The Vatican welcomed an Oriel College delegation during the institution’s seven-hundredth anniversary celebrations.
Provost Lord Mendoza headed the group that visited the Apostolic Palace on September 4th.
Pope Leo XIV received the representatives following his 2025 declaration naming former Oriel fellow Saint John Henry Newman a Doctor of the Church and co-patron of education.
Lord Mendoza expressed gratitude for the papal audience and referenced the Pope’s recent encyclical on artificial intelligence, calling for its governance in accordance with human dignity and the common good.
He noted that Oxford’s tutorial system, which emphasizes direct engagement between instructors and learners, serves as an important safeguard for human judgment in education.
He observed that universities face ongoing challenges regarding teaching methodologies, assessment practices, and student evaluation.
This engagement marked Lord Mendoza’s second meeting with a Pope in his capacity as Oriel’s Provost.
In 2019, he had previously accompanied a British delegation to witness Newman formally canonized by Pope Francis, with the group then led by the individual who was Prince of Wales before ascending to the throne.
Cardinal Eijk, Archbishop of Utrecht, facilitated this week’s audience.
The delegation gifted Pope Leo XIV a seventeenth-century print of Oriel College, which appeared in Oxford’s earliest illustrated publication from 1675.