Downside’s downfall: the dissolution of a monastery

The monks of Downside Abbey in Somerset elected a new abbot last Thursday, according to sixth-century rules laid down by St Benedict. The next day, they sent an email notification saying they had voted ‘to make a new start and to seek a new place to live’. It was a shock to those who know the place. The monks will leave behind a beautiful abbey church built in the Gothic Revival style — its 166ft tower visible for miles around — a monastery and cloisters, the largest monastic library in Britain and a grand-looking public school with more than 300 pupils.

It’s as if a piece of English Catholicism, like a decaying chunk of church masonry, has fallen away. But it has been a long time coming. So many of the monks I knew while at school at Downside in the early 2000s — some of them towering figures, it seemed at the time — have died or left already (some with their reputations intact, others with their lives in ruins).

One is now a priest in a thriving American parish. Another is in Rome. A former abbot quit entirely and got married to one of the school nurses. For the handful of mostly elderly monks left, the decision to leave cannot have been easy. They will have prayed from dawn till dusk. They know that there were enormous failings which allowed child abuse to take place in the school for decades.

The guilty men, as in other Catholic settings, were then wrongly protected by the institution. An unwavering deference from lay Catholics towards them helped. But it was the bonds of loyalty between the monks themselves that led to disaster. These bonds were almost always prized over the safety of the boys in their care.