There have been no processions of the Party faithful down the avenues to Westminster, nor sounds of gunfire from Eccleston Square. No one has heard the cries of victims of a purge in the cellars of Kensington. Yet a quiet revolution has taken place in England and Wales within the Catholic Church, with the appearance of two new faces in two important cathedrals, at Birmingham and Westminster.

To appreciate the sudden turn of events, one needs to understand the contrast created by two leaderships. The late Cardinal Basil Hume had no time for system, policy, or structure; the Church’s administration was governed by his personal whim, and everything from the future of students for the priesthood to the transfer of parish priests pivoted upon one’s relationship with him. He is often recalled by the laity as a father and guru, but the clergy tell a different story. Cardinal Hume was above all the irascible headmaster of a Benedictine school, and this is how many clergy were received into his study.

With the appointment of the Anglo-Irish Archbishop Cormac Murphy-O’Connor many aristocrats from the Hume establishment were genuinely surprised. Catholic commentators had rushed to be guardians of the Hume archive and legacy, but few had realized that Murphy-O’Connor had been groomed for the post—well out of sight of the intrigues of Westminster. Rome saw, and acceded. Archbishop Murphy-O’Connor was a Roman before he was an Anglo-Irishman. Yet the notes sounded by the new man were markedly different from those put forth by Cardinal Hume. Gone was the pre-eminence of the personal, the cultivation of the baronetcy far from Vatican eyes; in came the rise of the policy, the system, and the structure. The clergy who had suffered a dip in morale under the schoolmaster now perked up to find one of their own on the episcopal throne.

For Archbishop Vincent Nichols, the decisive moment may have occurred last October at the European Synod. At the synod his interventions charmed the older cardinals, who saw in this young man one who could be trusted to transmit a legacy. His carefully arranged residence within Vatican City helped enormously. An escape from the prying gaze of the English College in Rome facilitated his adoption. Archbishop Nichols was approached by several cardinals, and he gradually learned to respect and finally to imbibe the view from Rome.

So the stage is set for a remarkable transition in the Church of England and Wales.

At last, a system
Archbishops Cormac Murphy-O’Connor and Vincent Nichols have been seen by the aging staff of the Anglo-Catholic periodical the Tablet as the heirs apparent to the late Cardinal Hume. If the truth be told, plaudits are due to that periodical for the editors’ extensive campaign to have a protégé of the cardinal installed in his place—even if the campaign was rather too obviously designed to continue the legacy, and extend the mantle of protection accorded to the paper’s liberal writers. The problem was much more subtle, however, than the Tablet calculated, for Cardinal Hume was a father to many orphans.

Furthermore, it was not altogether clear to whom Cardinal Hume had confided the future of his little empire in the green and pleasant land. As is so often the case, there was one story in Rome and another in London. Observers in London pointed to the much-groomed Archbishop Nichols; observers in Rome pointed to the able Archbishop Murphy-O’Connor. Remarkably enough Cardinal Hume himself had kept his final decision a secret even from his closest circle of favorites.

And indeed, if the confidences of one senior clergyman of Westminster are anything to go by, Cardinal Hume did have his favorites. The cause for his canonization suffered a setback recently with the publication this year (in the April edition of Prospect magazine) of a “reassessment” of the Hume years in this country. The article was anonymous, but it is widely believed that the author was a Benedictine confrere of the late cardinal at Ampleforth. It recalled the cardinal’s policy of appeasement toward liberal theologians, with had come to light with the rather grubby publication of his letters in the Lavinia Byrne affair. (Byrne had quit her religious order after coming under pressure from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith for the unorthodox views she expressed in her book Woman at the Altar. Cardinal Hume had done his best to protect her from the Vatican inquiry, and she repaid his kindness by publishing the letters he wrote to Rome on her behalf.) And the Prospect appraisal also gave voice to the reservations that had often been expressed by the backroom boys of his archdiocese about the style of Cardinal Hume’s leadership inside and outside Westminster.

Cardinal Hume regarded himself as a kind of father figure to his favorites but this role was played to the needy; his adopted sons had to need him and thus enable him to enfranchise them through the bestowal of his favor. “This archdiocese was run on personal whim,” commented one clergyman. He explained that the cardinal was so convinced of his own mythological aura as father and guru that he felt he could simply “look into the eyes of his courtier and pronounce his innocence.” That sort of approach might sound marvelous if one is writing about Merlin, but it was a disaster when the cardinal was called to deal with the odd nefarious pedophile who had secreted himself among the ranks of his clergy. “The cardinal had no time for system, policy, or structure,” explained our informant; “the entire machinery of the archdiocese was built upon one’s relationship with him.”

