7:50am Thursday 9th September 2010
By Reg Little
PLANS to build a chapel dedicated to Cardinal Newman off Woodstock Road, Oxford, have been submitted to Oxford City Council, on the eve of Pope Benedict XVI’s visit to Britain.
The chapel will form the centrepiece of a £5m development at The Oxford Oratory, with a new library and a new cloistered courtyard also proposed.
The public has until September 16 to comment on the proposals. The plans and a model of the scheme can be viewed all day on Saturday and Sunday at the Church of St Aloysius, in Woodstock Road, as part of the Oxford Open Doors weekend.
When Cardinal Newman, the great Oxford churchman, died in 1890, the city refused to permit a memorial to him.
Now, 120 years later, The Oxford Oratory says its planned new chapel, built as an extension to the existing Oratory Church, would make good the omission, The Newman chapel would be suitable for children’s liturgy, pilgrimage masses, weddings and an overflow congregation from the main church. It would be linked to the main church through a baptistry.
A new cloistered courtyard would be built to provide a sheltered meeting place after mass and to link the new chapel with an improved parish centre.
The development would also provide a new block to provide five new study-bedrooms, along with a common room.
The designs have been prepared by Anthony Delarue, a prominent young architect.
The Oratory earlier launched an appeal to pay for the Newman chapel and other new buildings. So far £1m has been raised. The Church of St Aloysius was built in 1875 by Jesuit fathers. Since 1990 it has been home of an Oratory, a style of community life introduced into England by Cardinal Newman in the 1840s.
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