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Westminster's next Archbishop and the essential move from clericalism to partnership

The Tablet - Tue, Dec 6th 2022

Cardinal Nichols has spoken out in favour of the marginalised.

Westminster's next Archbishop and the essential move from clericalism to partnership

Who will be the next Archbishop of Westminster?-Mazur/cbcew.org.uk

Cardinal Vincent Nichols of Westminster now being more than two years past the retiring age for bishops, Pope Francis is said to be looking for the right man to replace him. This is an opportunity for the Pope to point the Catholic Church in England and Wales, bishops, priests and people, towards his vision of a synodal church “of and for the poor”.

Because Westminster’s territory covers the institutions of central government, the Archbishop of Westminster takes on a leadership role in the Church nationally and is usually also the President of the Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales.

In a media-dominated world where Christian voices are easily drowned out, being a cardinal, which Westminster’s archbishop normally becomes, attracts attention. In a sense, Westminster is already the Church of the poor. Caritas Westminster is doing admirable work in that respect.

Cardinal Nichols has spoken out in favour of the marginalised, notably when he protested that the government’s policy of withdrawing welfare benefits from individuals who failed to keep the rules was “punitive”. Indeed, in 1850 the very first Archbishop of Westminster, Cardinal Nicholas Wiseman, described his role thus: “Close under the Abbey of Westminster there lie concealed labyrinths of lanes and courts, and alleys and slums, nests of ignorance, vice, depravity, and crime as well as of squalor, wretchedness and disease, whose atmosphere is typhus, whose ventilation is cholera, in which swarms a huge and almost countless population, in great measure, nominally at least, Catholic... This is the part of Westminster which alone I covet.”

It is a striking testament, entirely in the Pope Francis mould. Westminster needs an archbishop who can utter an updated version of the same, with similar passion. Wiseman’s successor, Cardinal Henry Edward Manning, waded into the bitter London Dock Strike in 1889 and persuaded the employers that the dockers’ claim, for sixpence an hour, was just. So the Catholic Church was present at the birth of the modern trade union movement.

Manning’s only weapon was a moral one, and the same will be true of Nichols’ replacement. He will need the ability to persuade, to communicate – “preaching the Gospel at all times, using words where necessary” in the words attributed to St Francis. The Catholic Church is undergoing a transformation in its self-understanding. It is waking up to the reserves of untapped talent in the laity, not least among women, that an over-hierarchical, over-clericalised and indeed over-masculine model of the Church has pushed to the margins. It can no longer afford such wastefulness. And the synodal process instigated by Pope Francis needs a leader who can inspire it and infuse it with purpose.

Yet its success will depend not on him but on what energy he can liberate in others. A modern leader is an enabler and an animator. The laity are the true evangelisers of the modern world; they do so on their own account, by virtue of their baptism, and not as agents of the clergy. That change of culture, from benign clericalism to true partnership, is among the biggest challenges that will face a new Archbishop of Westminster.

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