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Basil Hume: The Monk Cardinal. By Anthony Howard. (London: Headline Book Publishing. 2005. Pp. 342. £29.) In February, 1976, Pope Paul VI reached over the heads of all his bishops in England to select Basil Hume, then Abbot of Ampleforth, to be Archbishop of Westminster. In a profile of Hume published shortly thereafter, I compared the appointment to the selection of Father Theodore Hesburgh of the University of Notre Dame to be Cardinal Terence Cooke's successor as Archbishop of New York. Something unthinkable in the United States became reality in England. Anthony Howard, author of three previous political biographies and a self-described "wistful agnostic ,"describes the behind-the-scenes maneuvering which led to Hume's selection as a "Patricians' Revolt." Calling Hume "the very quintessence of Englishness," this official biography is itself quintessentially English: breezy, fast-paced, and often funny. It is above all a good read. Where but in England could one find a man like Herbert Byrne? For twenty-four years Abbot of Ampleforth (and deeply hurt when, at age 78, his community refused to reelect him for another eight years, and turned to Hume instead), Byrne responded to a novice who announced that he needed to leave the monastery for "wider horizons" by asking: "What's her name?" And could there be a more delightfully English countenance than that of Father Paul Neville, Headmaster of Ampleforth School from 1924 to 1954, known to generations of schoolboys as "Posh Paul" (his photo says it all). "What I am is what you have given," Hume told a packed Abbey church in his farewell sermon before leaving for Westminster. "The gap between what is thought and expected of me and what I know myself to be is considerable and frightening. There are moments in life when one feels very small and in my life this is such a moment. It is good to feel small because I know that whatever I achieve will be God's achievement and not mine." One cannot read these words today without recalling Pope Benedict XVTs words on the day of his election about the cardinals' choice of "a simple, humble worker in the vineyard of the Lord," and his confidence in God's ability to work "even with insufficient means." Priests of that caliber seldom get miters. The son of a nominally Anglican Scots doctor and a devout French Catholic mother, Hurne's first experience of a non-Catholic religious service was his father's Church of England funeral in 1960. Yet as archbishop and cardinal he preached in most of England's ancient cathedrals, never sharing his co-religionists'feeling of having been dispossessed, but simply rejoicing in what, for him, was a shared religious and architectural heritage. More important, for the first time since the Reformation Hume put the Catholic Church in England "on the map," in effect annexing it to the British Establishment. To appreciate this achievement, one must know that as recently as 1935, when Hume's predecessor Cardinal Hinsley twice sent King George V a "loyal address" from his Catholic subjects on the sovereign's Silver Anniversary, the envelope was both times returned from the palace unopened and stamped "Not received ."Hume dissipated this Establishment hostility by a combination of personal charm and deep spirituality. At his death on June 17,1999, Hume was universally acknowledged to be Britain's leading moral authority. Rupert Murdoch's daily Sun, normally replete with sex and scandal, bore the front page headline: "Farewell our Beloved Basil: Friend who touched all our hearts." Howard portrays above all the public man. He describes his subject's cordial but never close relationship with Pope John Paul II, a marked contrast to that which Hume enjoyed with Paul VI. "Always remain a monk," the pontiff told Hume at his appointment. And when he returned to Rome shortly thereafter to be made a cardinal, the Pope said: "Above all, dear Father, be yourself." Hume emerged from that audience in tears-behavior which, when exhibited when he was first elected abbot, had caused the stiff-upper-lip contingent in the monastery to murmur about their new leader's "Gallic temperament. … |
