There
has been some difficulty in arranging this meeting with the Archbishop
of Westminster.
There
also appeared to be difficulty with the formula of the piece.
Nearly
every interviewee in this slot is taken out to lunch and part of the fun
is to conduct a conversation with some eminent person while he or she
chooses their food.
Being someone who enjoys lunch as my main meal of
the day, there could be few more pleasurable assignments than to be paid
to eat.
But the last person I interviewed for this page, the writer Paulo Coelho,
announced, when I had flown to Geneva to buy him the poshest lunch this
paper could afford, that he never ate in the middle of the day. The
most I could do was to coax him to eat a boiled egg.
The Most
Reverend Vincent Gerard Nichols, who was installed as Archbishop of
Westminster in May last year, went further. He announced in advance that
he would only have tea with me.
When I began to slaver over the
prospect of tea at the Ritz, with mounds of little sandwiches, three
types of cake, and possibly a hot savoury, the press office for the
Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Westminster said the collation would be
consumed at the Archbishop’s House.
Was this because the
Archbishop, like the Holy Father himself, was too rarefied a being to be
seen eating in public? Evidently not.
When I arrive for the
Archbishop’s tea party, he has clearly heard nothing about the
possibility of being taken out to eat.
Evidently, his minders had not
thought anything was to be gained by allowing me to buy him a fine
lunch. A pity.
I recollect the very first Archbishop of Westminster,
Cardinal Wiseman (who was appointed in 1850, when the Pope restored the
Roman Catholic hierarchy in England) was said to “have his lobster salad
side”.
Vincent
Nichols, a very amiable, modest, smiling priest, evidently has no
lobster salad side or, indeed, any side at all. We take our tea at the
Archbishop’s House, which lurks behind the great red-brick cathedral
(completed in 1903) in Westminster.
The house is a lugubrious,
institutional residence. The walls are hung with bad portraits of
previous archbishops (and an even worse one of the current Pope).
I
am shown into the bleakest of reception rooms.
The Archbishop, wearing
one of those black suits only seen on Catholic priests, begins by
saying, “May I ask you a personal question?” My heart plunges to my
boots. He is going to ask if I believe in God or, more embarrassingly,
whether I have ever considered joining the Roman Catholic church.
After
all, in 1966, when the writer and broadcaster Malcolm Muggeridge
interviewed John Heenan, then Archbishop of Westminster, for a BBC
documentary in this house, he referred to the prelate’s role as a
proselytizer.
“I loathe that word,” snapped back Heenan memorably.
“Presumably,” Muggeridge pressed him, “you want more people to become
Roman Catholics?” “Yes,” said Heenan, rather splendidly in my opinion.
“I want everybody to.” (And, many years later, Muggeridge did become a
Roman Catholic.)
The presence of a new RC archbishop in
Westminster caused enormous controversy in the 19th century. The very
act of setting up a hierarchy of RC bishops was described at the time as
the “papal aggression”.
Was conversion, perhaps, Nichols’s aim in
luring me to tea in his house, rather than allowing me the Fountain
Restaurant at Fortnum & Mason, where a protestant can eat his
knickerbocker glory in freedom? Evidently not.
“Every time I’ve
seen your name in the paper. I’m reminded of a book from a
fellow-student of my father’s at Strawberry Hill called AN Wilson.”
The
personal question he wants to ask me, it seems, is whether I am the
author of that book.
I have written many books; what, I ask, was the
title of the book?
“I can’t remember. I think it was a scripture
text. My father studied with this AN Wilson.”
Vincent Nichols has just
turned 65. His father must have been born at least 85 years ago. Aware
that time makes ravages even on the vainest of journalists, I explain
that I am five years younger than the Archbishop and he seems to take my
word for this. It comes as a relief.
I still feel it worth trying
to get to grips with whether Vincent Nichols, like his predecessors,
hopes or believes that we all should submit to the Pope.
The Pontiff
has, after all, set up an “ordinariate” so that members of the Church of
England who do not like women priests can join the Roman Catholics en
masse.
(Shortly after we meet, five bishops of the Church of England do
take up the Pope’s offer, and will convert.)
I begin by asking
about women priests. Many Roman Catholic friends tell me they see
nothing wrong with the ordination of women – indeed, that they would
welcome it in their church.
Archbishop Nichols takes a rather different
view – one that is not merely old-fashioned but practically Bronze Age
in its pre-feminism: “A Catholic understanding of priesthood is so
strongly rooted in the historic actions of Jesus and in all their
antecedents in the place of sacrifice in life. And those things ... they
are rooted to the role of the man. You know, in some ways, the celibacy
tradition goes back to the tribe of Levi and, certainly, sacrifice and
the notion of sacrifice. In the Old Testament, the shedding of blood was
for a man to perform. It was not for the woman, who gave life.”
I
get my point in: but if we speak of the Sacrifice of the Mass, that is
surely symbolic language. We are not talking about priests wielding
knives on stone altars?
“And then” – Nichols goes on, taking a
bite of the Victoria sponge – “you have this iconography of Jesus Christ
who stands in this spousal relationship bringing his people as [the]
bride, to the Father. And some of those things are quite difficult to
unpack, and I have a sense that some of those things are quite deep and
not going to be changed by someone having an argument about who had a
right to be a priest.”
I bring up the argument, made to me by
prominent Roman Catholics, that there just aren’t enough men training to
be priests.
At some point, the church will have to admit women to make
up the numbers, I suggest.
