This splendid book of articles, essays and reviews, some published for the first time, begins with a long, masterly piece on the unfashionable doctrine of Hell, the best thing in the whole book. Having been taught about Hell by the monks of Ampleforth in the 1950s, Piers Paul Read asks, ‘Why was damnation dropped from Catholic preaching in the last decades of the 20th century when a monk from Ampleforth, Basil Hume, was Arch- bishop of Westminster?’ If there is a consistent theme in this book, it is the sense that what Read learned at Ampleforth and its prep school Gilling has been betrayed by the post-Vatican II English Church led by the former abbot of Ampleforth.
Hume was one of the three cardinals who headed His Holiness’s loyal opposition during the pontificate of John Paul II, distancing the English Church as far as he could from Rome, with the help of complaisant nuncios. I have no doubt that he would have deplored this book as ‘inflexible’, ‘rigid’, and ‘divisive’, the three sins that are anathema to the English bishops he dominated. Read refers to a ‘revealing’ sermon Hume preached in Westminster Cathedral a few years before he died, in which the Cardinal called for ‘a fourfold witness — through holiness, through faith, through love and through the liturgy’. Nothing about any kind of intellectual witness — so much for Newman, Chesterton, Knox and the rest. Hume prided himself on his Englishness; certainly he was much more akin to the small minority of recusant ‘old’ Catholics who preferred to keep their Catholicism under wraps for fear of offending their fellow countrymen than to the main stream of Irish immigrants and the numerically much smaller but no less high-profile converts from Anglicanism.
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