduate community. Joe Cassidy, our wonderful Principal for eighteen years, was instrumental in encouraging us. The 2014-15 edition of Foundation is dedicated to Joe, and to his work and love for our College.”

Copies of the Foundation journal are available to buy from the College.

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JCR Philip Whitehead writes: first encountered Papa Joe when he was making his pre-application Open Day speech, one I’m sure many recent alumni and current students will have heard.

As he enthused in his softly-spoken Canadian voice about the College’s proud scholarly tradition, seven libraries and how much fun gowned formals were, I instinctively knew Chad’s was different. This place was more than a set of rooms with a gym and a bar - it was a kind, gentle and welcoming community. First impressions count for a lot. Although he encouraged us to become well acquainted with those seven libraries and strive for academic achievement, one of his greatest qualities was to recognise that Chad’s was a place for tremendous personal growth too, and that behind every degree in progress was a student sometimes in need of support, reassurance or the occasional beer.

I was privileged to appreciate the depth of his contribution to the College as Principal and how it enhanced the student experience after I was elected Senior Man in 2014. While other JCR Presidents fretted about breakfast meetings and disciplinary hearings, Papa Joe just instinctively treated us as adults who could get on with things without much fuss.

He was that rare combination of deep thinker and problem solver, able to tease out the political, financial and ethical implications of a decision the University was making during a Governing Body meeting in the morning and then explain the outcomes to frustrated students in the Bar the same evening.

Papa Joe’s convictions and firmly-held belief in social justice in action, however, meant he was never inclined towards being ponderous or woolly. Chad’s has not been insulated from the winds of change that occasionally blow through the national student movement, for better or worse. Cultural appropriation, ‘safe spaces’, banned songs, and the difficulties of reconciling LGBT rights with holding separate Gents’ and Ladies’ formals all surfaced as substantial and thoughtprovoking challenges during my year in office. Dr Cassidy’s perspective on all this, when asked for advice, was to encourage real debate, field solutions and call for sensitivity and generosity, presciently reminding us that people are much more than the sum total of their ideological positions.

Amazingly, he never took himself too seriously either. His Candlemas speeches were filled with self-ef-

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facing jokes; he led the Chad’s Day Cathedral service in fluorescent green face-paint; he attempted to join in with the antics of the Rugby Club; and jammed on an electric guitar - or a hundred other things besides.

As a new generation of Chadsians settles into college life without Papa Joe, I am sure his legacy will be felt for years to come. Not just in refurbished buildings or the Quad which now bears his name, but in the way people behave towards each other, discover abilities they didn’t know they had and find space to flourish. It certainly lives on in those of us who were fortunate enough to share Chad’s with him.

Jordan Smith writes: apa Joe was an adventurer and a thinker. He loved to explore not only the world but also its peoples and ideologies. Throughout my time at Chad’s, he demonstrated his breadth and openness of thought by inspiring countless debates on how the College could realise its understanding of social justice. Not one to push his opinions on others, he was keen to nurture our thought paths rather than prescribe them, trusting us as adults to make the right decisions.

In 2014, I was lucky enough to accompany him as a volunteer at a rural school in South Africa. It was here that his passion for people and their individual views on life became apparent to me. It was as though each person was a new adventure to him, and he couldn’t wait to find out what they thought about the world.

Between this enthusiasm for complex debate and his varied and beguiling anecdotes, he was never aloof. He was someone you could chat to about what you got up to after the bar shut. From experience, you’d always be received without judgement and in the best humour.

Last year, I was asked to play my saxophone at Papa Joe’s funeral in Durham Cathedral. Amidst pieces of classical music I decided to play Somewhere Over the Rainbow from The Wizard of Oz. The choice may have seemed a little twee, but I liked how aspirational and accessible the song is. It reminded me of how he saw the world - as a constant opportunity for exploration and understanding beyond our bubble.

Dr Cassidy was someone who saw life for what it was: intricate, chaotic, beautiful, and above all, fascinatingly complex. The way he lived his life helped me to understand that we’ll never know all the answers, but that the most important thing we can do is search for them with an open mind and heart.

