IN a recent BBC Radio Four series the former British foreign secretary, Douglas Hurd, described the staid and stuffy Foreign Office he joined as a career diplomat in the early 1950s before becoming a full time politician.

He said it was a Whitehall department characterised by senior employees looking back to the world of empire and colonial rule, and never forward to the nascent European Community a relationship, incidentally, that still bedevils British conservatism.

One of the few things to be said in defence of the Foreign Office, Hurd continued, was the presence of a few individuals who recognised Britain's waning influence and involved themselves in a policy he called the steady management of decline".

That description is peculiarly well suited to parts of the Catholic Church at the moment and, in particular, to the long pontificate of Pope John Paul II.

It is fast becoming taboo within Catholicism to discuss the death of the present Pope. The aggressive conservative lobby, for whom John Paul II has been such an indefatigable champion of moral orthodoxy, interpret all talk of death and succession as akin to treason.

However, the fact remains that the Pope is an old man 76 on his last birthday and in obvious pain at many recent public ceremonies.

No one is seriously suggesting that the Pope is close to death. But he was involved in a cancer scare in 1992 and in a very real sense the curtains are closing on John Paul II's active papacy. To use a sporting analogy the former goalkeeper might understand, we may well be heading into extra time.

CATHOLICISM has been here before, most notably in 1954. Pius XII fell ill in January of that year, saw no one except his doctors, Cardinal Tardini and Archbishop Montini for eight months, but had recovered sufficiently by August to appoint Montini to Milan.

Although he lingered on until October 1958, Pius XII never functioned fully again after the 1954 illness.

Montini in turn, as Pope Paul VI, began to slow down in 1976, withdrawing into himself as he turned 80. The kidnapping and murder of his old friend Aldo Moro took their toll and he was dead within a year, the vigour and vitality of the early years spent.

A close analysis of some of Pope John Paul's actions in recent times indicate that he may be getting his house in order.

In allowing Crossing the Threshold of Hope to be published in 1994, he was letting the public know many of his private thoughts for the first time. Gabriel Daly commented in this newspaper on the "overall autumnal mood" of the book.

Two years on, autumn is slowly but inexorably moving into winter. With the issuing of Evangellum Vitae in March 1995, the philosopher Pope offered the most robust defence of his anti abortion and anti contraception views of his entire papacy.

Finally, in February of this year, new regulations concerning the election of the next Pope were published, maintaining the exclusion of cardinals over 80 and setting the maximum number at 120. Admittedly all these are small steps in themselves, but taken together they indicate the general direction in which this papacy is heading.

PART of the tired look and feel of this pontificate is that the same few people have been around Rome almost as long as the Pope himself.

Special criticism is reserved within some quarters for Cardinal Ratzinger, who is portrayed as the doctrinal disciplinarian of this papacy and one of the prime beneficiaries of John Paul II's centralist papacy. He arrived at the Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith in 1981 and is staying on after an unprecedented third five year term, when the clear norm has been a maximum of two terms of office.

In a declining papacy the instinct is to hold on tight to the policies of the past, to conserve, to hold the line.

Deeper than any of the apparent problems which appear to beset the Catholic Church today the steep decline in ordinations, the almost total disregard of the teaching on artificial contraception and the demand for female ordination is the fact that John Paul II presides over a church more sharply divided than at any time since the Middle Ages.

That loss of essential unity is most marked in places like South America, where Catholicism is divided into two camps conservative Papal loyalists who insist on firm adherence to the letter of the (usually Roman made) law and progressives, sensitive to the needs of the poor and sympathetic to the insights generated by liberation theology.

It looks extremely unlikely that any effort will be made to narrow that gap in the remaining years of this papacy, and so the gulf will continue to widen.

In Father Joe Dunn's book, No Vipers in the Vatican, there is a fascinating account of how the Vatican communicates news and information. The Vatican Press Office, he suggests, exists not to issue comments or interpretations but only denials. Similarly, Osservatore Romano is not really a newspaper in the widely understood sense of the word, but a journal through which official texts and papal addresses are circulated.

Given that hard information about what goes on inside the Vatican and the exact state of the Pope's health is hard to come by, a policy of steadily managing decline may seem attractive to Curial officials in the short term.

The reluctance to admit that there is anything wrong only stores up trouble for the future, ensuring that the next Pope has even more to do to restore the credibility of the Catholic Church.