The Story of This Chalice

The gap between the Oxford Movement and The Margaret Beaufort Institute’s move into new, permanent premises shared with Christians of other traditions and of other faiths, seems a very long time and ‘in another place’. In fewer than ten years we will be celebrating the bicentenary of the reforming movement in the Church of England which led to the conversion to Catholicism of a generation of brilliant men and women, most notably John Henry Newman.

This chalice was presented to Leo Ward, by his mother, aunt and sister, on the occasion of his ordination to the priesthood in 1931.  Leo’s grandfather W.G. Ward, had been one of Newman’s close associates, and his father, William’s son, Wilfred. He had married Josephine Hope-Scott, the daughter of other Catholic converts who became a well-known novelist. In 1932 Leo’s elder sister, Maisie, who was already married to the Australian journalist, Frank Sheed, whom she had met through their common activity in the Catholic Evidence Guild and the family had set up the publishing company which was to become Sheed and Ward, certainly the most influential Catholic publishing house in these islands in the twentieth century. A glance at its list of authors is in itself an education in who-was-who in British Catholic intellectual circles. Fittingly, Nicholas Lash’s first book, His Presence in the World, was published in 1968 by S&W.

Following Leo Ward’s early death in 1942, the chalice was returned to the family. A decade later Frank and Maisie employed Nicholas Lash, then a seminarian at Oscott, at Sheed and Ward, during his vacations. By then the Second Vatican Council had been called, and they shared the intellectual excitement generated by Pope John XXIII’s initiative, and developed a deep friendship with the clever young man, with the result that the Ward chalice was handed on to Lash upon his ordination in 1963. Lash used the chalice throughout the time of the Council, during which, as a curate in Burnham, Slough, he followed the conciliar proceedings avidly and shared what was happening in stimulating weekly sessions with the parishioners. He became known on the lecture circuit in the immediate post-conciliar years and, in 1978, was sent by his bishop to study in Cambridge, where he spent the rest of his life. His doctorate was eventually published with the title Newman on Development.

After becoming Dean of St Edmund’s House, later a full college of the university, Nicholas was appointed a Junior Lecturer in the Faculty of Divinity and subsequently, in 1978, the Norris Hulse Professor, becoming the first Catholic professor of Divinity since the Reformation. Before that time, however, he had come to realise that his vocation was not to pastoral work but to scholarship, and, with the support of his bishop, had sought laicisation and married.

When the Margaret Beaufort Institute was founded within the ecumenical Cambridge Theological Federation in 1993, Nicholas was part of the founding group and for the rest of his life took a keen interest in its development. The education and engagement of the laity, which had been so much part of Frank and Maisie’s vision of the Church in the Catholic Evidence Guild and at Sheed and Ward, thus found a concrete expression in the Institute. As it developed, Nicholas began to think that Leo Ward’s chalice, for some years only used for the occasional house Mass, would be more suitably lodged at the Institute rather than gathering dust in a cupboard. He contacted Rosemary Middleton, Frank and Maisie’s daughter, who thoroughly approved of the idea. Thus, in 2004, Rosemary and Nicholas presented the chalice to the first Principal, Sr Bridgret Tighe FMDM, with the hope that it would continue to be used for years to come.

In 2023 When the Margaret Beaufort Institute moved from Grange Road to a smaller temporary location the chalice was given to Janet Lash for safe keeping. Once the Margaret Beaufort Institute was firmly established within the Woolf Institute, the chalice was presented again to the Institute in June 2025 by Janet’s son, Dr Dominic Lash.