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Principal I

have loved reading this Joe Cassidy tribute edition of The Chadsian and am sure you have too. Just over a year after Joe’s untimely death, we continue to miss him greatly. Reading these tributes again, and now with the perspective that the months bring, I find myself not quite so engulfed by the immediate shock and grief of the loss of the man, but with space now to reflect on the qualities of the person we lost. Along with this comes a fresh sense of what a privilege it was to know him and work with him to build St Chad’s into a college that, to a remarkable extent, fulfilled its potential as a place of scholarly excellence and possibility, a community of kindness and justice - and fun.

The tributes in these pages wonderfully articulate so much of the genius that was Joe and how he poured so much of that into the college he loved. He often used to reflect with us, his colleagues, on whether we were building something that was worth giving our lives to. In difficult times, it was something of a litmus test of the worth of what we were doing. And occasionally he would muse (and the sharp edges of this question posed only in the hardest of times) whether, if we could not be the college we were called to be, should we be prepared to think the almost unthinkable - and cease to be.

I hope - and believe - that if Joe has been witness to St Chad's over this last year since his death, he will indeed have believed that it was worth the prime years of his life.

The sense of grief and loss has been a tribute to how much he was loved. The outpouring of gratitude, the recognition by an astonishing array of students, alumni and friends of just what this college has meant to them, and who it has helped them grow into, and how much of that, certainly in recent years, was thanks to Joe, would surely answer his searching question with a resounding ‘yes’. This is a college absolutely worth spending one's life on, because of what it gives to so many on the cusp of their own adult lives, who, in turn, often go on to spend their own lives to serve the world in a dizzying variety of ways.

With my appointment as Principal of St Chad’s, we are entering a new stage in the history of our College. I am committed to doing my absolute best to carry forward all that we cherish about St Chad's and to build on what Joe Cassidy established.

The world of higher education - and Durham University - is changing very fast. There are significant challenges on the horizon – the rising costs of higher education, debates about what it means to be a college, achieving excellence in an increasingly competitive global world. It will take imagination and the courage of our convictions to ensure that we continue to be a college where all kinds of students can thrive in all kinds of ways.

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St Chad’s will always depend on the interest, commitment and support of our friends and alumni so that together we can ensure that Chadsians of the future will have the same opportunities and memories that made Joe - along with so many of us - believe that this is a college worth belonging to and worth investing ourselves in, a college we can all continue to be proud of (in a suitably humble St Chad kind of way).

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Family A moving tribute by Joe Cassidy’s eldest child given at her father’s funeral mass in Durham Cathedral. Emmeline is currently reading for a degree in Arabic and Islamic Studies at Oxford.

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ad and I always imagined that he would be the priest at my wedding, one distant day in the future. In fact, we joked about it just the day before he had the first heart attack. But instead, only a few weeks later, I’m speaking at Dad’s funeral.

I know that this must seem like a horrible connection to draw, an ugly juxtaposition between one thing so hopeful and another so final, but as the stony reality of what’s happened begins to sink in, it is in this connection that I’ve found beauty. For when I sat down and began to think about what I wanted to say, I realised that what I want to say is not so very different from what Dad would have said at his children’s weddings, since really I just want to talk about love, because love is what, most of all, my father taught me.

Dad taught me about the eternal strength of love one afternoon in the living room. I remember very clearly, when I was around four or five years old, turning to Dad as we sat side by side on the sofa and asking him, completely earnestly, “Dad, how long would you be sad for if I died?” Dad turned to me, equally seriously, and said, “I would never stop being sad. I would be sad for the rest of my life.”

I thought about this. His answer had surprised me.

I’d been expecting something more easily quantifiable than “forever”. I’d been expecting something between six months and a couple of years — this is what, as a small child, I’d judged to be an acceptable period of grieving. But no, Dad was telling me that he would be sad forever, and I remember looking at him and thinking “Woah, Dad must really love me….”

