The appointment of Cormac Murphy-O'Connor to succeed the impeccably English Basil Hume as archbishop of Westminster has aroused little comment. Although born and bred in Britain, Murphy-O'Connor is Irish in name and accent; after Hume's success in making the Catholic church look much more English, he is a surprising choice. Perhaps England is a more tolerant place than when Hume was appointed in 1976. Moreover, the new archbishop has an abundance of Irish charm and a middle-class background with no trace of the bog. The more interesting question is why such an elderly man was chosen-he is 68 this year-when there were at least three other younger and better-qualified candidates.
To answer this we need to go back to 1963, a year after the revolutionary Second Vatican Council had begun, when a new, very urbane Vatican envoy, Igino Cardinale, arrived in Britain. Rather snobbishly, he pronounced that the sons of Irish bricklayers were no longer suitable for episcopal office. It was not just that the church tended to look more Irish than English; but even more important, a crucial item in the Vatican II agenda was ecumenism. With hopes high in Rome that Anglicans might return to the papal fold, bigoted Irish bishops suddenly became unfashionable. Public school and Oxbridge-educated prelates, who would be able to relate to Anglican bishops, were in favour.
This new policy reached its triumphant culmination when Cardinale's successor, Bruno Heim, the Vatican's expert on heraldry and cocktail-mixing, persuaded Pope Paul VI to appoint Basil Hume, the abbot of Ampleforth, to Westminster. As it happened, the rival candidate-Bishop Derek Worlock-was also perfectly English, although he had attended only a minor public school. Worlock was himself a sign of the times. Formerly the conservative secretary to Cardinal Godfrey, Worlock-a classic apparatchik-soon saw which way the wind was blowing and transformed himself into the new type of liberal bishop keen to implement the Vatican Council's reforms. But his failure to win what would have been his natural prize had important consequences for English Catholics
Two years after Hume's appointment, the indecisive Paul VI died, succeeded-after the brief pontificate of John Paul I-by a young Pole called Karol Wojtyla-like Hume, still in his 50s. A number of liberal theologians had written to newspapers calling for the election of a young, non-Italian pope who was an intellectual and who could also relate to the young and the poor. Hans K?ng and his allies got the man they had specified, but he turned out to be the nightmare rather than the dream appointment.
During the last years of his pontificate, Paul VI, who had been one of the leading reformers at the Council, had become alarmed by the gale of change blowing through the Catholic church, and had already taken a number of steps to try to check progressive policies such as more liberal stances on contraception or clerical celibacy. This was the policy inherited by the Polish John Paul II, who had also been a reforming young bishop at the Council. It was soon realised, though, that he intended to pursue it more vigorously than his predecessor had the will to do.
The English Catholic church remained largely unaffected by the new turn of events. There were several reasons for this. First, the church here had been, ever since the time of Cardinal Manning, one of the most conservative in the world; unlike, say, the Dutch or American church, it was not in the cautious English temperament to change overnight. Second, there was the ecumenical factor: the Anglicans had been singled out by Vatican II as different from other Reformation churches, and it was considered important not to disturb the process of bringing them back into the fold by a lurch to the right. Third, and most important, was the Hume factor.
Hume was not just a holy, humble monk; he was also a wily politician. His public image was carefully nurtured: successfully kept from view were his irascibility (which often spilled into intemperate letters he later regretted), his autocratic style, and his indecisiveness-he once remarked that he sympathised with Robert Runcie, who had been accused of "nailing his colours to the fence." "What else can one do?" complained the cardinal.
Hume had one skeleton in his cupboard about which he was embarrassed: he had become a monk instead of defending his country against Hitler. But it was not cowardice: his motive is more interesting and provides the clue to his character. He had a French mother whose country had surrendered; apparently Hume was convinced that England, too, had no chance. He would therefore be most useful by becoming a priest, to minister to his defeated countrymen. I suspect that he felt far more at home with Chamberlain than with Churchill-just as he must have found the conciliatory Paul VI more congenial than the uncompromising John Paul II. If England had been occupied, no doubt Hume would have been very critical of any resistance which might have endangered English lives, and would have urged cooperation with the enemy.
