Cardinal Basil Hume wonders whether the extraordinary react ion to the death of Princess Diana might not have represented some kind of spiritual awakening. "It's too easy to write it off as mass hysteria, or something generated by the media . . .", he said.
"If you wandered round the streets as I did and saw all the flowers, and the things written . . . people were very shocked at the death of someone so well known and so well liked." It had made them wonder "Why death?" he thought. "What does it mean?"
He was reminded of the death of Astrid of Belgium, in somewhat similar circumstances. He was young at the time. "She was young and beautiful too, and there was the same kind of reaction."
Though he was in Westminster Abbey for the funeral service, he had heard afterwards that when the Archbishop of Canterbury began the Lord's Prayer "all those people in Hyde Park" joined in.
He felt there was something "residual" there. But it was too early to say what might be evolving from it all.
Cardinal Hume feels there are many more believers than there are people who go to church. "Many more are seeking some kind of faith than perhaps are given credit. I believe that quite profoundly."
Every person is naturally religious, he believes, and each one possesses "that instinct for the spiritual".
He knew Princess Diana. Both shared a concern for the homeless, and she had come to his offices at Westminster "more than once". But he was doubtful of rumours that she was considering becoming a Catholic.
"I never once heard her say anything like that. I don't think she would have thought seriously about it."
Cherie Blair, the British Prime Minister's wife, is, however, a Catholic, while her husband is an Anglican. It has been said that Mr Blair was anxious to receive Holy Communion at Mass along with his wife.
Cardinal Hume said he had written to him about the matter, explaining why he felt people should keep to the rules, i.e., that Mr Blair should not receive Holy Communion in a Catholic Church. And there was "no problem at all", he said.
Though unwilling to comment on the President, Mrs McAleese, taking Communion in Dublin's Christ Church cathedral, as his mandate as a churchman does not extend to Ireland, the cardinal does believe that generally people in positions of leadership should give good example.
It was one of the first principles of Christianity that people respected each other's regulations, he said, and down through the centuries taking the Eucharist was not only a personal receiving of the Lord, but was also a sign of belonging to a particular community. He felt that a lot more dialogue on the issue was needed before the churches could move forward.
It was also his view that there had been a lot of confusion about the Eucharist since the Second Vatican Council, just as there had been after the Reformation. For this reason, the bishops of England and Wales were preparing a document on the Eucharist - to clarify the teaching and explain why it has to be the way it is. (The Irish bishops are doing the same.)
On the issue of inter-church marriage, while recognising the difficulties for the couples involved, Cardinal Hume drew attention to the sacraments they could share, such as baptism and matrimony. His attitude is that within the Catholic Church "there are enormous riches which I would want others to share". It was not a question of one institution versus another, but he thought it important that people should not be deprived of allegiance to "the Chief Shepherd of Rome". He also queried the word "conscience", as used by Catholics who tended to go their own way in these matters. Such a person had to say: "I do not agree with the teaching of the church on this matter." That was a judgment, he said; conscience followed.
On the Irish contribution to the Catholic Church in England and Wales, he thought it "enormous", particularly in his own diocese.
He agreed that being Catholic in England at one time was seen as being Irish, or as being "the Italian mission to England", but that had changed before his time. He traced the change to Cardinal Hinsley, head of the English Catholic Church during the war.
"A rugged Englishman from Yorkshire, very like Churchill ecclesiastically," was how he described him. Catholics had gradually been accepted as part of the English scene since then, with the Irish identified as just one group among emigrant groups who were Catholic, converts, or old English Catholics, going back to penal times, particularly around Lancashire.
But he remembers how in his first 10 years as Archbishop of Westminster, (from 1976) he received letters almost daily about the North. It was "an agony . . . an agonising situation for an awful lot of us." He has often thought that there is more ecumenism in Northern Ireland than anywhere else where church leaders were concerned, though it might be an entirely other situation with some of the people.
He knew Cardinal Tomas O Fiaich very well and liked him a lot, and also knows Cardinal Daly. He thought both men had "a very powerful ecumenical outlook". His involvement with the Guildford Four, and later the Birmingham Six and the Maguire Seven, began when he visited Wormwood Scrubs one Christmas Day and was called over to speak to a man who had emphysema. It was Guiseppe Conlon, who told him the story of how he had left Belfast one morning and ended up in prison in England that evening, where he was to spend the rest of his life. "I just knew the man was innocent. Something had gone badly wrong," the cardinal said. On another visit to the prison "some IRA fellas got me into a corner and said `see those two over there,' - they pointed to Gerry Conlon and one of the Birmingham Six - `they're innocent. We know.' " The IRA men didn't protest their own innocence. He knew then "things had gone wrong".
Years later he met Gerry Conlon, after he had been released, and asked him whether he remembered seeing him [the cardinal] there that Christmas Day. Conlon had. He remembered walking along and saying "There's Father Christmas up there." Cardinal Hume was wearing his robes, he recalled.
At the moment two of the cardinal's preoccupations are the millennium and Third World debt, and they are interlinked. On December 17th last, at a meeting with Gordon Brown, the British Chancellor of the Exchequer, he undertook to contact the Vatican and the presidents of the Catholic Bishops' Conferences in the other G7 countries, about freeing the Third World from its debt burden.
The year 2000 is a jubilee year in the Catholic Church. In a recent Observer article, he recalled that when the Jews celebrated a jubilee every 50 years it was a time when "land would be restored to its owners, slaves freed, and debts forgiven". This was why, in preparing for the millennium, the Pope had singled out the issue of debt. Generally, he thought the millennium was an opportunity for rejuvenation in the church. It was a chance to "change the minds and hearts of all, somehow or other". People like him had to be able to talk in a way which could teach people that Christ was "the way, the truth, and the light".
But where God was concerned "things are opaque at the moment". He thought that people were more interested in religion than they were in the institutional church.
The church's role in the millennium, however, was "to speak to the spiritual void in people". They had to find the language to do so, and the means to do so. He would like "to see the media becoming our allies in this". The TV set had access to more homes than the priest.
But he noted there was a suspicion about institutions generally, possibly, he thought, as a consequence of the war, during which so many western European countries were occupied, and countries to the east were overrun by oppressive tyrannies.
He would not be drawn on whether there might be women priests or married clergy in the Catholic Church, except to say that he had given up looking into a crystal ball. "As far as I am concerned, when I don't see a way forward clearly, I am happy to be one with Peter - the Pope. I find that the safest," he said.
Finally, on the matter of whether the former Bishop of Galway, Dr Eamonn Casey, should be allowed return to Ireland, he felt "unable to make a judgment". The "prudent thing" to do was to leave that to the Irish bishops. But he recalled how just recently he had been telling people at Shelter, the housing agency in Britain, that it had been founded by Dr Casey, when he was a priest in London during the 1960s.
He himself is now president of Shelter, as was his predecessor, Cardinal Heenan, who also attended Dr Casey's installation as Bishop of Kerry.
Cardinal Hume met Dr Casey "on many occasions, and I had great respect for him". He is "well aware of the very sacred thing" entrusted to bishops, but they are human beings. "None of us is perfect," he said. "I always believe in God's forgiveness, in everything."