In 1852 John Henry Newman prophesied a second spring for Catholicism in England. The amazing achievements of the Victorian Church were a partial fulfilment of that prophecy. More recently, severe winds have perished many of the buds and flowers. So be it. What would an English spring be without some sudden frost? On cold winter days when the light disappears early, we are not inclined, temperamentally, to credit nature’s promise. But in the stony ground of the contemporary Catholic Church in England seeds are sprouting and showing green. One of these is the Chesterton Institute for Faith & Culture at Oxford, founded (originally as the Centre for Faith & Culture) at Westminster College in 1994 and for the last four years located at Plater College on Headington Hill.

As a vantage point for viewing Oxford, Headington Hill is less well known than Cumnor Hill, which lies to the west across the valley of the twin rivers, the Cherwell and the Thames. But near to Plater is a break in the trees and villas, and through it you can see those dreaming spires quite as well as from anywhere. What is it they dream of, those spires that witnessed the coming of the New Learning and the Reformation, the English Enlightenment (such as it was) and the struggle of Whig and Tory, as well as Tractarianism - the ‘Oxford Movement’ par excellence, Neo-Hegelianism, and the spectacular development of the natural sciences, and finally linguistic philosophy and the post-modern avant-garde? Only Catholics know the answer to that question. The spires of the churches, and the chapels of the Colleges, dream of the Mass’s return to the mystical Golgothas of their altars. They dream of the expansion of the University’s horizons to the infinity of God, thanks to divine revelation, the greatest truth ever known.

From 1994 to 2002 the Centre for Faith & Culture testified to that reality about which the spires dream. What strikes me in going through its literature is the sheer range of activities that it seems to have generated - for liturgists, for economists, for artists, for young pilgrims. Behind it is Stratford Caldecott - for most of his life a professional publisher with Routledge, HarperCollins and more recently the Edinburgh firm T. & T. Clark - together with his wife, the writer Léonie Caldecott. They met at Oxford while undergraduates, but only after their marriage did each decide to become Catholic. Like many converts, they have a certain apostolic enthusiasm, but unlike some they try to avoid intemperate zeal. As is apparent from their writings as well as their personalities, they are very clear that in any Christian life, contemplation is what comes first. They attribute their inspiration largely to three great heroes of modern Catholicism: John Henry Newman, G.K. Chesterton and John Paul II. A more adequate liturgical practice that is God-centred and has the measure of the Liturgy’s cosmic dimensions; concrete proposals for a political economy that will earth Catholic social teaching in the service of a society of households; the revival of sacred art for our places of worship as well as our homes; initiating girls into a Catholic feminism that is properly womanly: the tasks the Caldecotts have set for themselves and their collaborators are clearly contributing to Newman’s aim of making the Catholic Church fit for converts to live in, and represent a vigorous response to the Pope’s longstanding call for a new "evangelization of culture".

The particular vision the Caldecotts have put forward in their writings and conferences is a vision of a Catholicism that is maximally generous: able to integrate all that is good, true and beautiful no matter where it comes from. The thinkers they patronise – including also Balthasar, Soloviev and Christopher Dawson - instantiate that generosity of temper in various ways. The presence of the Russian Orthodox thinker Soloviev in that list can stand for the ecumenical outreach of the Institute, which is pursued partly through an association with the St Theosevia Centre for Christian Spirituality in Oxford. The Caldecotts, together with their close colleague, Dr Gregory Glazov, who recently moved from Plater College to at Seton Hall University in America, are surely right in regarding the dialogue with Eastern Orthodoxy as potentially the most fruitful ecumenical conversation for the Catholic Church.

It’s difficult to think of any Catholic institution in England with either a comparable range of interests, or a comparable coherence of outlook. And the amazing thing is that this has been done with minimal financial resources. To be honest, it is really rather shameful that the Catholic Church in England – whether officially or in its laity – has not been more generous with its temporal goods for the sake of helping an organisation that so adequately represents the generosity of Catholicism itself. But of course part of the reason is that people – busy bishops and the woman in the pew - just don’t know of it. Hence this modest appeal to hearts, minds, and purses.

But steady on, you may say. Before I try to help, I want to find out more. Information is readily available. From its foundation the Centre put out a twice-yearly Bulletin, which in 2001 became an illustrated ‘Journal of Faith and Culture’ with the title Second Spring, now published by the Chesterton Institute alongside its own flagship journal, The Chesterton Review. In the first issues of this remarkable publication a feast is laid for which I here have provided only the most elementary hors d’oeuvre. Labour and Liturgy, art, theology and devotion are inter-threaded in the tapestry the Caldecotts and their associates have set themselves to weave. Subscription information and details of the history, activities and other publications of the Institute are readily available on an associated website: www.secondspring.co.uk.

As I have already hinted, the Centre merged in 2002 with the G.K. Chesterton Institute, whose main office is located at Seton Hll University. The Institute now employs Stratford full time, although it still needs to raise money in England to support its various activities. By the summer of 2003 Stratford will have moved his office away from Plater to King Street, in Oxford’s Jericho district, close to the centre of town. Around him will be housed the Institute’s fine Chesterton archive, built up over many years by the exertions of Mr Aidan Mackey. This includes not only books, by the way, but household objects that bring GKC touchingly close: like his battered typewriter, and the toy theatres that were a passion of that childlike man. Chesterton’s stature is increasingly recognised in the English-speaking world beyond this island. One of the purposes for which the Institute now needs benefactions is precisely in order to preserve this rich material and eventually find a setting fit for it.

The most celebrated view of Oxford, I said, is from Cumnor Hill, where the Institute began. The hill became famous after Matthew Arnold made it the setting of ‘The Scholar Gipsy’, his poem about a student drop-out who learns from sources beyond the University – from gipsies but also from Mother Nature herself – truths pure scholarship cannot know. Perhaps the Institute for Faith & Culture is a corporate Catholic Scholar Gipsy, looking at Oxford from a place where other sources of wisdom rise and mingle their waters in a wide deep pool.