In an interview marking the occasion, Cardinal Vincent Nichols said the “philosophy” of individual autonomy underpinning the Assisted Dying Bill was “a total heresy”.
Referring to the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill, now under scrutiny in the House of Lords, Cardinal Vincent Nichols said the idea that it “is my autonomous choice what I do” was “just not true.” He said: “We are not born autonomous. We don’t live with autonomy as a principal value, and we should not die with it.”
That philosophy reflects a societal crisis over “identity and belonging,” said Nichols. “People do not know who they are or who they belong to. The counterforce that is being pushed very much is that we don’t belong to anybody,” he told The Tablet in an exclusive interview for his eightieth birthday.
Meeting The Tablet in his spacious, light office in Westminster, he scotches talk of immediate retirement. “I do what I’m told,” he said semi-jocularly, referring to the wait for news of his successor from Rome. “It’s not in my hands so I’m at peace. That’s fine. It’s the way I’ve lived within the Church.”
Born in 1945 in Crosby (now in Liverpool, then Lancashire), the Cardinal entered the Venerable English College in Rome after school. Ordained for the Archdiocese of Liverpool in 1969, he has a long record serving the Church. Aged 46, he became the youngest bishop in the Anglo-Welsh Catholic hierarchy, as an auxiliary of Westminster. By 2000, he was Archbishop of Birmingham. Nine years later, he became Archbishop of Westminster. In 2013, Pope Francis made him Cardinal.
Can he select one highlight from his 12-year-tenure as Cardinal? “The conclave to elect Leo XIV,” he says, without hesitation. It was “a deeply spiritual experience,” even if moving into the Vatican guesthouse for the duration “was worse than getting on an aeroplane. All your luggage went through a detector and your phones were taken. I joked that they even took my electric toothbrush off me. They didn’t but it was that meticulous.”
The upshot was “a lot of freedom from distraction.” He explained: “Think about how long you use your phone for each day – that all becomes free time to ponder and to listen and to talk. It was very profound.”
Global interest in the conclave deepened the sense of fraternity between Catholics and non-Catholics. Leaders at a Churches Together in England leaders’ meeting on Tuesday “were all saying that the election of Pope Leo strangely was a world event. People stopped when they heard there was white smoke. They said, ‘We see the Pope as our brother now.’ That was right across the whole Christian community.”
Other highlights include the declaration of Cardinal St John Henry Newman as a Doctor of the Church and the State Visit of Charles III to Rome. Nichols described the King and Pope praying together as “the healing of an ancient wound.” In 2010, Nichols recalls travelling along the Mall with Pope Benedict XVI in the Popemobile, saying: “I never, ever thought I would see the Union Jack and the Papal flag being flown along the Mall.”
Nichols’ hands rest on a red book – a record of Pope Benedict XVI’s visit to the United Kingdom. Joining 80,000 people praying silently before the Blessed Sacrament with the Pope in Hyde Park was “probably the single most memorable thing of my life,” he recalls. “It was just unforgettable.”
That silent prayer lingers. An Irishwoman told him later she had wept to see television cameras hold the shot of the Eucharist. “Where people gather before the Blessed Sacrament, they know ‘I belong here’. And we belong to each other, a belonging rooted in the mystery of God,” said Nichols. “From that flows the willingness to serve… to have a sense of direction and purpose.”
People come to faith “and are encouraged in their faith, in quite quiet ways,” he added, mentioning Walk with Me, the series of booklets containing Advent and Lenten prayers and scriptural meditations. “I’ve been producing those for 25 years and probably each year 800,000 are distributed. Through prayer, avenues of partnership with other Christians and other faiths open up, because it’s a human truth that we [all] need this inner quiet life: a life of prayer.”
Taking senior Imams, two Sunni and two Shia, to meet Pope Francis in 2017, was an especially powerful moment, “I think, when you get to that level, something is more important than ideas,” he said. “So, what might I regret? Not doing more of that. And probably being too tied up in problems, in conflicts, instead of being able to quietly lead people.”
In hindsight, would he do anything differently? “If I was more aggressive or wanting to dominate, I might have been better as the archbishop, been more upfront, forceful but it’s not who I am.”
Nichols was criticised by IICSA, the independent inquiry into sexual abuse for failures of “compassion” toward survivor victims, for prioritising the Church’s reputation. What was his take-away from the inquiry? He pauses: “Our learning over these years has been difficult, painful and nevertheless fruitful. I first sat down and talked with a group of survivors of abuse 20 years ago, so I’ve been listening and trying to do my best for 20 years.” Listening has become “more and more the practice” in the Church.
He added: “Structurally, we have had three independent studies of how we are doing, of recommendations and frankly, they are far more useful than the IICSA inquiry which had a different focus. In a way, the aim of a lot of these public inquiries is to find somebody to blame.”
Of all the changes in Church safeguarding in the past 20 years, the most important is “a far deeper understanding of the effects of abuse… how profoundly it disrupts or even destroys a person’s capacity for steady relationships with others, for trust and, for some, any sense of trust in God. And that’s terrible.”
Encouraged by Pope Francis, he established the Santa Marta Group to fight human trafficking globally, aided by police forces, governments and NGOs, and the Centre for the Study of Modern Slavery (now the Bakhita Centre) at St Mary’s University Twickenham.
At Bakhita House, the London safe house Nichols opened for trafficked women, he very occasionally drops by (when invited) for supper, cooked by the residents. “I love it,” he said, saying the house team, led by an ex-Metropolitan woman police officer has “created something unique, a family atmosphere, because people can stay for as long as they need to.”
Recovery time, coupled with the help on offer enables women to find the strength to testify against traffickers, he explained. “It’s traumatic,” he said, remembering an abuse survivor who had a job and wife but “went to pieces” while testifying in court against an abuser priest. “He never recovered.”
He plans to keep contact with survivors in retirement, when he lives in the house occupied by the last retired Archbishop of Westminster, Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor. “The most important room is the chapel. The most important thing will be to have a lot more time just to be with the Lord.”
Does Nichols have a bucket list? He once planned to spend his first year in retirement “going to every single Liverpool football match.” Now, he believes “there are too many and they’re too expensive, so that might not happen”.
Above his office door is a frame holding a Liverpool FC shirt, signed by the players. It’s a special edition: “Cardinal,” it reads above the number 11 – for the 11th Archbishop of Westminster.
Perhaps he’ll occasionally sneak into the Kop at Anfield.