Catholic World News News Feature

Waiting in Liverpool January 09, 2002

By Kevin Grant

Liverpool’s Archbishop Derek Worlock died in February. His death was hardly a surprise; it came after a protracted struggle with cancer. To the date of this writing the Vatican has not chosen his successor--a delay that has raised some eyebrows among the Catholics of Great Britain. But the murmurs of impatience were being drowned out, as Catholic World Report went to press, by a bitter controversy which led to the Catholic Herald making a fulsome apology for a columnist’s attack on the late metropolitan.

The trouble was sparked by novelist Alice Thomas Ellis, whose final contribution as a regular Herald columnist was headed "My War Against Worlock." "It seems that people are wondering about the delay in appointing a new Archbishop of Liverpool and there are fears that it may indicate a repudiation of the work of Derek Worlock," she wrote. "If it doesn't, it should. The last thing in the world faithful Liverpudlian Catholics want is another ‘progressive’ in that position."

She referred to fear that the delay in naming a new archbishop indicated a repudiation of Worlock's work. "If it doesn't, it should," she wrote. She attacked his ecumenism as a mixing of the pure and strong with something weak and polluted. She defended her attack on a man lately dead by saying that he had refused point-blank to be questioned while he was alive.

While the late archbishop had been widely praised for his contributions to the ecumenical movement, the Ellis column could a decidedly different view: "But look what he did for the ecumenical movement," his friends cry. "And look what he did to the Church," we respond....Ecumenism seems to mean taking something pure and strong, mixing it up with something weak and polluted, slashing it about, watching the churches empty and then congratulating yourself on your progress.

[For a further discussion of the fallout from the Ellis column--including the widespread perception that the Herald columnist was fired on orders from Cardinal Hume--see "World Watch," page XX.]

OUTRAGED REACTIONS

The controversy ran forward in reports and letters in the Daily Telegraph. Their "Churches" correspondent said Ellis' article would provoke outrage among Catholics and Anglicans who viewed Archbishop Worlock as a saintly man who had rescued Liverpool from sectarian and racial violence. And Anglican Bishop David Sheppard told the paper that he thought Alice Thomas Ellis had "a personal agenda" against his late Catholic counterpart.

In a bizarrely expressed apology, the acting editor of the Catholic Herald, Harry Coen, said he would not be going to confession over publishing the article, but he recognized that such a personal attack on a well-loved figure, so soon after his death, had been insensitive and had caused much distress among his former flock.

Catholic World Report's own occasional contributor Bart Harrington weighed in to support Alice Thomas Ellis in a Telegraph letter, particularly on the grounds that the religious-education resource Weaving the Web--which was 12 percent essential Catholicism, 26 percent other Christian religions and 62 percent other faiths--had originated in Liverpool under the direction of the late archbishop. Miss Ellis herself wrote that it was not a question of personalities that she and "millions of orthodox Catholics" were concerned with, but the integrity of the Catholic faith.

Kenneth Platt, who reproached me for my respectful Catholic World Report note on Derek Worlock's death in a letter in our May issue, also joined the Telegraph debate on Ellis' side, attacking the late archbishop for "failure to promote Catholic teaching on contraception, abortion, and other moral issues." But Catholic Times editor Norman Cresswell wrote in the Telegraph that it was not Archbishop Worlock we should be judging, but the city of Liverpool which he had inherited: "gutted... strike-ridden, hate-ridden, and full of self-loathing."

I believe I stand as firmly for traditional Catholic beliefs and for the Pope's authority as any of the late archbishop's critics (as some of them would agree), but I think a remark that Cardinal Hume included in his address to the Faith of Our Fathers Day in London on May 4 may be applied to the present matter:

... our reaction to other persons ought always to be characterized by a willingness to show respect; to be careful not to damage another person's good name; to affirm what is good in another; never to be rude or insulting. The spirit of the Pharisees lurks in each one of us, myself included, tempting us to sit in judgment on others and even to seek to exclude them from the Church.

SECOND THOUGHTS?

Before this unseemly fracas erupted, I spoke with Msgr. Kieran Conry, head of the Catholic Media Office, about the rumors that have been circulating during the wait for the appointment of a new archbishop. It is widely held now that the delay indicates that there has been a second consultation--that Rome has rejected a list of proposed replacements, and asked for a new set of suggestions. Msgr. Conry is in a particularly good position to comment on the procedures that govern the selection of bishops, because his previous post was with Britain's long-serving papal nuncio, Archbishop Luigi Barbarito.

Msg. Conry did not seek to alter the widespread belief: It probably can be inferred now that there has been a second submission of a "ternus," the list of three candidates for an episcopal position which the nuncio puts to the Pope. But he did dispute the assumption that this would indicate strong Vatican dissatisfaction with the situation in Liverpool, or the qualifications of the proposed replacements.; The second consultation, he said, could have been requested for positive rather than negative reasons.

One of the principles governing the submission of the ternus is that all three of the men on the list must be plausible candidates for the role. A list would not be acceptable if one candidate was demonstrably less qualified than the other two, because such a submisson would in effect leave Rome to choose between two candidates instead of three. Thus it is possible that the Vatican might have asked for a second consultation because of the need for more information about one of the candidates--information that would show him to be suitable. Or the Congregation for Bishops in Rome, which advises the Holy Father, might be in a quandary because all three are excellent candidates. So the Vatican could be seeking more detailed information on one or more candidates to help in recommending a choice. These, at least, are logical possibilities. The long official silence from Rome cannot be presumed to indicate any more serious misgivings.

Monsignor Conry also commented on the rumor that someone had been offered the post and had turned it down. "But who could have known such a thing?" he asked; "Only the nuncio and the individual candidate." He had applied the same test to the recurring rumor that an Opus Dei cleric had been proposed as Bishop of Northampton on the untimely death of Bishop Thomas in December 1988, but had been 'vetoed' by the other bishops.

THE POPE'S CHOICE

While the inquiring Catholic public cannot know the details of any particular case, we do know the broad outline of the process by which episcopal appointments are made. Information and opinions about the suitability of a candidate are sought under the provisions of Canon Law (377,378) and can include consultation with "lay persons of outstanding wisdom." The sort of layman who might be consulted could be a head teacher from a school in a district where the candidate had been parish priest.

No individual, apart from the pope, has a decisive voice in the appointment of a bishop. Thus for example the notion that the Duke of Norfolk, as the leading lay Catholic in Great Britain, had a voice in the appointment of bishops was another good old myth, as was any idea that the Archbishop of Liverpool must have (or must not have) an Irish surname. In a more serious vein, the papal nuncio has no discretion to sift and edit; he is obliged to send forward all of the information and documentation he has received about each candidate when he makes up a ternus.

I asked Monsignor Conry when we could now expect the announcement of the Liverpool successor and he thought it might be by the end of May, or perhaps the end of June. One factor that should reduce any surprise about a delay is that although Archbishop Worlock had been required to resign when he reached the age of 75, the Holy Father had chosen not to accept that resignation. Perhaps it was wished that he should die in office rather than retire.

Among the names of those reported to be possible candidates for the archbishopric are patrick Barry, OSB, Abbot of Ampleforth; Bishop Christopher Budd of Plymouth; Bishop Patrick Kelly of Salford; Bishop David Konstant of Leeds; Bishop Cormac Murphy-O'Connor of Arundel and Brighton; Bishop Vincent Nichols in North London; and Father Timothy Radcliffe, OP, Father General of his order.

[AUTHOR ID] Kevin Grant is editorial coordinator for Catholic World Report in Great Britain.