Dad taught me that love is urgent, that it can burn itself into you and then slip away again as easily as a

dream unless you really, really grip it tight. Dad taught me this one evening in front of the TV. We were watching Love Actually. In that nail-biting, heart-melting scene where the little boy is tearing through the airport so that he can tell the little girl he loves her before she moves to the USA, Dad turned to me, his eyes all misty, and said, “Emmeline, one day you’re going to fall in love and when you do you have to tell them, you have to, because otherwise you’ll regret it forever.”

I was about fourteen when Dad gave me this piece of advice and I think I mumbled something in response about him being all embarrassing and soppy; but for Dad this wasn’t something soppy and trivial. Dad lived his life by this rule.

Indeed, one afternoon 22 years ago, my Mum was sitting in her office in Southampton when a man she’d met a few times showed up in the doorway. “I’m sorry to barge in on you like this,” the man said, “but I just had to tell you that I’m crazy mad about you.”

Of course, this man was my Dad, seizing love.

When I first heard this story of his impulsive words as he suddenly realised that he was in love, I was straight away reminded of one of my favourite quotations from E. M. Forster, which goes: “When I think of what life is, and how seldom love is answered by love… it is one of the moments for which the world was made.”

Dad taught me about love in the way he cared for Marianne, Ben and me. We spent our summers in a Canadian town called Crystal Beach, just by Lake Erie.

Practically every day Marianne, Ben and I would play in the lake together and my Dad would sit on the shore watching, almost not blinking, ready to run in and save us should any of us get into difficulty. My Dad was the sort of Dad who built us a treehouse in the back yard and then, when we outgrew it, pulled it down to make a special place in the trees for our Mum to read. He was the sort of Dad who taught us to ride our bikes, told us bedtime stories about a little girl called Fartalina and made us a strange floury watery concoction with which to have our very own food fight (much to my Mum’s horror).

Dad taught me about love in his relationship with my Mum. I’m struggling to know what to say here, because I don’t know how to articulate the level of tragedy that occurs when two people who have promised to spend their lives together, looked forward to the rest of their lives together, spent the last two decades together as a team and a partnership, are so suddenly and so untimely ripped apart. I don’t know what to say here.

All I know is that my Dad did not want to leave my Mum, not at all, not ever. And even spending life

together wasn’t going to be enough for Dad, because for him it never was ‘till death us do part’. My Dad believed in everlasting life in the Kingdom of God and for Dad this love and partnership that he had entered into with my Mum was not for life but for ever.

In fact, it was this type of love — committed, longterm, public love between two adults — that had such a

great impact on my Dad’s entire understanding of the world. The death of my grandfather, my Dad’s father, when my Dad was 33 shook and reformed his understanding of his role in life. Dad remembered witnessing the last few moments that his parents spent together before his father died. It was one loving caress that stayed with my Dad more than anything else. In that touch my Dad saw the depth of their love, the goodness and the purity of their love and, more than anything, I think my Dad saw the bravery in their love — in a sense all love is scary because it carries with it the prospect of loss, and my Dad felt this as he was confronted with the incredible pain his parents felt in losing one another. At this time my Dad was a Jesuit and he later wrote that it was at this moment that he suddenly began to see his celibacy as a form of cowardice, because he would never know this love and in that way he was protecting himself from such painful and profound loss.

A few years later my Dad left the Jesuits and then Roman Catholicism altogether. This was not because my Dad no longer wanted to devote himself to God, indeed

he always considered himself a Jesuit, but because of a change in his interpretation of the relationship between love of God and love between human beings.

Watching the love and the loss that his parents shared, he saw that loving another human with all your heart and soul is no incompatibility with love of God. St John says that “if we love one another, God lives in us, and his love is perfected in us”. My Dad believed this: that there was no conflict, no divide, between his love of and faith in God and his love for my Mum, Marianne, Ben and me. It was never a question of loving God or loving us; the two were inseparable for Dad. They were two interwoven elements in a life governed by love.

I started by talking about weddings. The reason my Dad and I were talking about this just before he died was that he was writing a wedding sermon for our friends, Ashley and Julian. My Dad called me into the dining room to get me to read it through to see what I thought. This is what my Dad had written: “What I see today is a public statement… that life is ultimately all about love; that life must ultimately be about love; that, if it’s not about love, well… it’s not about anything.” This is the truth that my Dad lived by. Love and love and keep loving until you feel as though your heart might burst, as though you just can’t possibly love any more.

