The gloomy redbrick residence of the Archbishop of Westminster is decidedly lacking in festive cheer.On the wide ceremonial staircase, flanked by dark portraits of 10 English cardinals, two priests are complaining in mock-lugubrious Father Ted -fashion about the spindly collection of pine branches that has been arranged around a nativity scene.
"We could have done with a better Christmas tree," says one, "It's pretty mangy."
The Edwardian dwelling, on a backstreet adjoining Westminster Cathedral, is full of hushed whispers, sudden draughts, and echoing corridors. I'm ushered into the archbishop's oversized sitting room with its flamingo pink armchairs and standard-issue oil paintings of Rome and saints.
The forbidding mood evaporates when Cormac Murphy-O'Connor, 10th Archbishop of Westminster, arrives from his flat upstairs - tall and lumbering in a black cardigan and clerical shirt - all ruddy cheeks and bonhomie. At 75 and 6ft 4in, he retains the solidity of the young priest who played centre for his seminary's first XV.
Professional priestly demeanour aside, there are reasons why he might be looking particularly content as the year-end approaches. After eight years in the job, 2008 is likely to be his last full year as archbishop before a long-delayed retirement. He could be forgiven for feeling some professional pride too.
Following a shaky start to his tenure, the head of the Roman Catholic Church in England and Wales could lay claim to being Britain's most visible spiritual leader over the past 12 months - almost as likely to be seen on the GMTV sofa or in the Today programme studio as the pulpit of Westminster Cathedral.
While Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury and leader of the Anglican communion, has been forced into an agonised silence by the need to keep warring factions together, the cardinal has cheerily filled the vacuum to lead the charge against what he has described to the Spectator magazine as "Christophobic" policies. Murphy-O'Connor presents the Catholic Church not as some omnipotent "magisterium" but as a beleaguered institution under siege from an aggressive secularism.
He has lobbied for a reduction in the abortion limit from 24 weeks to 20, united with the Anglican bishops in the House of Lords to defeat a euthanasia bill and led a drive against embryonic stem cell research. His high-profile campaign against equality legislation that would oblige Catholic adoption agencies to consider gay couples as potential adoptive parents has even earned him the approval of the Daily Mail. But were the archbishop prey to anything so sinful as pride, it would undoubtedly be tempered by the fact that this campaign was comprehensively defeated when it came to the vote. Despite his threat to close down the agencies, the law came into force in April with no opt-outs.
"I was surprised, really," he says. "I thought that the legislation wasn't necessary. Already it was quite possible for homosexual couples to adopt. This particular act went very far along the road as saying, in law, a homosexual union of a couple was equivalent to a marriage between a man and a woman. [Our opposition to the proposed legislation] was really our convictions about the primacy of the family." So far, the agencies haven't been closed and the Church has until the end of 2008 to comply with the new law but it's clear the cardinal found it an unpleasant encounter.
Not long after his elevation, he spoke bleakly of a secular Britain where Christianity has been "almost vanquished". And, for all the apparent ease of his manner, this austere tone is also in evidence when I ask him if he has a Christmas message for readers of the Financial Times. He offers not an easy moral injunction about giving to charity or repenting your sins but a grand historical sweep: "You'll have to condense it," he warns.
"The Enlightenment - the age of reason - brought about a situation where it was thought that religion and religious values could be put to the periphery - and that economic, technological and scientific progress would solve the problems of mankind. Readers of the FT will realise that this economic success is not enough. Focus on the dignity of the human person, focus on the family, and focus on the transcendent."
The cardinal speaks in long sentences, sidestepping potential pitfalls, and it can be difficult to penetrate the clouds of sermonising generalities and goodwill-to-all-men sentiments. The diplomatic skills that have taken the son of an Irish immigrant doctor to the diocese of Westminster have been honed from an early age. His sensitivity to the media was undoubtedly heightened by bruising encounters with journalists in his first year as Archbishop of Westminster when allegations about the Church and sex abuse were at their peak.
In the early 1980s, when Murphy-O'Connor was Bishop of Brighton and Arundel, it was brought to his attention that one of his priests, Michael Hill, was a paedophile. Instead of reporting Hill to the police, the bishop followed the then prevailing practice of the Catholic Church and arranged for him to be transferred, to an industrial chaplaincy at Gatwick airport, where Murphy-O'Connor believed he would be away from children. Hill, however, abused again and was jailed in 1997 for a series of sexual assaults.
When the case became more widely known, Murphy-O'Connor appeared otherworldly and bumbling - and initially did little to calm the media hue and cry. Did he ever come close to resigning?
"I didn't, really, because I thought [while] the onslaught was against me it was also against the Church as a whole," he says in a comforting burr at odds with the subject matter. "It was a difficult period because, like everyone in the Catholic Church, one felt a certain shame that priests had committed these crimes. They were terrible things to do." But if his media-handling skills seemed clumsy, the steps he took to tackle the scandal were much more sure-footed: he profusely apologised, appointed a commission of the great-and-good and implemented its recommendations for a national office of child protection and police checks on all church workers.
