Farm Street

A good deal of the light and power of British Roman Catholicism emanates from an undistinguished-looking church and a drab, red brick building close by London's Berkeley Square. The church is officially called the Church of the Immaculate Conception and the building is headquarters of the English Jesuits, but both together are much better known as Farm Street. Farm Street's back door is the gateway through which pass the more notable British converts to Catholicism.*

First with the Best. It was not always so. The Jesuits had no permanent headquarters in England until the mid-19th century, when official tolerance at last encouraged them to establish one. In 1840 a delegation of Jesuit priests, cautiously clad in secular clothes with top hats, paid -L-5,800 for the Farm Street leasehold in what was then a stifling congestion of stables and cab-choked cobble streets. But as Mayfair spread out and the Edwardian upper crust turned the stables into mews flats, Farm Street became top-drawer. The best known Farm Street figure of this elegant era was handsome, well-born Father Bernard Vaughan, whose sermons packed such dramatic punch that professional actors came to church for pointers.

Today Farm Street still maintains the tradition of getting there first with the best of the Catholic point of view on everything from euthanasia to the Kinsey Report. One of its priests recently outlined Farm Street's function as "presenting the Catholic religion in modern terms to the intelligentsia of the day and answering any attacks made upon Catholics.'' Immaculate Conception is no parish church; it contains no baptismal font and performs no marriages. Instead, its 20-odd priests in residence handle a tough, three-part assignment: 1) administering (under Father Desmond Boyle) the 903 members of the Jesuit Order in England, Scotland, Wales, Rhodesia and British Guiana, 2) publishing (under Father Philip Caraman) a highbrow monthly called The Month and extending the ministry to the literate with lectures, newspaper articles, radio broadcasts, etc., 3) preaching and instructing converts.

Just a Job. Last week Farm Street got a new boss. Tall, spindle-faced Father Leo Belton, 63, is a shy scholar who has spent 24 years in the capacities of teacher, chaplain and headmaster at Stonyhurst, a Jesuit school for boys. Though he is almost painfully reserved, Father Belton seems to have no qualms about his new role as head of his order's most active newsmaker. He accepts it as one more opportunity to fulfill his vow of obedience.

"There's no such thing as a promotion in the Jesuit Order," he said last week. "One year you might be head of a college, the next you might be director of boys' games. Now I am superior of Farm Street, a famous church, but it is just a job to be done. I won't change anything; it will go on as it always has--a pool of information and assistance, ready to be drawn upon whenever it is needed."

*Among them: Novelist Evelyn Waugh, Pamela Churchill, ex-daughter-in-law of Sir Winston, Murder-Trial Lawyer John Maude.

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