“It depends,” the Archbishop says.
“I don’t
know the situation in France or Germany but I know in this country we
have never had a tradition of providing ourselves with enough priests.
Hence the strong tradition of an Irish priesthood in this country.”
I
pause. This is the moment when a killer interviewer would point out
that the Irish church has imploded but, somehow, he seems such a nice
man that the words “child abuse” simply will not form on my lips.
Sheepishly,
I say that the readers will want to know what we are eating. “I don’t
know,” laughs Nichols good-naturedly.
“He” – pointing at the press
officer who hovers in the background – “chose the cakes. They were
bought in some shop. What would you call this, do you suppose?” Sponge
cake. “And that?”
It’s a chocolate brownie, I say.
“That’s it!” – more nervous laughter, as if the word were somehow esoteric.
Don’t you, I ask, have a cook?
“I am looked after very nicely by nuns. La Sagesse, the Daughters of Wisdom.”
Do they make breakfast, lunch and tea?
“We muck in a bit, actually.”
How many nuns?
“There’s two, actually.”
The
“actually” seems a bit apologetic. Was this twice as many nuns as he
needed or a pathetically small number?
I revert to asking about the
numbers training for the priesthood. He tells me there are more than
200.
“It is an upward trend ... In this country I would not be convinced
by the argument that there was a shortage of priests.”
Even
without the Irish?
“In this country we have the third highest ratio of
priests to laity in the world. We have been spoiled.”
Perhaps too
persistently, I try to get him to say that we should all be joining his
church and accepting the Pope. In fact, as Nichols tells me: “I think he
[the Pope] is more at ease with the diversity of expression of Catholic
truth than we are. I think he knows that the Catholic face can have
many expressions.”
Does that mean that the role of an archbishop
of Westminster is no longer to convert England to Catholicism but to
look after the foreigners who happen to live in England?
“Here you have
this multicultural, multiracial Catholicism. In the Popemobile as we
drove about the streets [during the Pope’s visit] quite a bit of the
conversation ... was spotting the different flags in the Mall. We have
60 different chaplaincies in London for different languages.”
I
get him back on track with another question about the ordinariate and
this idea that the Anglicans can come to Rome en masse? “It feeds the
wider ecumenical quest,” he says.
We change the subject from the
esoterically churchy to the wider question of the archbishop’s role in
the world.
I suggest that Cardinal Manning, Archbishop of Westminster
from 1865-1892, would have advocated voting for the Labour party because
he would have feared the effect of the coalition government’s cuts on
the poor.
“He would, but the social setting today is so utterly
different that I don’t think you could apply his thinking today. I
remember as a young priest in Liverpool hearing about the condition of
workers in the docks and there was no justice. But we are not in that
situation today, the comments are not exactly applicable. It is right,
great care has to be taken about the impact of the cuts and to keep in
mind that the great majority [affected] are in public employment, or are
students, and the impact could be dreadful.”
The Archbishop has
wisely ignored my invitation for him to put his foot in it by getting
involved in party politics. He talks instead about a conference in the
City of London last month in which the chief executive of the Financial
Services Authority and City bigwigs were talking about the social
responsibilities of the very wealthy.
“The people I’ve met in the
financial world are profoundly good people and they are sensitive to
that [issue].”
I ask about his childhood.
“I grew up in Crosby,
which is the north side of Liverpool. When I was recovering from an
illness at the age of 10, someone in hospital asked me where I was from.
‘Ah,’ they replied, when I told them. ‘Posh Crosby.’ ‘Crosby’s not
posh,’ I said. ‘Yes it is, there are trees in the street.’”
I ask if he knew the very hard days in Liverpool, when Catholics and Protestants threw things at one another.
“I
remember as a young priest going out to take Holy Communion to the sick
on a Friday afternoon. Two men standing at the door said, ‘We’ll come
with you.’ They’d been doing it for 20 years since it was actually
necessary to escort a priest with the Blessed Sacrament and protect him
... No, I did not know bad times”.
Other things have changed since
Nichols was young, I point out. Back then huge numbers of Catholics
went to mass frequently, if not daily. What happened to stop it? Nichols
tactfully attributes it to the demolition of slums in the inner cities.
“All those crowded areas of people produced those people – those areas
were dispersed.”
So, you are an optimist, I say.
“Well, it’s a struggle.”
I
move on to something more cheery, the rumour that Nichols is likely to
get a promotion soon. Have you been told you are going to be a cardinal?
“No.”
Surely it is inevitable that you will be given the cardinal’s hat soon?
“It would be with the job, not because of any qualities of ... ” his voice trails off.
As I make my way out of the room, he offers me a souvenir Papal umbrella, adorned with the words of Cardinal Newman, the English Catholic convert who was beatified during the Pope’s visit: “Heart speaks to heart.”
“We
have been surprised in recent surveys,” he volunteers. “There are more
Catholics than we realised. Regular mass attendance has gone down but
there is a lot of vitality.
“After the Pope’s visit we have seen
plenty of evidence that faith in God is important to people and the
Catholic faith has vitality in it. The silence speaks to people: the
period of silence – 80,000 or 90,000 people in Hyde Park in silent
prayer before the Blessed Sacrament – no one who was present will ever
ever forget that. The utter silence in the middle of London.”
We look at one another and realise the interview is at an end.
“Amen,” he says with a friendly laugh.
“Thank you.”
SIC: FT/UK