News

Hilary Punnett, Director of the Christ Church Cathedral Singers, has been appointed as Assistant Director of Music at St Paul’s Cathedral.

Your generosity at our Christmas services this year raised an amazing £5690 for two charities, Oxford Community Emergency Foodbank and Acts 435.

We are delighted to announce that £1400 raised from coins dropped into the Cathedral fountain by our visitors will be used by the UK charity WaterHarvest to help remote communities in Ghana and Uganda access clean water.

Our Frideswide Voices chorister Jihyo will compete in the Semi-Finals of the BBC Young Chorister of the Year competition this Sunday on BBC One.

Dignitaries including the High Sheriff, the Vice Lord Lieutenant and senior judges from Oxford and beyond gathered at Christ Church Cathedral on Tuesday evening to mark the beginning of the legal year in a tradition dating to the 1500s.

Christ Church Cathedral is delighted to announce a new outreach partnership with the Dr Martin Clarke Young Organ Scholars' Trust (YOST). YOST is a registered charity working to train and support the next generation of young organists, with the aim of widening access to organ education and preserving the UK's rich cultural heritage of church music. 

The Revd Canon Dr Sally Welch, our Diocesan Canon, has been appointed as the new Vicar of the Benefice of Kington St Mary with Huntington, Old Radnor, Kinnerton and Titley in the Diocese of Hereford.

Christ Church Cathedral’s girl choristers, Frideswide Voices, set off for Dublin this Saturday for their choir tour.

We are excited to launch a new walking pilgrimage route from Oxford to Reading along the Thames Path named after Oxford’s patron saint. St Frideswide's Way begins at the shrine in the Cathedral, which once brought medieval pilgrims from far and wide to Oxford. The route follows a picturesque 40-mile stretch of the Thames Path, with stops along the way at 24 different churches in Oxfordshire and Berkshire's riverside towns and villages, including Abingdon, Dorchester, Wallingford, Goring and Pangbourne. 

A special service of celebration took place in the Cathedral last Sunday to mark thirty years since women were first ordained as Church of England Priests in the Diocese of Oxford. While women could be ordained as Deacons from 1987, it was not until later that they were able to become Priests permitted to celebrate sacraments such as Holy Communion. The first ordinations of women in the Diocese of Oxford took place on April 16th and 17th 1994 in Abingdon, High Wycombe, Reading, Banbury, Buckingham and Oxford. The service was led by the Diocese’s first female Bishop, The Rt Revd Olivia Graham, Bishop of Reading; while the first female Dean of Christ Church, The Very Revd Professor Sarah Foot, served as liturgical Deacon. 

We are excited to take the first steps of a long-term project to commission a new organ for the Cathedral's East end. The new instrument will be designed to accompany the choir during worship and concerts as a complement to the Rieger organ at the west end, which will continue to be used for congregational singing and solo pieces. The commissioning process will begin next week with floor surveys of the proposed location for the new instrument. Our current chancel organ, rented from charity Pipe Up For Pipe Organs, will be removed to allow this critical work to take place. We are excited to work with our new organist to take the project to its next stages, following their appointment later this year.

Our Peter Eugene Ball sculpture Madonna will now watch over the prayers of our visitors, thanks to a new votive stand crafted from a tree from Christ Church Meadow.

A special bilingual service of Holy Communion was celebrated in both English and British Sign Language simultaneously last week for Sign Language Week.

Music composed by women will be played by our organists at every accompanied service sung by the Cathedral Choir and Frideswide Voices in the next month as part of our celebrations of International Women’s Day.