HELD IN TRUST BOOK:Prelim Pages
23/6/08
14:42
Page 7
Editor’s Preface
the British empire by the early 1840s, was the location chosen for this pioneering venture. From shortly after the foundation of the Society of Jesus in 1540 by Ignatius Loyola (circa 1492-1556), Jesuit colleges had sprung up by popular demand in towns and cities all over continental Europe. Municipalities wishing to enjoy the educational and cultural benefits offered by a Jesuit school were expected to provide the necessary buildings, while the Constitutions of the Society of Jesus demanded that Jesuits offered their services as teachers and educators without charge. By 1760, across the world from Paraguay to India, there were seven hundred and twenty-eight such Jesuit colleges, mostly comprising day schools, many of them in Europe with 1,500 to 2,000 pupils, and with churches attached to them open to the public. In certain places, Jesuit schools were open to all male students, whether or not they were Catholic: by this time, certain female religious orders had taken up many of the educational ideas of the Jesuits and were applying them to the education of girls. All of these institutions became important places of religion, education and culture. Within Jesuit colleges, educational and cultural emphases on public speaking,
On 21 January 1840, a group of nine lay Catholics, all of them local businessmen, met at the Rose and Crown tavern in Cheapside, Liverpool, to form themselves into “a provisional committee for the formation of a society with the view to erect a Catholic church in Liverpool to be presented to the President of Stonyhurst College”. Some of the nine had received their education at the hands of members of the Society of Jesus, generally known as the Jesuits, at Stonyhurst College in Lancashire. All of them were determined to help realise a dream that had been the aspiration of the Society of Jesus — the largest religious order in the Roman Catholic Church, devoted to missionary and educational work — since the arrival of the first Jesuits in England and Wales in 1580. This was to create, in an urban setting in an English town or city, a Jesuit collegium. The Latin word in this context means considerably more than the English word college: it denotes a church, with outreach into the community, and a school for boys, all under a rector whose duty it is, according to the Jesuit Constitutions, to preside over and guide the combined missionary, educational and cultural enterprise. Liverpool, which was rapidly becoming one of the largest ports in
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