The late cardinal did have his informal consultors. For discussions of canon law he received visits three times a week from Bishop Peter Smith of East Anglia, and for other business of a more political nature he phoned Bishop Vincent Nichols most evenings. (The former has been compared to Giordano Bruno at the court of Elizabeth I, the latter to Richelieu at the court of Versailles.) The cardinal also maintained an inner circle of admirers among the clergy. The able bodied Father Pat Browne, headhunter for the archdiocese, and the refugee from Opus Dei, Vladimir Feltzmann, have been identified as belonging to this set, whose members are now grieving the loss of their father and patron. Clergymen who were not so privileged complained that interviews with the late cardinal were tantamount to meetings with the headmaster at school.

Morale dipped in the last decade of Cardinal Hume’s rule as clergy came to be regarded as part of the problem, not part of the solution. The reward mechanisms, too, suffered as the late cardinal forged an alliance with the aristocracy and the professional busybodies. Some priests were relieved, then, to see the headmaster replaced by one of their own: a diocesan priest turned bishop.

“It was impossible to run the system as a system,” my interlocutor explained. He continued:

The whole edifice was built on whether one was liked or disliked by the cardinal. Take the interviewing of candidates for the priesthood, for example. This year we have twelve who have applied to the seminary, one of whom is HIV positive. Under Basil all would have been admitted—on the grounds of a privileged few moments in the presence of the cardinal. There was no policy, no criteria—just a staring into the eyes and a pronouncement. This new man, though, has rejected six of the candidates and let it be known that there are certain kinds of candidates who are unsuitable as a matter of policy: recent converts, men who have not lived continently for a period after a sexual relationship, and homosexuals.

The editor of the Catholic Herald had spotted the implications of the change at Westminster, and suggested three motives for the Vatican choice of Murphy-O’Connor. First he mentioned the new archbishop’s undaunted interest in ecumenism, which endures despite the fact that many in and out of the Catholic Church now regard ecumenism as yesterday’s word. Next he pointed to the new man’s Anglo-Irish background, which makes him a powerful symbol for the political rapprochement taking place between the two islands. Third he alluded to his Romanitas, which made him a very able understudy to Cardinal Hume and a useful instrument for the Vatican.

The Catholic Herald was the first of the Catholic newspapers to sound a mixed note about the Hume years when it solemnly intoned “The era of Anglo-French Benedictine independence has been brought to a successful close and a new era of greater cooperation with Rome has been ushered in.”

Archbishop Murphy-O’Connor struck up a different tune within hours of his appointment. When asked by journalists how it felt to be the leader of Britain’s Roman Catholics, he responded “I should just like to make it clear from the start that I am not the leader of the Catholic Church in this country.” Cardinal Hume would have relished the question; Archbishop Murphy-O’Connor struck a much humbler note. Nor will his prospects be seriously damaged in the long term by the debacle in his recent interview with the Guardian, when—apparently without preparation—he tried to make a distinction between the dogma that prohibits the ordination of women and the discipline of priestly celibacy. (The distinction was lost on the reporter, and a media storm ensued when the archbishop seemed to be implying that celibacy was on the way out.) Irish charm may not be enough to guarantee victory in theological discussions on issues such as celibacy, but it does go a long way to ensure one’s good standing with the rank-and-file clergy. Gone is the shadow of the irascible headmaster from Ampleforth. Our senior Westminster clergyman put it succinctly: “The clergy feel much more comfortable with Cormac; they know he is one of them, and they know he is rewarding them with a greater say in the running of the archdiocese.” There are happy faces all around at Party headquarters.

Birmingham and beyond
Recently the Tablet has taken a dislike for the new Archbishop of Birmingham and tarred him as a conservative (in the nicest possible way, of course). The editor did not take kindly, it seems, to having then-Bishop Vincent Nichols write snooty letters to the periodical from the far pavilions of the Eternal City during the days of the European Synod. And those letters were all the more unwelcome because the bishop seemed to be making a point of correcting the writers who had once been his own allies.

Vincent Nichols was not the needy type, and therefore not the favored son of Cardinal Hume that everyone—at least on this side of the Alps—took him to be. In fact the decisive moment for Archbishop Nichols came during that stay in Rome last October when he attended the European Synod. His residence within Vatican City, at the house built to accommodate cardinals during papal conclaves, helped enormously. His speeches at the Synod on the traditional subjects of death, judgment, heaven, and hell won him new friends within the Vatican.

Indeed the young bishop has a style that might appeal to a veteran of the Roman Curia. It has often been remarked even by his close friends that Archbishop Nichols is polished almost beyond belief, and very political. “He keeps his cards so close to his chest that not even he can see them,” my old friend remarked.

During his stay in Rome, the soon-to-be Archbishop of Birmingham made a new friend, the Secretary for the Synod of Bishops, Cardinal Jan Schotte —who later turned up at Archbishop Nichols’s installation in Birmingham. There the cardinal astonished the assembled clergy—the papal nuncio, the other members of the country’s hierarchy, and priests of Birmingham—by setting forth what amounted to a new five-year plan for the archdiocese, calling for heavy emphasis on catechesis, education, and the transmission of the faith—and a good deal less social commentary.

The next five years promise to be very interesting ones for the Church in England and Wales.