LAST THINGS

 Philip Blosser

     Last autumn a British paper (The Times, Oct. 5, 1992) carried an article announcing a plan by the administration of one of England's most prestigious religious colleges to turn the institution into a nonsectarian school.  St. Philip's sixth form college in Birmingham was founded by Cardinal Newman and proudly counts J.R.R. Tolkien among its alumni.  The plan to go non- parochial was defended on the ground that more than two-thirds of the students are now non-Catholic.  In fact, as a result of an increased multicultural and non-Christian student population, the Lord's Prayer and Sign of the Cross have been "deemed inappropriate" at the college.

    The problem raised by the trustees and dissenting parents, however, is that the terms of the college trust deed state that buildings are to be provided for "the performance of public wor- ship according to the rites and ceremonies of the Roman Catholic religion" and that the college is to be operated "in accordance with the principles of the Roman Catholic faith."  This would seem to leave no legal means of implementing the proposed changes.

    But the administration argues that the mitigating circum- stances of a changed cultural climate now permit it to redirect the original terms of the trust deed by way of the legal doctrine of "cy pres" (or "nearest equivalent").  It alleges that the secular multiculturalism of our late 20th-century society makes a strictly Catholic education, as envisaged by the original grantors, unrealistic.

    Whatever the changing winds of cultural climate may lead people to think, this argument is both legally and morally problematic.  Legally, "cy pres" applies only in cases where it is now IMPOSSIBLE to carry out the original purpose of the trust. Morally, benefactors who explicitly give their property for a defined purpose have an inviolable right--reflected in the law's reticence to modify a trust purpose--to have their property used for that purpose if there is any reasonable way in which it can still be done.

    The relevant question, then, is this: can the original St. Philip's trust no longer be performed?  Does having a multi- cultural student body PREVENT St. Philip's, a traditionally Catholic college, from teaching its voluntarily enrolled students the Holy Catholic faith?  To pose the question is to reveal its absurdity.

    Such disregard and modification of religiously-oriented trusts is common today on both sides of the Atlantic, and is by no means limited to Roman Catholic circles.  What makes such cases particularly cowardly and obnoxious is that they violate the trust of those who are no longer present to defend their interests.  "Trustees" are, by their very title, those entrusted to protect the interests and purposes they hold in trust.