Murphy-O'Connor was born and raised in 1930s Reading, Berkshire, one of six children of a doctor from Cork. Three uncles and two of his four elder brothers became priests. He describes the family as "very devout" and "disciplined" - though a family wine business and a brother, James, who played rugby for Ireland suggests a conviviality in the genes that seems to have survived.
In this milieu, the calling to the priesthood was less a sudden epiphany than a well-trodden career path. "I'd thought of following my father and becoming a doctor, or of becoming a teacher or a concert pianist. But underneath it all, I had been thinking about the priesthood. I still remember being out in the car with my father - he was doing his patient calls. I was, I think, 15. He asked me what did I want to be? And I immediately said, 'A priest.' "
He remembers his boyhood as a time when, "We felt that we were a bit different. We clung together. There was still a lot of suspicion of Catholics among the establishment. You wouldn't have found too many Catholic judges."
Aged 18, Murphy-O'Connor followed two of his brothers to the English College in Rome where, for six years, he studied philosophy and theology. He was ordained in 1956 and appointed to a parish in Portsmouth. At 40, after a decade or so as parish priest and chaplain to the then Bishop of Portsmouth, the Right Reverend Derek Worlock, he was asked to return to Rome as rector of the English College. In December 1977, he was ordained Bishop of Arundel and Brighton where he stayed for 22 years.
The cardinal says he "just likes to be a good shepherd" and would have been content to remain as a humble parish priest. If he does have a steely ambition, it is well hidden: "When I was ordained, my ambition was to look after people in the parish - but it didn't quite turn out like that. At quite a young age I was made a bishop. My ambition has been curtailed by other events so I've had to accept them." He starts half-speaking, half-singing a fatalistic hymn: "You know, Newman's 'Lead, kindly Light, amid th'encircling gloom/ lead thou me on.' "
Murphy-O'Connor was approaching 70 and winding down for retirement when, in 2000, he was the surprise choice to follow the lionised Basil Hume as Archbishop of Westminster. Though he does little to dispel the impression of many religious observers that he would have been happy to retire to practise his golf swing and Chopin's piano works, personal desires count for little when the call from Rome comes. A year after appointment to Westminster, he was made a cardinal. "It was a daunting task - but you take what you're given and you do what you can. When you are cardinal, you come into a new world - whereby you are very close to the Pope - you go to commissions in Rome that help him in his task. Sometimes it's very pressurised."
This summer, as he reached the mandatory retirement age of 75, the cardinal submitted his resignation to Pope Benedict but was asked to stay on for a "year or so". What does he plan to do with his retirement? "If I live, I'll be the only Archbishop of Westminster who retires. All the rest have died in office," he says cheerfully: "I'll still be a cardinal - so I'll still be part of commissions in Rome. I'll certainly have more time for golf but I'll be less distracted by the things of the world and more attracted by things like reading, writing, reflecting. I will do a little pastoral work helping out in parishes."
But, for now, the cardinal is preparing for a Christmas season that will take in a visit to Holloway prison to preach ("the most important thing I'll be doing this Christmas. They are at the bottom of the pile - nobody really cares"), celebrating midnight Mass in Westminster Cathedral for broadcast on Radio 4, and, if he has time, "reading Jeremy Paxman's book about the Royal Family. That's my light reading alongside the latest Encyclical."
This weekend, he'll visit one of his two surviving brothers and his wife and celebrate Mass with their 20 grandchildren. But he'll share his meal on Christmas day with just his immediate spiritual family: the priests of the cathedral and the nuns who cook and clean in his household.
I ask, finally, for a progress report on Pope Benedict XVI - whose theology is reputed to be rather more hard-line than Murphy-O'Connor's selectively liberal instincts. "People now go to Rome not so much to see the Pope but to listen to what he says. Pope John Paul in his gestures and openness captured the imagination of everyone. This pope captures the imagination of the mind and the heart by what he teaches and preaches."
In spite of this endorsement, Murphy-O'Connor is gently subversive in making a case for the ordination of married men: "We have a number of married men in this diocese who are former Anglicans who are already married. If you say to me, 'Do you think the church could change and ordain many married men?' the answer is, 'Yes, it could.' "
As we finish the interview, I ask the cardinal for his memories of the papal conclave in 2005, when he was one of 115 cardinals enclosed in the Sistine Chapel for two days to elect John Paul's successor. For the first time, he seems to bounce from his chair. He gives what, if it didn't come from the lips of a cardinal, might sound like a Vatican conspiracy theory: "Nobody could reach us. Some had mobiles but, if you tried to phone, it didn't work. They blocked the mobile phones. I don't know how they did it but they did. Each day we looked at each other and thought, 'Gosh, some poor man is going to come out of here Pope.' "
And were you relieved it wasn't you? I ask. His eyes twinkle and he throws back his head, turns the colour of his cardinal's galero, and roars with laughter. "Very relieved."
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