Hume's job was to implement the Vatican II revolution. But it was not clear what that meant, and Hume was caught between the older monks, who mostly wanted no change, and young monks pressing for more secularisation of monastic life. Hume's instinct for appeasement at Ampleforth accompanied him to Westminster. The aggressors now were not the Germans but the young liberals in the church; and the defeated were the older, pre-Vatican II, generation. Hume himself had been formed in the old church and so his sympathies were divided. But he always saw the Catholic left as the inevitable victor; his task was to appease it in the hope of limiting the damage, of modifying its more extreme demands, which he knew Rome-for now at any rate-would not give in to. As for the right, Hume felt the kind of irritation he would have felt for an English resistance; its implacable opposition could only make the situation much worse. Hume thought that Pope John Paul II, great as he was, was only a Polish interlude before the inevitability of the liberals' triumph. What he failed to see was a new post-Vatican II generation unlike the 1960s generation.
Hume was very effective in keeping the mouths of his more liberal bishops shut and in urging restraint on the left. As a result, he persuaded Rome not to make the conservative appointments being made elsewhere. The comparative restraint of the liberals, unlike in the US, ensured that the British hierarchy remained unscathed. By the time of Hume's death, the hierarchy had changed from being one of the most conservative in the world to being one of the most liberal. It was a remarkable achievement.
Rome was not altogether fooled, but it had a problem. Not only was Hume a cardinal, he was also regarded as the head of the Catholic church in England-a position the Vatican does not officially recognise but has to take into account. Like Margaret Thatcher, who could not exclude all "wets" from her cabinet, the pope had to live with cardinals like Hume, Martini of Milan, and Bernardin of Chicago. While making sure that the sky became increasingly hawkish, the pope couldn't cleanse it of all the doves.
It was not just that Rome had moved decisively to the right. The privileged position enjoyed by English Catholics, thanks to the hope of reunion with the Anglicans, came to an end in 1992 when the Church of England decided to ordain women. Polite discussions continued but Rome no longer took them seriously. Moreover, by the 1990s, the English Catholic church no longer seemed so reassuring. Church attendance was collapsing and vocations to the priesthood were in serious decline. But it was the new liberal programmes of religious education in schools which particularly alarmed Rome. The Vatican had an ally in Maurice Couve de Murville, the conservative archbishop of Birmingham, who was in open opposition to the officially approved textbooks. Unfortunately for Rome, the archbishop was a maverick whose hauteur alienated many of his clergy. It is widely believed that a series of sex scandals among his priests, which he was perceived as not handling well, forced his early retirement just ten days after the death of Hume.
Rome had made one serious effort to bring the English into line when it attempted, ten years ago, to appoint a priest called Andrew Byrne, of Opus Dei, the bogey of Catholic liberals, to Northampton. But it backed off when Hume and at least one other bishop threatened to resign. The one shot the Vatican did fire across Hume's bows was the appointment to Liverpool of Couve de Murville's only able supporter in the hierarchy, Patrick Kelly.
Kelly was the candidate of the right to succeed Hume. The liberal candidates were Vincent Nichols, recently named archbishop-elect of Birmingham, and Timothy Radcliffe of the Dominicans. The pope likes high-profile leaders like himself, but it seems that the lacklustre Kelly was not judged up to it. Murphy-O'Connor was chosen as a caretaker who is good on television and can be relied upon to be more deferential than his Benedictine predecessor.
Nichols, who is highly ambitious, is still only in his mid-50s, with every chance of getting Westminster when Murphy-O'Connor is technically required to resign in seven years. Now that both his patrons-Hume and Worlock-are dead, and with Rome's eyes on him, many are wondering whether Nichols will do what Worlock did in reverse. With the college of cardinals almost all appointed by John Paul II, it is hard to imagine the next pope following very different policies. Nichols knows which way the wind is blowing, and there are signs that he has already begun to trim his sails. An unusually large number of dioceses are soon going to fall vacant; Rome may have lacked names for jobs at the top of the English church, but lower down there are many candidates. And now there is no Hume standing in the way. The next two years are going to be interesting.
