Provost leads delegation to meet Pope at Vatican

The Pope received the delegation, led by the Oriel’s Provost Lord Mendoza, at the Apostolic Palace.

The private audience comes after the Pope recognised the former Oriel Fellow Saint John Henry Newman as a Doctor of the Church and co-patron of education in 2025.

The audience also comes as Oriel is celebrating the 700th anniversary of its royal foundation in 1326. Just a few weeks before, His Majesty King Charles III visited the college and viewed the humble oratory that John Henry Newman used for private prayer.

Lord Mendoza, Provost of Oriel College said:

“We are deeply grateful to Pope Leo for receiving our delegation today and recognising our former Fellow Saint John Henry Newman as a Doctor of the Church.

“I welcome His Holiness’s insistence in his recent encyclical that artificial intelligence should be neither idolised nor feared, but governed towards human dignity, the common good, solidarity and justice.

“Our tutorial system’s sustained conversation between teacher and student is a small but resilient defence of human judgement and human presence.

“That said, the university world is struggling with not only how to educate but how to interview, assess, tutor, lecture, examine and grade students.”

It is the second time that Mendoza has made a visit to the Vatican as Oriel’s Provost. In 2019, he was part of the UK delegation led by the then-Prince of Wales, now His Majesty King Charles III, to Newman’s canonisation by Pope Francis.

The private audience was made possible by Cardinal Eijk Archbishop of Utrecht, who welcomed the Oriel delegation to the Vatican.

During the papal audience, Mendoza presented a gift to Pope Leo of an original 17th-century engraving of Oriel College from the first illustrated book of Oxford, published in 1675.