OPENING SPEECH PETER RAEDTS at Last the Participants in the British

OPENING SPEECH PETER RAEDTS At last the participants in the British-Dutch colloquium meet in the place, where they should have met all along, on the very spot where British-Dutch cooperation started thirteen hundred and seven years ago. You probably have not noticed it, but the building in which we are gathered, stands on a sandy ridge, to Dutch eyes almost a hill, overlooking what in St Willibrord's days must have been a soggy swamp. On that ridge, St Willibrord built two churches and a monastery inside a Frankish fortress, which was erected there a few years earlier to keep the Frisians in their place. Churches and monastery became the centre of St Willibrord's mission to the Frisians of the Northern Netherlands, for which purpose he had been ordained an archbishop by Pope Scrgius I in Rome on 21 November of the year 695. The fact, however, that St Willibrord's monastery was built inside a Frankish military base may already give you a hint that perhaps I am slightly exaggerating when I refer to his missionary efforts as a first form of British-Dutch cooperation. All of us here present know enough about the rough and ready methods and tactics of the conversion of Northern Europe to the Christian faith, always with the King of the Franks hovering in the background, to realise that it was probably more a matter of the British coercing the Dutch rather than cooperating with them. It is certainly true that St Willibrord quite often had to seek refuge in the abbey of Echternach, founded by him, when things got out of hand in Utrecht and the Dutch put a temporary end to cooperative efforts. It was there that he died in 739. A few years later, somewhere around the year 750, Gregory, the successor of St Willibrord as abbot of the Utrecht monks, founded a school within the compounds of the monastery, a school that soon drew some illustrious pupils, none more so than the young Frisian aristocrat Liudger, whose family's estates were a few miles north of Utrecht. Eventually Liudger became the first bishop of Munster, in the recently conquered territory of the Saxons. But it was in Utrecht that the foundations for his career in the service of the Church and the Frankish empire were laid, first as a pupil of and, later, as master 8 in the school. According to his nephew and biographer Altfrid, Liudger was tireless in raising the school's intellectual standards. He travelled to York in England to study with Alcuin and to collect manuscripts from one of the richest collections in those days for the school library in Utrecht. From these few remaining data about what could be called British-Dutch cooperation, it may be gathered that the result was that by 800 the Utrecht school was one of the more important in Charlemagne's empire. For one of the more colourful members of the Faculty of Theology at Utrecht, the emeritus Professor of Ancient Church History, Gilles ?uispc:l, this was more than enough to conclude that this was the beginning of a continuous tradition of learning and scholarship in Utrecht, that was formalised in 1636 when the University of Utrecht was officially founded. Quispel insists that the founding act of 1636 was nothing more than placing the official seal on an academic tradition that really started as a British- Dutch effort in the 750s, the real beginning of Utrecht University. Being an alumnu.s of Utrecht myself, I believe him wholeheartedly, of course, and I welcome you, therefore, in this ancient seat of British learning, perhaps more ancient than even Oxford or Cambridge. On a more serious note, I would like to say a few words about the theme of our colloquium. When, over a year ago, the members of the Dutch committee met to discuss the topic of this seventh British- Dutch colloquium, it seemed a good idea to choose the theme Pastor bonus for the simple reason that it is quite obvious that no Christian community can be held together without properly trained professionals, priests, ministers, and pastoral assistants. Sociological surveys in coun- tries such as Germany and Austria have shown quite clearly that parishes without a priest become dying communities quite soon, even if there is any number of voluntary workers available to take over some of the duties that used to be performed by the parish clergy. However, since then, things have happened which place the topic of our meeting in quite a new perspective, and gives it a grim actu- ality and an immediate relevance, which we could not then foresee. As you all know, in the past years several churches have experienced problems with their clergy, but none more so than the Roman- Catholic Church, which has been shaken to its very foundations by the unsavoury revelations of structural misbehaviour of many of its priests. This has resulted in a crisis of confidence that may well be worse than that of the 1960s whcn so many priests left the ministry and the Church. These disastrous revelations show two things: first, .

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