News

14/04/2001
A very human cardinal
John Wilkins


In Westminster, Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor faces a very different challenge than in Arundel and Brighton, where he was a much-loved bishop for 22 years. The toughest questions about the Church and society confront him. A year after his installation, he shared some reflections with The Tablet's editor.

It is not surprising that Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor does not always seem at home in the marble halls of Archbishop's House, Westminster, where he now resides. For this is an exceptionally human man who does not take to palaces. He has a gift for conviviality, and he meets you on your level. His predecessor, Cardinal Hume, was a monk, who seemed to carry his cell with him wherever he went, and to speak from it, as it were. With Cormac Murphy-O'Connor, what you see is what you get.

He has a brother and a cousin who are priests, and it is as a priest that he is at his most impressive. When he goes to a parish and preaches about the true freedom that is the Christian life, the congregation knows that they are listening to someone who is testifying from experience. When he is talking about the Gospel, he speaks directly heart to heart. When I met him recently in Archbishop's House, beside Westminster Cathedral, he started musing at one point about the sins of modern society. "Money, sex and power: it always comes back to those three. Lust for power is the worst, because it is shaming in a different sort of way. ‘I am me', people say, ‘and it is my truth and my will and my wants that matter.' The Lord said he couldn't forgive that, not because he didn't want to, but because people didn't feel contrite about it."

At the age of 68, when most people are enjoying retirement, he finds himself plucked out of the rural environment of the diocese of Arundel and Brighton, where he was bishop for 22 years, and plunged into the urban stress of cosmopolitan, multi-ethnic London.

He interrogates himself constantly about modern society. "There is a deep unease amongst good people all round the country. There is concern about marriage break-up and the disintegration and fragmentation of the family. And there is anxiety about the young people, caught in the consumerism that consumes them also."

He has made marriage and the family a central plank of his platform. Does he ever have a feeling that William Hague's domestic policies are more attractive than Tony Blair's? He laughs. "I am not going to be drawn into party politics. But just as under Margaret Thatcher the Church of England was a sort of opposition, so the Catholic Church needs to be able to oppose tendencies in government or society." He is particularly concerned that abortion and genetic engineering negate the sanctity and gift of human life. But isn't there a danger that the Catholic Church will come to be seen by society as a pro-life pressure group? "That would be a great pity. Our March statement on the Common Good makes it clear that Catholics should not regard the coming general election as a single-issue referendum. Life issues are of supreme importance but we stress also the dignity of every human person and the perspectives of family and society."

He thinks the political parties are genuine in the surprising initiatives they are taking to court faith groups. They are not just out to catch votes. "The party leaders have a real worry about the fragmentation of society. They want to reanimate the sense of community. That is why they seek to enlist the faith groups, because these are the only people who meet regularly once a week in every town in the country."

The cardinal seems to have recovered from the baptism of fire he underwent at the beginning of his time at Westminster, when he came under concentrated BBC attack, accused of naïvety in his treatment of the paedophile priest Michael Hill. Now he wants to move on, and as part of that process has set up the Nolan inquiry into the Church's guidelines for cases of clerical sexual abuse. He understands the anger he encountered, he says (he admitted at the time that in seeking to rehabilitate Hill he made "a serious mistake"), but thinks one cause of it was that "this society is not familiar with real forgiveness. It lets the News of the World name and shame, but even in paedophile cases we must have forgiveness somewhere." And he would not be human, after his experience, if he did not retain some fear of the media. "The media are very powerful and very important. In a way too important. Suppose for example they switched over and proclaimed that Britain should join the euro zone. People would be swayed."

A suspicion of the media could be an obstacle to evangelisation, however, particularly since the cardinal is determined to speak out on the national stage. "I will try to strike a chord about the kind of society we are breeding. What have we to do if we are to be a healthy nation? What is it that seems to be breaking up? What is it that people feel deep down? I have been heartened to find that people do want to hear about that, and they can't hear it in the same way from politicians."

So perhaps it may not ultimately matter that this is a man without the delicately tuned political antennae of Cardinal Hume. He will try to speak the truth, and people should surely therefore make allowances if he does not go in for slick soundbites. His many friends and admirers will wish him well, for already a year of his term at Westminster has gone by, and there is much to do.

