'Papa Joe': A personal tribute to Canon Dr Joe Cassidy RIP

Canon Dr Joe Cassidy, the Principal of St Chad’s College, died suddenly on 28 March 2015. He had had a serious heart attack a week ago but he and we all thought he was recovering very well. He was sending upbeat messages across the world from his Blackberry. He was expected back at work after a few weeks' convalescence. Now, without warning, he has been taken from us. His death is a cruel loss. Our fond thoughts and prayers are with Gillian his wife, their children Emmeline, Marianne and Benedict, his wider family, his beloved St Chad's College, and his many colleagues and friends in Durham and beyond.  

When I came to Durham twelve years ago, Joe was one of the first to welcome me. The Cathedral is St Chad’s nearest neighbour on The Bailey: the elegant front door of the College is directly opposite the Cathedral’s majestic east end. The College invited me to be first its Visitor, and then Rector. Joe believed that a lively partnership between these two great Durham institutions could only be good for both. I have loved my roles in the College, and this is not least due to Joe’s generosity, kindness, personal warmth and gift for friendship.

Joe had been a distinguished Catholic philosophical theologian and ethicist whose fine mind was already recognised in awards and prizes gained in undergraduate and postgraduate days. His specialism was the thought of the twentieth century Canadian Jesuit theologian Bernard Lonergan. Joe was a Canadian himself (and had the accent to prove it). In due course he himself joined the Society of Jesus where among a wide range of involvements he was a much valued retreat conductor and spiritual director. Accompanying others of every age on their spiritual journeys was close to his heart all his working life.

His gifts took a new ecumenical dimension when he became an Anglican in 1993.  He would contribute significantly to the councils of the Church of England, including General Synod, though I wonder if his intellectual acuity as a theologian was sufficiently acknowledged. In 1997 he came to Durham as Principal of St Chad’s, an independent Anglican foundation within Durham University. If he thought that being head of house in a Durham college would allow lots of time for leisured literary and scholarly output, reality quickly set in. Running a college  nowadays is an all-consuming enterprise. It is to Joe’s enormous credit that he succeeded in stabilising St Chad's which was then going through demanding times. His prodigious energy (‘always in the fast lane’, someone said of him), his practicality, his capacity to solve problems, his sheer appetite for hard work were all important aspects of his leadership of St Chad’s.

But most important, I think, were his personal and spiritual qualities. If you ask Chad’s students and alumni what they will remember ‘Papa Joe’ for, you will hear a lot about his humane wisdom, his personal warmth, his quick-witted love of repartee and his intellectual liveliness. (He thought and spoke fast: you had to keep up.) And you will also hear about his belief that a higher education institution like a Durham college should – indeed, must – be a living community of human beings in which people care about one another so that everyone can flourish. This was the kind of college he set out to shape at St Chad’s. I’m sure I am not alone in thinking that in this project, he was brilliantly successful.

At the College Domus Dinner the other night, this was what I was being told on all sides from Chadsians past and present, whether they were staff or students. It’s sometimes a cliché to say that someone is ‘much-loved’ but this was genuinely true of Joe. I’m so glad that before he died he was able to hear tributes to his leadership expressed publicly on that lovely occasion (including a faltering offering from me as Rector) and that he could know how much he was valued and loved. In his modesty, he did not want to make too much of it. Self-deprecation was an endearing trait. Though I’d prefer to call it genuine humility, a beautiful quality in anybody but especially in those who are called to lead where many follow.

Joe’s death is a sad loss to the Cathedral too. He belonged to the ‘Foundation’ as a member of its College of Canons and Council. He loved the Cathedral and valued his own as well as the College’s connection with it. He said so in the Cathedral just a few short weeks ago at the annual College Day service. At the end, he suddenly produced from nowhere a green College hood and invested me with it, saying that the College had resolved to make me a life-fellow to recognise the importance it attached to its relationship with the Cathedral. ‘Now this relationship is for life’ he said. Alas that his own was so cruelly cut short the following month. It’s a loss I feel very personally.