This is what Dad believed and this is the principle that underpinned his life. We all knew my Dad in different ways and we all have different memories that we will cherish, but if there is one thing that we may collectively remember about my father, it is this: his overwhelming capacity for love. And even more importantly than simply remembering, we can take this truth and use it to inspire us, as it inspired my Dad, to really and truly open our hearts, to work for a fairer world.

So now I just want to say, for one last time: I love you, Dad. We all love you. Forever. For always.

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Joe, in his own words I

grew up as a Roman Catholic in a very Roman Catholic city, Montreal, of mixed Irish and French lineage. I inherited the neurotic guilt of the Irish, and the unneurotic je ne sais quoi of the French. My early life was pretty unremarkable, though at my baptism my grandmother did place me on the altar and offered me, her first grandchild, up to God as a priest. I don’t know what effect that had, but I do recall that my superman cape could double as a chasuble of sorts; and though I had the

usual Canadian boy’s collection of baseball and hockey cards, I also had a more unusual assortment of saints holy cards. I even had fun ranking the saints cards in terms of the size of the indulgence you could get by praying the fewest words. Most of these cards carried little indulgences; and boy did I need indulgences, because, even though all my sins were forgiven at confession, the Irish priests in our parish were fond of emphasising how we still needed to suffer the temporal punishment due to sin – that is, if these cards didn’t do the trick.

Skipping a few years, I had a life-changing religious experience whilst in College. I say ‘life-changing’ because, at the time, you can’t imagine that your life won’t be absolutely and forever transformed by such experiences. In any event, I had a powerful experience of God’s self-emptying, an experience triggered and confirmed by the passage, ‘Though his nature was divine, he did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself....’ I had a brief glimpse of what infinite divine Trinitarian self-emptying looked-like, feltlike, tasted-like — it was simple and majestic and very attractive. The experience led to a reappraisal of my faith, with the result that I discovered that I really did believe, that I believed that this man Jesus was truly divine, and that such a belief couldn’t sit alongside a zillion other beliefs. It had to be central to my life.

So what does a good Catholic boy do when he has a religious experience? Well he goes into religious life and/or gets ordained, or both. Not much vocational discernment there, I’m afraid. And probably not a very high regard for the possibility that lay-people might have religious experiences and might live fully-committed religious lives too.

Well, I eventually entered the Jesuits. I became a Jesuit not so much to become a priest, so much as to live the gospel as radically as I could alongside others. I could say a lot about my motives for living radically, how earnest they were and yet how self-serving they could be at the same time, how they buoyed up a particular image of myself as somehow ‘radical’; but the point I want to make is that my dream really was to become a disciple, a companion of Jesus – hence my choice of the Jesuits— the Society or Company of Jesus.

As you probably know, Jesuit formation is a very long process, with up to thirteen years of prayer, study and ministerial placements before ordination. Again, as you probably know, Jesuit spirituality is almost entirely based on the gospels, with the accent placed on becoming free enough to follow even the slightest indication whatsoever of the Father’s will.

That said, my motives were a bit complex—it wasn’t just about the Father’s will. Along with a fair few of my confrères, I joined the Jesuits in part because I saw the order as a refuge from the Church.

Even though many people consider the Jesuits to be the Pope’s frontline troops or something like that, those who know the Jesuits would know that things aren’t so simple.

Well, to cut a long story short, when the time came for me to be ordained, I asked for a postponement, even after all those years of training. Ordination seemed to me to be an entry, albeit at a low level, into a hierarchy, into a

power structure that too often seemed more concerned with control than with discipleship. I have to say that those sorts of criticisms are almost too easy; and when you get right down to it, they’re fairly adolescent. Deepdown, though, I was facing a different sort of crisis. It was a crisis of hope, really — a crisis of believing that God could work through sinful social and ecclesial structures, a crisis of believing that God could remain faithful to an old creaky Church that hadn’t exactly excelled in fidelity over the centuries, a crisis of believing that God could work through me, who hadn’t excelled in fidelity either.

