Father Anthony Meredith
Jesuit priest who taught at Campion Hall in Oxford and was valued for his wisdom and playful wit
THE REVEREND ANTHONY MEREDITH, SJ, who has died aged 84, was a Jesuit of a type that scarcely survives these days. He was compassionate yet strict, a sought-after spiritual guide and confessor, known for his wisdom.
Tall, with curling hair, and an air of dignity, he was good company, and his wit, irony and intelligence made him the star of Campion Hall, the Jesuit college in Oxford where he taught for many years. He had a particular rapport with the young.
Anthony Meredith was born at Harrow-on-the-hill on April 12 1936. His father was a pharmacist. As a child, he recounted, his father had taken him to see the parish priest of Harrow, who had greeted them, he claimed, with an absent-minded Nazi salute, supposing that they had come for the meeting of the local British Union of Fascists.
He was educated at the Cardinal Vaughan Memorial School, west London, where he excelled academically. On the long journey to school each day he read Trollope, and later attributed his vocation to the priesthood to Barchester Towers, and his vocation to be a Jesuit to Thackeray’s Henry Esmond.
In 1954 aged 18 he entered the Jesuit novitiate, then housed in the eccentric Victorian mansion of Harlaxton Manor in Lincolnshire. The novices were given elocution lessons to fit them for membership of the Church’s leading order, which gave Meredith a rather orotund delivery.
Philosophy studies followed at Heythrop College in Oxfordshire, after which Meredith moved to Campion Hall, where he took an MA in Classical Mods and Greats.
There followed two years at Stonyhurst teaching Latin, Greek and history. He was subjected to merciless ragging by the boys. Never a good driver, he was made to take expeditions by minibus. “Sir, sir! You have killed a boy,” the passengers shouted in apparent horror on one occasion. Braking harshly, he dashed out of the minibus to find one of his pupils faking death on the tarmac.
In 1965 he returned to the peace of Heythrop for theological studies, and then, after being ordained in 1968, went back to Campion Hall to study for a Dphil on Saint Gregory of Nyssa. At Oxford he acted for a time as chaplain to the Catholic boys at Eton.
In 1972 he travelled to Berlin for his final stage of Jesuit training, and the next year returned to Campion Hall, teaching patristic theology. From 1977, while living in Oxford, he also taught regularly at Heythrop, the college having moved to London.
He found time to tutor members of the Hall in Latin texts, but his main activity was classes on Saints Gregory, Basil and the other Greek Fathers.
Blessed with a playful mind, he loved unserious activities too, such as revealing an obsessive love of the Church of England by reciting in order, or backwards, all the archbishops of York and Canterbury, and the bishops of London, Durham and Lincoln.
He was a gifted mimic capable of imitating the Chapter of Christ Church, especially Henry Chadwick, and capturing the absurdities of many of his fellow Jesuits.
He was much valued as a preacher. On the occasion of the Queen’s Silver Jubilee in 1977, he preached at St Aloysius, the Catholic parish church in Oxford then run by the Jesuits, on the divine right of kings.
His sympathies were profoundly conservative. When Margaret Thatcher was refused an honorary doctorate by the University in 1985, his was one of the few dissenting voices in Congregation. Nevertheless, while by no means happy at the new directions taken by the once conservative Jesuits, he rarely expressed dissent.
In his personal life Meredith was a true son of Saint Ignatius, the founder of the Jesuits, with little time for personal comforts. He spoke with childlike simplicity of his veneration for the Blessed Sacrament, the Saints and the Blessed Virgin.
His faith was unshakeable: he told the novelist AN Wilson, a great friend to whose daughter he was godfather, that if some historian could prove the story of Doubting Thomas were not true, he would abandon the Church. He respected academics such as (the Anglican) Professor Maurice Wiles, but was scandalised by their lack of belief.
After a sabbatical in 1992 that took in Zimbabwe, Italy and Germany, he left Oxford to take up residence at the Jesuit church in Farm Street, Mayfair, while continuing to teach at Heythrop. He remained at Farm Street for 16 years, with teaching spells in Hekima College, Kenya, and at the Gregorian in Rome.
In 2008 he moved to Corpus Christi at Boscombe, Dorset, but after a year returned to Farm Street, where he continued to write, particularly on Gregory of Nyssa and the Cappadocian Fathers. With failing health, in 2014 he returned to Boscombe.
Anthony Meredith, born April 12 1936, died June 25 2020