The year 2009 could mark a new turn in our civic and political culture, the first stage of an extended crisis in the Roman Catholic community, or both.Already beyond the normal retirement age of 75, Cardinal Cormac Murphy O'Connor will be leaving in the first few weeks of the year. He plans to spend time as an advisor to the Tony Blair Faith Foundation among other causes.
Murphy O'Connor has always been hampered by the huge and holy stature of his predecessor, Cardinal Basil Hume, a lack of consistent and high-quality advice, and his own relative unpreparedness for the role. All being well, his successor will enter national public life untrammelled by such baggage and at a moment of immense flux: on the legislative agenda will be fresh attempts to introduce euthanasia, the ongoing mess of the Brown-induced credit crunch and European elections fixed for June.
On the church front, within not so many months of his own appointment, the new Archbishop will have helped with the further replacement, due to retirement and ill health, of up to a third of English and Welsh Catholic bishops. In Westminster he will also have to deal with the retirement of around a quarter of his parish clergy. The direction he sets will have lasting implications.
Catholic enthusiasts – whom some might call "conservatives", though these labels never quite tell the whole story – are praying for a new kulturkampf. UK society has become degraded, they say, and needs a new "pro-life", "pro-family" coalition backed by younger Jews, Muslims, evangelicals and Catholics. The existing generation of "life" activists are elderly and low-tech, the new generation must be able and high-tech. Such enthusiasts see their schools under attack by secularising strands in the Labour government and their church's habits questioned aggressively by a religiously illiterate Charity Commission. They look for a fresh – and younger – flock of bishops who will lead a renewal from the front. To find them, many wish to skip the priestly generation who are now in their fifties.
Catholic reformers, meanwhile, (whom you might call "liberals") would prefer something – or someone – more clubbable and acceptable to urban elites. They have worked hard to be accepted in their professions and fear a conservative extension of the current "nightmare" of having to apologise for being a Catholic. They thought that their hard work, and Cardinal Hume's gentility, had won them the right to belong. The unwinnable campaign by some bishops to stop Catholic charities being obliged to open their adoption services to gay couples, though, has left them hurt and righteously angry. It has also left them squirming with embarrassment at metropolitan dinner parties, since the bishops have also asked them to increase their giving to such campaigns and the staff who organise them.
For those concerned with people who lack a voice in our society, however, an urgent concern will become paramount: Cormac Murphy O'Connor can lay some claim to having been the leading public voice for undocumented workers. In the face of the vicious Asylum Bill that is now on the parliamentary agenda, his successor could take up that mantle no matter what his theological hue. At the local level such a stance may be one of necessity as his London church is increasingly packed with those who have travelled from outside the UK in search of gold on London's streets.
Why should this matter to the wider realm? Well, a raft of appointments to episcopal roles from either the "enthusiasts" or "reformers" will almost certainly cause huge internal tension: in the US and elsewhere enthusiastic bishops have taken to attacking their own Catholic politicians for "inadequate orthodoxy" while also taking secularist politicians to task with new resources and the utmost focus. A new Labour government would not enjoy such attention. Meanwhile, appointments concentrated among Catholic reformers would provide a fascinating – and potentially demanding – backdrop to a new Conservative cabinet led by David Cameron. No matter how far-reaching his "social responsibility" agenda, reformers will lament an undermining of the large welfare state that helped them into the UK mainstream. On either account a fundamental Catholic commitment to defend asylum seekers and migrants would add to any government's woes.
Under any of these options the chances of Catholic civil war and fractious public debate will be enhanced. It will be a time of change during which bridge building skills will be in short supply but desperately needed. That's why the Catholic community will be the religious space and civic community to watch as the year unfolds.
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(Source: TGUK)