Religious Life
The college is Catholic and has had a significant place in English Catholic history for many centuries (including controversial events such as the Popish Plot and Gunpowder Plot conspiracies). It was founded initially to educate English Catholics on the continent in the hope that, through them, Catholicism might be restored in England. Finally, the school settled in England in 1794 and the Society of Jesus was officially re-established in Britain in 1803. Stonyhurst remained the headquarters of the English Province until the middle of the century; by 1851, a third of the Province's Jesuits were based there.
Until the 1920s, Jesuit priests were trained on site in what is today the preparatory school. There was a drop in vocations after World War I and the seminary was closed. The number of Jesuits teaching at Stonyhurst fell to a third of the staff within a decade. Since then, the Jesuit presence has been in decline, but the school continues to place Catholicism and Jesuit philosophy at its core under the guidance of a Jesuit-led chaplaincy team and the involvement of the Jesuits in its governance.
Read more about this topic: Stonyhurst College
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