Cardinal Basil Hume's great achievement as Archbishop of Westminster was to ensure that the Catholic Church in England and Wales, as it slowly absorbed the lessons of Vatican II, was never riven by the dissension and controversy that has damaged the Church in too many other countries. He died on Thursday last aged 76.
This was a tribute to diplomatic skills honed during his 13 years as Abbot of Ampleforth. Elected in 1963, just six months after Vatican II's dramatic opening session, it fell to him to guide his monastic community through the sometimes traumatic process of adjusting to change that was all the more rapid for having been delayed so long. The monastery could easily have become polarised, but thanks to Basil Hume's patience and tact it did not. Born on March 2nd, 1923 at Newcastle-on-Tyne, George Hume (Basil was his name in religion) was educated at Ampleforth, and on leaving school in 1941 at the age of 18 he promptly entered the monastery as a novice. In due course the Benedictines sent him first to Oxford to read history and then to Fribourg in Switzerland to obtain a licentiate in theology.
Back at Ampleforth he became head of the modern languages department and a housemaster, besides coaching the rugby 15. Thanks to his French Catholic mother he was bilingual in French, and also knew German. His Scottish father was a distinguished heart specialist. Despite this distinctly un-English ancestry, Basil Hume always came over as quintessentially English. It was a proud moment for him when in November, 1995, he was able to welcome the reigning monarch to vespers in his cathedral.
His appointment in 1976 to succeed the late Cardinal John Carmel Heenan as Archbishop of Westminster came as a surprise, though this, perhaps, reflected the extent to which metropolitan opinion was out of touch. It is revealing that when Archbishop Bruno Heim, then still apostolic delegate rather than nuncio, asked the then Archbishop of Canterbury, Donald Coggan, who he thought should be appointed, Coggan, who had got to know the Abbot of Ampleforth when he was Archbishop of York, had only this one name to offer. Archbishop Heim rightly regarded Hume's appointment as his best achievement during his 12 years in London.
As a newcomer to the bishops' conference Basil Hume was happy to leave the presidency to his senior colleague, Archbishop George Patrick Dwyer of Birmingham. It was not until 1979 that he was elected president, when he was ably supported by Archbishop Derek Worlock of Liverpool as vice-president. Together they made a formidable team, not least when at the synod on the family in Rome in 1980 they pleaded for a more Christian approach to the problems created by the Church's official (but almost universally flouted) teaching on birth control and by its treatment of the divorced and remarried.
In this the two archbishops had the backing of the National Pastoral Congress which had met in Liverpool earlier that year and which put forward a number of mildly radical suggestions which also covered the ordination of married men, the whole question of the ordination of women, and the admission of non-Catholic spouses to communion on special occasions. To such suggestions the bishops were obliged to give a dusty (though polite) answer when they came to give their response to the nearest the Catholic Church in England and Wales has come to a national pastoral council.
Two years later Cardinal Hume along with his fellow bishops and Cardinal Gordon Gray and the Scottish bishops were able to persuade Pope John Paul II not to cancel his visit to Britain which had come under threat because the United Kingdom was at war with Argentina over the Falkland Islands. That visit was a great success, and the tone of the Pope's speeches in England and Wales - presumably drafted for him by the English and Welsh bishops' conference - was such as to prompt the veteran Rome correspondent of the Times, Peter Nichols, to speak of the emergence of Pope John Paul III.
Throughout, Basil Hume demonstrated a profound loyalty to Rome. But this did not prevent him from questioning the party line when common sense demanded, as when in 1985 he made a powerful plea for the ordination of married men to ensure that Catholic communities were not deprived of the Eucharist.
Nor did this prevent him and his fellow-bishops successfully resisting efforts by Rome to appoint a member of Opus Dei to the vacant See of Northampton in 1989 - through the exercise of what an inside source described as "obsequious diplomacy". Indeed, he had earlier cracked down on Opus Dei's recruitment practices in his own diocese by insisting that no one under 18 should be allowed to join that organisation and that young people should talk the matter over with their families first.
His ecumenical credentials were established right from the start of his period in office at Westminster, when the day he had been ordained a bishop he and his fellow Benedictines joined with their Anglican confreres to celebrate vespers in Westminster Abbey. He played a leading role in bringing the English and Welsh Catholic Church into full membership of the Council of Churches for Britain and Ireland, the successor body to the British Council of Churches, on which the Catholic Church had had merely observer status.
The influx of disaffected Anglicans into the Roman Catholic Church following the Church of England's decision on November 11th, 1992 to allow the ordination of women priests made demands both on his ecumenical commitment and on his powers of diplomacy. He began on the wrong foot by suggesting in an interview with the Tablet that this could be "a big moment of grace, it could be the conversion of England for which we have prayed all these years". (Before the liturgical reforms of Vatican II every Mass in England would end with prayers for the conversion of England.)
It was, after all, merely the defection from the Church of England of a small body which had consistently flouted that Church's discipline. There could be no question of allowing Anglican communities coming over to Rome to have their own liturgy, as had been done in America, because they had for the most part been using the Roman missal anyway, and any suggestion of this was firmly resisted by Cardinal Hume and his fellow bishops. They also ensured that the Anglican influx did not become yet another Church within the Church as extreme Anglo-Catholics had tended to be in the Church of England: the newcomers were to be integrated into the existing Catholic parish structure.
But the cardinal offered a warm welcome to those who decided Rome was now the only option, and held weekly sessions at Archbishop's House for Anglican clergy thinking of moving. The bishops worked out a formula which allowed for the ordination of those accepted for the Roman priesthood while at the same time affirming the validity of their ministry as Anglicans, and Cardinal Hume's own diocese was one which benefited from the ministry of priests who already had considerable pastoral experience and several of whom were married. All this was not allowed to affect the close relationship that had grown up with the Church of England.
Basil Hume also displayed a keen sense of justice. He was instrumental, along with two former Law Lords, Lord Devlin and Lord Scarman, and two former Home Secretaries, Roy Jenkins and Merlyn Rees, in having the cases of the Guildford Four and the Maguire Seven referred to the court of appeal and their convictions quashed. In the wake of this, the Birmingham Six were then officially recognised as yet more victims of a miscarriage of justice.
His interest in the case began with a visit to Wormwood Scrubs in December 1978, when he met Giuseppe Conlon and found it difficult to believe that he was guilty of the crime for which he was imprisoned. There followed a lot of patient investigation and quiet lobbying before justice was at last done.
Basil Hume's great gift was his spirituality. Here was someone who was completely unaffected in regarding the spiritual life as the key to human existence and who gently encouraged others to share that view. He was, above all, a monk, moulded in the Benedictine tradition that did so much to shape western European civilisation.
Typical of the man was the letter in which, just after Easter of this year, he told his priests and the world in general that he had cancer and that it was not in its early stages. Stating his intention of carrying on working as much and as long as he could, while recognising that he would be "a bit limited in what I can do", he said: "Above all, no fuss."
Cardinal Basil Hume: born 1923; died June, 1999.