And once I realised that hope was the issue, I also realised that I didn’t want an intellectual sort of hope: I wanted to experience hope rather than read about it.

So I went on my second thirty-day silent retreat, which is what Jesuits do when they’re not sure what to do. And I had a very unusual retreat. My first thirty-day retreat a decade earlier had blown my socks off, but this second time my socks stayed on, and I had a steady, very quiet and disarmingly gentle experience of the extraordinary ordinariness of discipleship. The Lord seemed to be taking away the compulsiveness of my desire to find hope, and I began thinking of a place where people had hope but a place where they also had very little obvious reason to hope. So I asked to be sent to work in Nicaragua, just as the contra war was breaking out.

As odd as that may sound, it was a good decision. In fact every bit of negativity I had felt towards the Church was magnified there. The Church was divided down the middle, and the hierarchy seemed to be on the wrong side all the time. In fact, the wrong side seemed so obviously and murderously evil, that many of us down there were tempted to disown the Church. But I remember one of my fellow Jesuits saying to me that, before he came to Nicaragua, he’d thought the institutional Church was beside the point. Now he realised that the Church was the problem or at least a large part of the problem.

The Church wasn’t some wonderful sacrament of God’s saving power in the midst of evil. No, the Church was intertwined with, and caught up in, the evil itself.

And then, one day, as I was attending the funeral of a young man, a teenager, his mother came up to us and said, ‘even if they kill all of us, we’ll still win’. The word ‘eschatology’ suddenly made sense to me, and I experienced a kind of hope that was much more costly than I had anticipated. I also realised that the Church wasn’t just an accomplice to the evil around us, but it was also tied up with that very costly hope which emerged as we attended a sadly routine church funeral.

A few months later, a friend of mine and I were chatting, and he was railing against the Church — some-

thing I usually enjoyed. He was doing a really good job of it, when all of a sudden something clicked within me. I started to take it personally. I surprised my friend, and I surprised myself even more, when I said, ‘I am the Church. It’s not abstract. Get angry with me.’ It wasn’t ‘l’état c’est moi’, but ‘l’église, c’est moi’. At that very moment, as I sat with what I’d just said, my resistance to ordination evaporated.

Well, that’s a story about a shift in my understanding of clerical or priestly identity, and the key shift was from seeing the Church as something ‘out there’ to being able to identify with actually being the Church. And the Church the priest identifies with (or should do, I’d say) is not some sanitised, idealised, extra-historical, almost-angelic institution. No it’s the same darned Church that can bless some of the worst human dictators of our century and at the same time bless the crumpled body of a teenager killed indirectly by its very own complicity in evil. It is a Church that can mediate the hope that comes from God alone and a Church that can also break your heart.

Another story. When I finally did get ordained, the thing I most looked forward to was when, in the RC

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rite, I was prostrate, lying in the aisle, during the litany of saints. I wanted this to be a very special moment: lying there, symbolising my utter poverty before God, symbolising my desire to die to myself and to rise in the power of the Spirit for service. I had it all scripted. The cantor sang the Litany of the Saints, asking hundreds of saints from almost 2000 years of the Church’s history to pray for me. But all I could think of was how bad the carpet smelled. I almost had to laugh.

Not long after I was ordained, my father died at the age of 57, after a long and painful struggle with cancer. He was the first person I’d ever anointed, and his was the first funeral I’d ever conducted or preached at. I could say a lot about how he died, but I want to mention three things really. One was an image I still have of my father holding his hand up to my mother’s cheek, just a day or two before he finally lost consciousness. It was a very tender, beautiful moment, and it struck me that I would never know such tenderness in my celibate life. It also struck me that I would never know the pain of loss that they were feeling. Well, the celibate in me, such as it was, died that day — if not in fact, at least in spirit. My celibacy was protecting me from the experience of loss that was part of the beauty of their love: I would neither have that sort of relationship nor experience that depth of loss – ever. My celibacy felt at once more cowardly than noble, more safe than courageous – too safe.