Si monumentum requiris, circumspice. ‘If you want a monument, look around you.’ So runs Christopher Wren’s famous memorial in St Paul’s Cathedral. What will Joe’s monument be? Talk to Chadsians across the world; or look into the life of this remarkable community for yourself. It’s written on the hearts and lives of the men and women he served so devotedly – and loved. This is the only tribute that would matter to Joe.

May he rest in peace and rise in glory.

Seasons of Durham Life 1: October

October feels like the start of the new year in the Cathedral. It’s true that the rhythm of Cathedral meetings is already a month old, the Chorister School term has begun, the choir is back from its summer break so that once more daily choral evensong is restored to us - how we have missed it!

But more than anything, October in Durham means the influx of thousands of students. No sooner have the summer tourists gone than it’s time for another invasion. The freshers make up the first wave – returners have a few days grace. You step out of the medieval gate of the precinct and find the Bailey festooned with welcome banners over the colleges, the narrow streets heaving with young people, bewildered parents with cars packed to the gunwales, baffled by Durham’s arcane traffic system while delivering their offspring for the first time. On Volvo Sunday as it’s called, residents don’t try to drive off the peninsula. It only takes one driver in a big 4x4 attempting a 9-point turn in a street no wider than a car’s length and you lose the will to live.

All new students are presented in the Cathedral to be matriculated by college. This is the formal ceremony of admission to the University. The name comes from the matricula or register that a representative student from each college signs during the occasion. There are so many students that it takes five ceremonies to get all of them through. For most, it will be their first time inside the Cathedral; for some, their first time inside any Christian church.

I scan their faces. Most are expectant, some look anxious or uncertain about what is about to happen, a few fold their arms as if defying the occasion to move them. How they dress tells you a lot. As Dean and ex officio member of the University Council, I sit on the platform with the Vice-Chancellor and senior staff and give a welcome. I tell the students that I hope that they will always feel at home in this great place, whatever their faith. I invite them to make the most of what it offers. I also say that students bring great liveliness to Durham, and that’s a gift to us, despite the grumbles of a few locals about how the University is ‘taking over’ our little city.

Going to services is part of life for surprising number of students. I say surprising because the environment of higher education in Britain is mostly resolutely secular. They head for their college chapels, or for churches in the city of all styles and denominations, or both; and some of them become regulars at the Cathedral. Some were brought up in faith and are committed worshippers. Some have recently found faith and are excited by its life-changing impact on their lives. Some are curious, some come because of the building, the liturgy and the music. October always sees a noticeable increase in congregations both on Sundays and weekdays. One or two even find their way to the daily service of morning prayer (which we say at 8.45am: later than most cathedrals, not because we are lazy but because it’s an hour when some students at least will be up and about and on their way to lectures or supervisions). Some start volunteering in the Cathedral as welcomers, servers or singers in one of the voluntary choirs.

You mustn’t think that the Cathedral’s life is dominated by the University. It isn’t.  But when you are working and praying (and in the case of the clergy living) cheek-by-jowl with it, indeed, when you are historically the institution that gave it birth, it’s understandable that it features prominently. This is especially true at the beginning and end of the academic year (when students flock into the Cathedral once more, this time for their graduation ceremonies).

What other cathedral has such opportunities for outreach to students at such a key time in their development? Hundreds walk past it, even through it, every day on their way to their studies, shopping or socialising. Some of these young men and women will be in positions of great power and influence in the future. We owe it to them to grasp this opportunity. And we try to be alive to how the gifts we inherit in Durham – our wonderful building, its community, its saints, its heritage, its music – are among the tools God has given us to use in this mission that is both his and ours.

Religion by Degrees: thoughts on Graduation Day

It’s been graduation week in Durham. 