The recent reports by the Queen's Foundation in Birmingham painted a disturbing picture of the Catholic Church in Britain. This survey under the aegis of an ecumenical institution and backed by Catholic bishops found that there was "no national strategy" for dealing with the structural problems such as the decline in vocations, the difficulty in reaching young people and the gap between Church and world. Is he as alarmed about this as the report was? "The answer is no." But surely the Church has to work out a strategy for the future? "The answer is clearly yes. We have to be proactive."

But what then is the strategy? He stresses the growing co-operation between priests and lay people, and the role of women. "In running every parish nowadays, there should be a team of men and women, some of whom will be religious sisters, working with the priest. This collaborative ministry has developed in an extraordinary way over the last 30 years."

Nevertheless, at national level the picture so far remains as it was under Cardinal Hume: there is no pastoral institute to promote renewal and train lay facilitators, no biblical institute, no catechetical institute, no institute for spirituality, and only an embryonic liturgical institute. The Corpus Christi catechetical centre in London, which in the late 1960s and early 1970s promised so well, was later allowed to fade away by Cardinal Heenan, and has never been replaced. Cardinal Murphy-O'Connor is not short of recommendations about what to do, and is exploring the options. He will need to show that he can consult widely, in a way that was not similarly required in his previous diocese of Arundel and Brighton. Any day now he will be receiving two new bishops as auxiliaries, and other changes of staff are imminent.

He refuses to be deterred by the alarming forecasts for the supply of clergy in England and Wales 10 or 15 years from now, during which time the present number of priests is expected to halve. He brushes aside my question about closing down parishes. "England and Malta have a higher proportion of priests to Catholic people than anywhere else in the world. The Church here is not going to crumble because of the shortage of priests." He explains that part of the reason for the drop is the changed situation in Ireland. "When

I was first a bishop 22 years ago, I had many priests who had come straight from Ireland, and most of the older priests were Irish-born. Today, most have been born and bred in England. So has there in fact been such a fall-off in vocations? I doubt it, particularly in the south of England."

Yet there is only one new seminarian in the English College this year, and for the first time for four centuries the Jesuits in England and Wales have no novices. The cardinal does not believe that the celibacy rule is at the root of the vocations crisis, though like Cardinal Hume before him, he has no difficulty in principle in envisaging the ordination to the priesthood of married men. But "you could have married clergy tomorrow and not meet the challenge. Because I think it's really a crisis of faith".

But what strategy do you adopt, then, when you have fewer priests? The cardinal, who has drawn attention by praising Opus Dei, thinks the Church should be more like one of the new movements. "When I was a curate many years ago, I organised in my small parish a community meeting once a month. The participants read the word of God, and looked at how it related to their daily lives. The parish became more itself, a living community. It was less structured than one of the movements, but it developed a much more communitarian communion. If the parishes were to develop in this way, we could use the movements better than they are used now, when they tend to be élitist."

In his homily in Westminster Cathedral for his installation Mass on 22 March last year, Cormac Murphy-O'Connor made joy and hope - the opening words of the Second Vatican Council's constitution on the Church in the modern world, which he chose for his motto - the keynotes. "I do not believe these are gloomy times for the Catholic Church in this country", he told the congregation on that occasion. "When the skies are dark, the light shines more brightly."

The Catholic Church in England and Wales has always had its folk memory, he points out, of being a persecuted minority, and indeed of almost ceasing to exist in the eighteenth century. It knows, therefore, that numbers are not ultimately what counts. "Whether the number of Catholics is going to be great or small, that is up to God and up to the spirituality and the sense of evangelisation of the Catholic people. What concerns me most of all is that we in the Catholic community today should have the generosity and courage which comes from faith. That ultimately is what will draw people to the Church and to priesthood."

This is a good man. Can he recognise, in a Church that has gone too far towards identifying itself as a counter-culture, that the signs of the times are positive as well as negative, as shown in the spiritual search that is widespread, the deepening religious enquiry? Can Cardinal Murphy-O'Connor make that joy and hope real to the Catholics whom he leads?