The Cardinal's biographer Peter Stanford

reflects on his quiet statesmanship
The man of God as politician
BASIL HUME never wanted to lead the Catholic Church in England and Wales. But in spite of his initial misgivings, he went on to win an international reputation as a wise, compassionate, pragmatic man of God.
His appointment to Westminster was a moment of genius in the Vatican. As Abbot of Ampleforth, Hume was virtually unknown in the wider world. Yet his humility, his charisma, his patent absence of any personal ambition and most of all the air he had of one who walked in God's shadow quickly won him a place in English hearts. In a country where Catholics were excluded from public life until 1829 and where in the 1950s and 1960s cities like Liverpool still suffered a sectarian divide as bitter as current-day Belfast, Hume personified the final healing of the wounds of Henry VIII's Reformation.
Though he appeared quintessentially English, Hume's father was Scottish and Protestant and his mother French and Catholic. But with his upper middle-class accent plus his network of friendships with Establishment figures and his gift for diplomacy, the reluctant Cardinal became a formidable politician in both Church and secular spheres. Few, if any, ever had a bad word to say about him.
In Britain, he spearheaded on the national stage the successful campaign over a series of miscarriages of justice that had seen innocent Irish men and women jailed for terrorist crimes. On homelessness, schools and the status of refugees, he used his influence discreetly but effectively to persuade government ministers to take the edge off what he regarded as unduly harsh policies.
Though many aspects of the Thatcherite laissez-faire economics of the 1980s must have been personally repugnant to him, especially in their fall-out among the marginalised who would congregate around his cathedral each day, Basil Hume never publicly questioned the governing ideology of the time. He was by nature a cautious man and he preferred to concentrate on individual policies and lobby for them to be reformed.
While Anglican leaders ended up in mortal combat with the Iron Lady, Cardinal Hume maintained a public distance from the world of politics at the same time as becoming a very effective operator behind the scenes.
On the international stage, he was among the first to visit Ethiopia during the 1985 famine and lobbied European governments and the EC over increasing levels of aid. In 1994, it was his personal intervention that persuaded the Thai government to release a young British woman convicted of drug smuggling. And in the worldwide Catholic Church, he developed a formidable reputation, principally through his role from 1979 to 1987 as chairman of the Council of European Bishops' Conferences.
For traditionalists there was little to fault in what Basil Hume said. But for progressives there was a hint that he understood and even sympathised with their dilemma. It was a classic example of the Cardinal's gift for bridging the gulfs that had opened up in his Church.
When appointed he said that he would only be archbishop for 10 years. He subsequently extended his tenure up to the statutory retirement age of 75, and then stayed on, hoping to greet the new millennium. Perhaps he had come to enjoy the job. Or perhaps he was fearful that some of the divisions in English Catholicism might become more apparent with him off the stage. But he was too humble a man to believe himself indispensable.
Peter Stanford's biography of Cardinal Hume was published by Geoffrey Chapman in 1993.