Prominent Catholic bioethics center in Oxford, England, shuttered amid financial strain
An aerial view of Oxford, England, taken on Oct. 14, 2016. / Credit: Chensiyuan via Wikimedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Washington, D.C. Newsroom, Jul 2, 2025 / 16:17 pm (CNA).
A prominent Catholic bioethics center in Oxford, England, has shut down after nearly 50 years due to financial constraints, according to an announcement from its director, David Albert Jones.
“It is with immense sadness we announce that staff have recently been informed of ‘the closure of the Anscombe Bioethics Centre, Oxford’” Jones wrote in a statement on Anscombe’s website. “This decision has been made on financial grounds by the center’s corporate trustee, the Catholic Trust for England and Wales.”
The center said it is no longer accepting donations and will no longer respond to queries after July 31.
The Anscombe Bioethics Centre is an Oxford-based research institute dedicated to serving the Catholic Church in the United Kingdom and Ireland through its promotion of research on bioethics.
Bioethicists at the center have regularly engaged in global discussion on bioethics, publishing biomedical research and academic books as well as making frequent expert commentary on breaking news stories in the media, including for CNA.
Anscombe is the oldest national institute in bioethics in the British and Irish Isles, according to its website. The center takes its name from Elizabeth Anscombe, a Catholic philosopher who “taught in Oxford and Cambridge, debated with C.S. Lewis, and studied with Wittgenstein [and] was well-known for her defense of human life and for sparking the contemporary revival of virtue ethics.”
Describing the announcement as being “in sorrow but with gratitude and steadfast hope,” Jones thanked Anscombe’s donors, noting that much of its funding had been provided through “the generosity of many thousands of parishioners” across the U.K. as well as the Catholic community in Ireland.
“We would like to emphasize that, though the center is now being closed, these donations have not been wasted but have helped educate and support generations of conscientious health care professionals, clerics, and laypeople over almost 50 years,” Jones wrote. “This support has also helped prevent repeated attempts to legalize euthanasia or assisted suicide in Britain and Ireland from 1993 to the present.”
Even in instances where laws that go against Church teaching on human dignity have passed, Jones noted that “the center has maintained a witness [to] the dignity of human life from conception to natural death.”
“We give thanks to God, and to our patron St. Raphael, for all that has been done through our work,” he said.
While Anscombe will soon no longer be able to provide expert witness on bioethics, Jones encouraged people to make use of its resources made available throughout the years and to continue to “engage with the Scottish Parliament and with the House of Lords as these bodies continue to debate dangerous and ill-thought-out legislation.”
“The burning issues of our day, from IVF to genetic manipulation of humans, to end-of-life decision-making, demand an expert voice to be able to explain the key moral and ethical concerns that are at stake, and to do so in a way that is convincing in the midst of our turbulent and confused culture,” Father Tadeusz Pacholczyk, a senior bioethicist at the National Catholic Bioethics Center, told CNA in reaction to the news.
“The Anscombe Bioethics Centre provided a much-needed voice in the midst of so many of these challenging public debates, not only in Britain but in Europe and beyond,” he continued. “We are all very grateful for the excellent work they offered. Their closing reminds us of the importance of assuring robust and ongoing support for the unique kind of ethical analysis offered by committed Catholics working together in the fields of medical ethics and bioethics.”