The next day my father was saying his good byes to each of us, his children, one-by-one; and he said to me that he wouldn’t be disappointed if I decided to leave the Jesuits and get married. He knew me better than I knew myself. I think he worried that I’d got ordained partly to please him. In terms of priestly identity, though, what was severed by all of this was the link between celibacy and priesthood — which for me was a huge shift in my

understanding not so much of priesthood itself, but of priestly holiness.

Parenthetically, I have to say that presiding and preaching at my father’s funeral mass signalled yet another rethink in my understanding of my priestly identity. At times like that, even though you’re obviously still a member of your family, your key role is the formal, public, church-authorised role. And for me there was a kind of leave-taking, a growing-up, I suppose, where my identity did not come from my family anymore, so much as from my ordination.

Another autobiographical vignette. You can probably see the trajectory that led to my leaving the Jesuits. I’m not sure that my discernment to leave the Jesuits was as good as it could be. I fell in love and that fairly clouded my thinking and my praying. Even though I went on another retreat (though not a thirty-day one this time), I couldn’t easily connect with the Lord, and I doubt I had been free enough to make a free decision.

Nonetheless I left. The relationship didn’t work out: I was far too set in my Jesuit ways, far too fearful of the risks of daily life, and far too controlling.

So here I was, still a priest, bound to celibacy, but no longer a Jesuit. In time, I fell in love (to my future wife, I should say), but this time I tried to discern properly. After months and months of praying, of speaking to spiritual directors and friends, I felt as though I’d reached a point of modest equilibrium, where I was able to say to God, as honestly as I could, that I would be willing to remain a celibate priest if that is what he wanted: I would be willing to make the sacrifices involved, if it were his will.

No surprise then that I did decide to get married; I was also excommunicated, as happens automatically when you marry (I couldn’t get permission to be laicised).

I became an Anglican, chiefly because I couldn’t stand the idea of not being able to receive communion (becoming an Anglican wasn’t easy or obvious, but that’s another story).

All that said, I have a particularly vivid memory of the last Eucharist I presided over as a Roman Catholic priest. I had been told by my Bishop that, as I had declared an intention to marry, I had to cease acting publicly as a priest before the next Sunday.

So my last mass was a weekday college Eucharist, oddly enough with an equal number of RCs and Anglicans in the congregation (I broke or at least generously interpreted all the RC rules about intercommunion all of the time). Anyway, I was the only one who knew this was the last time I’d ever preside, and I half expected God to pierce my heart with a sword or two. I had anticipated feeling great sadness, intense guilt, self-recrimination, a powerful urge to reconsider.

Instead I experienced the most joy I had ever experienced at a Eucharist. I’d had my share of moving liturgical experiences over the years. In Nicaragua I had literally hungered for the Eucharist, feeling an almost

desperate need to sense Jesus’ on-going presence there.

When I worked in Jamaica, the Eucharists there were exuberant, noisy, and wonderful celebrations. But this was different. This was sheer joy – as though my feet were being infinitely tickled. But instead of erupting into uncontrollable laughter, I experienced uncontrollable peace.

What I experienced was an astonishing sense of both distance from and union with this little congregation, a congregation I was very fond of. There was only one prayer going on. There was no sense of me, the priest, doing something for the people. Even though I was saying parts of the Eucharistic prayer alone, we were one body, seemingly offering ourselves to God. This wasn’t my prayer, and in a weird sense it wasn’t exactly our prayer as though any of us were managing it at all.

When you come to think of it, we weren’t really even offering ourselves: instead we were letting ourselves get caught up in a much more ultimate dynamic act of selfoffering, our Lord’s own self-offering. We were the Body of Christ. Right then and there. It was the Lord’s prayer, not ours, because he made it so. I was present, but I was expendable. I was praying as one with them, but what I was doing was almost beside the point. In fact, not only was I expendable, but I was just about to be expended. It was as though I were fading from their midst. And it was absolutely wonderful. The memory of it still tickles me almost 20 years later.

