Members of St Edmund's include cosmologist and Big Bang theorist Georges Lemaître, Lord St John of Fawsley, Archbishop Eamon Martin of Armagh, Bishop John Petit of Menevia, and Olympic Medalists Thorsten Streppelhoff, Marc Weber, Stuart Welch and Simon Amor. Historically, St Edmund's was also the residential college of the university's first Catholic students in two hundred years – most of whom were studying for the Priesthood – after the lifting of the papal prohibition on attendance at the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge in 1895 at the urging of a delegation to Pope Leo XIII led by Baron von Hügel.