The peninsula has been a kaleidoscope of colour as academic staff and graduating students don their gowns and hoods and process into the Cathedral to receive their degrees.  The new Chancellor, Sir Thomas Allen, was installed at a ceremony on Tuesday.  Then he presided over no fewer than 14 congregations. Many thousands of people: graduands and their families, honorary graduands, staff, governors and alumni have passed through the Cathedral.  It has been a happy and enjoyable week.

The Dean of Durham is an ex officio governor of the University. This recalls the history of Durham University, founded in 1832 by the Bishop and the Cathedral’s Dean and Chapter.  The Bishop gave his castle as its first college, and the Cathedral gave large estates to secure its endowment.  It was also influential in shaping the direction of the young institution, and its first Chancellor, 100 years ago, was a Dean of Durham. 

I make a point of being at all the ceremonies.  I sit on the platform with the Chancellor, Vice-Chancellor and the other University senior staff.  Most of the ceremony involves sitting still and ‘lending tone’ as we deans sometimes say.  If you enjoy people-watching this is fertile theatre: each graduand has his or her own way of mounting the dais and shaking the Chancellor’s hand (or offering a more intimate gesture).  It’s like Peter Brook’s Empty Space: each time the stage is crossed, a new drama is created.  The Chancellor is a lively speaker whose love of the north-east is infectious.  And I have to say that compared to many other such ceremonies I have been to, Durham does it well.  

It’s customary for the Dean to give a welcome at the very beginning: guests at graduations are the Cathedral’s guests as well as the University’s.  So I take this seriously because it sets the tone of the whole event.  And it’s not quite as obvious as it sounds because the majority of those who have come for the ceremony will not be used to sitting in a church.  Many of them, especially if they have come from overseas, will belong to another world faith.  Many more will be agnostics or have no faith at all (the Vice-Chancellor makes no secret of his thoroughgoing atheism). 

When I first arrived in Durham, I was asked to say in my welcome that a graduation ceremony is not a religious service.  As a now wholly-secular organisation, the University is highly sensitive about not conveying the wrong message by holding congregations in the Cathedral.  So I have complied ever since.  The formula is something like: ‘this is a working Christian church, but this is not a religious event.  So whatever your faith tradition, I hope you feel at home in this great building’. 

But this week I have wondered about whether this is an appropriate or even an honest thing to say.  It suggests that the Cathedral is simply a very grand shed in which to hold a big secular event.  There’s no point in wishing that we could ‘bless’ these ceremonies with a prayer as some Scottish universities still do.  When at my first congregation I ended by saying to the graduands, ‘God bless you wherever your paths take you in the future’ I was roundly told off for offending susceptibilities. So this is not going to happen under the present leadership.

But there is a deeper question here.  To my mind, any ceremony in a sacred building takes on the character of liturgy, even if God is never mentioned.  You simply can’t do ritual in a Cathedral without the Cathedral itself having a say in what goes on. And Durham Cathedral unambiguously says, in the old words of the Delphic oracle, ‘whether recognised or not, the deity is present’.  In such a numinous, transformative space, there is a powerful and compelling religious message. The building shapes our words and actions in ways we can’t predict and don’t necessarily intend.  Sometimes, after a graduation, parents will say: ‘thank you for that service which we enjoyed so much’.

So it’s simply not true that ‘this is not a religious ceremony’.  The Cathedral defines it as being precisely that, and as liturgists say, the building always wins in the end. Perhaps it would be better if I said: ‘you are welcome here, whatever your faith background. Make of this event what you will.  Be glad to be in this great Cathedral and let it speak to you in whatever way you are ready to listen.  This Cathedral was built for celebrations and enjoys them.  So let it help you celebrate today’.   

I have a few months to think about this: the next graduations are in January.  Meanwhile, the PA and CCTV installations are coming down, and the nave is returning to its customary calm.  For a few hours: tomorrow it’s ordination day.