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Founders Léonie and Stratford Caldecott

Stratford Caldecott, MA (Oxon.), STD, FRSA, was an author, publisher, and editor. He was educated at Dulwich College and Hertford College, Oxford. He worked for many years as a Senior Editor at Routledge, HarperCollins, and T&T Clark, and served on the editorial boards of Communio, The Chesterton Review, Oasis, and the Catholic Truth Society in London. After founding the Centre for Faith & Culture, he organised and spoke frequently at conferences, taught at a number of colleges and universities, and wrote and published widely on Christian apologetics, theology, and cultural themes. His writing was published in books, magazines, and newspapers on both sides of the Atlantic,  including Touchstone, This Rock, Parabola, Columbia magazine, StAR, and the National Catholic Register. In his final years he was appointed G.K. Chesterton Fellow at St Benet’s Hall, Oxford, and worked with his wife Léonie as the editor of Magnificat, Second Spring journal, and Humanum, the online review of the John Paul II Institute in Washington DC, of which he was the founding editor. In 2013 the Institute awarded him an honorary doctorate in recognition of his work for the Church. Stratford passed away after a battle with cancer on 17 July 2014.

Léonie Caldecott, MA (Oxon.), was educated at the French Lycée in London and Hertford College, Oxford, where she read French and Philosophy. In the early 1980s she won the Catherine Pakenham Award for Young Women Journalists, and has since written for both secular and religious publications, including the Guardian, the Sunday Times, Village Voice, the New York Times Book Review, Communio, Catholic World Report, Inside the Vatican, the Tablet, the Catholic Herald, Touchstone, and Parabola. Two of her articles have been reprinted in “The Best Spiritual Writing” series. She contributed to the BBC TV series Women of Our Century, and wrote the book that accompanied it. She has written on Blessed John Henry Newman and St Therese of Lisieux for CTS. She is the author of What Do Catholics Believe? (Granta, 2008) and two plays: Divine Comedy: a Theresian Mystery Play, performed at the Oxford Oratory in the autumn of 2009, and The Quality of Mercy, performed at the Newman Rooms in Easter week 2011. She has organised multiple pilgrimages and events for youth groups and adults in England and elsewhere in Europe, and was the UK editor of Humanum Review until October 2020. She is the UK editor of Magnificat, a freelance writer, and directs the annual Second Spring summer school.

Teresa Caldecott Cialini grew up in Oxford, and attended the GDST school, Oxford High. She graduated from the University of Durham with a BA(Hons) in Theology in 2008. After working for several years in administration, the theatre and for an antiquarian book dealer, she came on board at Second Spring in 2010 as managing editor and programme manager. Since 2016, she has been working from Pennsylvania, where she lives with her husband, who teaches Latin and History in a local classical academy.