Another bit of autobiography. As a post Vatican II RC priest, I had never presided at an eastward-facing Eucharist. Oh I knew there were strong arguments pro and con, but I’d never done it myself, nor had I ever seen

it done in the RC Church since I was a child. Well, when I was received into the C of E, I was assigned to a traditional parish in Salisbury. Not only was eastward-facing the norm, but the altar must have been about 60 feet from the people, at the end of a very narrow Victorian sanctuary. The first few times I presided I was more worried about doing it right than anything else; and I performed rather than prayed the Eucharist. But one day, after I’d become more accustomed to it all, I had a sense of the power of this form of worship. It was tightly concentrated, intensely personal, much of it very private. The congregation was with me, backing me, in a very real sense; but in another sense I felt as though they were almost voyeurs of this very, very priestly thing I was doing. There was a powerful, and again I think real, sense of the sacred, but I was also a bit spooked by the experience. I remember thinking that this sort of power could go to one’s head. Obviously, or I hope it’s obvious, this is not to undermine this way of celebrating, but to note the flip-side of this style of worship. My own style is still pretty traditional when you get right down to it, and probably as Roman Catholic as ever it was.

A few points though. As our understanding of the Church has shifted over the last 40 or so years, so has our liturgical practice. A misplaced traditionalism is not just quaint: it is bound up with all kinds of issues of power, of priestly self-identity, and often, I have to say, with issues of self — self-acceptance, even sexual selfacceptance when the cult is used as a shield, as an escape from self, rather than a proper dying to self. And with all of these changes, so our conception of priesthood has changed, as we have moved from a templeinspired cultic notion of holiness, bent on doing things to please or appease God, to one more focused on actually living the gospel with humility and honesty and integrity and passion and, perhaps most importantly, with others.

For me, there was a shift from aspiring to a kind of priestly holiness that is proper to a celibate life, to another type of holiness that is proper to a married life.

That was a huge shift for me, as you can well imagine. It very obviously changed how I prayed, how I related to Jesus, and I don’t think the changes are over yet.

ST CHAD’S COLLEGE Scholarships & Bursaries Endowment Fund

D

r Joe Cassidy was passionate about St Chad’s being able to offer students the support they need to succeed. He believed that anyone with aptitude and promise should have the opportunity to become part of an academic community like St Chad’s, whatever their background.

This is part of our College’s heritage and why, in these times of increasing university tuition fees and accommodation costs, the removal of student grants, and fewer hardship funds, we have launched an appeal for, initially, a £1 million endowment. This will fund annual scholarships and bursaries for undergraduate and continuing postgraduate applicants: to encourage students from less affluent economic backgrounds and under represented communities to apply to Durham and St Chad’s, and provide support, as required, to help our students who find themselves in financial need.

Inspired by Douglas Horsfall and Joe Cassidy, St Chad’s wants to raise £1 million for scholarship and bursaries. We need your generous support to help make this happen.

Undergraduate Bursaries

St Chad’s College Learning Fund

Postgraduate Awards

Choral & Organ Scholarships

Grants of between £1,000 and £3,000 to eligible students for each year of their undergraduate course.

Hardship grants of between £500 and £3,000 to support students in serious financial difficulties.

Grants of between £3,000 and £5,000 for continuing St Chad’s graduates for one-year Masters degrees.

£1,000 a year for St Chad’s College students committed to musical excellence and our choral tradition.

F

ounded in Hooton Pagnell in 1901 and in Durham in 1904, St Chad’s College owes its existence to philanthropy. In particular, to the generosity of two people: Douglas Horsfall and Julia Warde-Aldam, who not only paid for our original buildings but also funded the fees and living costs of many St Chad’s students. For many years Douglas Horsfall continued to be generous. Charles Whiting, the Vice-Principal, wrote: “How much Mr Horsfall gave no-one but the Principal himself knew”.

What we do know is that Horsfall endowed a number of bursaries. However, much of his gift was in introducing his friends and acquaintances to the work of St Chad’s College, encouraging them to make gifts themselves, particularly towards the scholarships and bursaries fund.

Joseph Patrick Michael Cassidy 1954 - 2015

St Chad’s College, 18 North Bailey. Durham. DH1 3RH www.stchads.ac.uk • +44 (0)191 334 3358 • chads@durham.ac.uk