Statement from the Provost on the papal audience

It was a great privilege to express our deep gratitude to the Holy Father for the Church’s recognition of Saint John Henry Newman as a Doctor of the Church.

Our group who joined His Holiness at the Apostolic Palace included Fellows, colleagues and partners from Oriel College. For nearly 25 years Newman was one of our number.

We met the Holy Father in the year of Oriel’s 700th anniversary. The College was founded by King Edward II in 1326 in honour of the Virgin Mary.

It is thought that our Oriel delegation was the first from Oxford University ever to be received by a Pope in a private audience. We are indebted to His Eminence Willem Cardinal Eijk, the Archbishop of Utrecht, for making the visit possible.

We are acutely conscious that Saint John Henry Newman’s long association with our college forms an important part of both our history and of Oxford University’s intellectual and spiritual inheritance.

Newman was elected a Fellow of Oriel in April 1822 and remained until 1845 when he was received into the Catholic Church and resigned his Fellowship.

During his time at our college he also served as Vicar of the University Church across the street, St Mary’s.

At Oriel, Newman encountered a serious community committed to inquiry, argument, intellectual rigour and friendship, “mind acting upon mind”.

College life was formative to his historic lectures, The Idea of a University, in which Newman made the case that a university is not merely a place for useful instruction or the accumulation of information, but a community ordered by truth, intellectual breadth and formation of judgement.

Newman’s ideal has become Oxford’s ideal and, probably, the aspiration for most universities.

Thanks to Newman, Oriel can stake a particular claim to the development of Oxford’s renowned tutorial system. Newman and his colleagues brought together formal college teaching and private coaching, meaning that the modern tutorial embodies Newman’s conviction that education should be personal.

He wrote that “an academical system without the personal influence of teachers upon pupils, is an arctic winter.” The task of the university is to nurture not only informed minds, but character, attentiveness and responsibility.

This is especially timely considering Magnifica Humanitas, the Holy Father’s first encyclical of his papacy.

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.

In the encyclical, the Holy Father focuses on humanity, not the technology of AI itself, but its effects on us, on power, on accountability and on, for example, loneliness.

The encyclical calls for schools and universities to offer what digital systems alone cannot — “rhythms that incorporate silence, in-depth study, reading and judicious analysis, for without these elements inner freedom may be compromised”.

Our tutorial system’s sustained conversation between teacher and student is a 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.

As we respond to the new technology, we will look to honour the legacy of Newman by teaching young people to seek truth with humility, to use power well and to build, as Magnifica Humanitas urges, not a new Babel, but a more humane and communal world.