Given at the Mass of thanksgiving on the occasion of the anniversary of Cardinal Hume at the Cardinal Hume Centre on 15 June 2016.
The Last Judgement could be really difficult! Some of you will have been here in 1994 when Cardinal Hume told you as much: ‘the last Judgement might be embarrassing for many of us,’ he said. To hear the Lord say, ‘I was hungry and you gave me no food. I was a stranger and you gave me no home; naked and you didn’t clothe me.’
Pope Francis put it even more strongly than the Lord himself when he said, just two weeks ago, ‘To ignore the poor is to despise God.’ If we fail to give food and drink and housing to the poor, we shall realise we acted as if we despised God.
Any of us who ever witnessed Cardinal Hume encountering the poor will know that for him every person mattered. ‘No human life is ever redundant,’ he used to say. ‘Each individual life, at whatever stage, must be accorded full protection and respect.’ You saw it in his face when he met the poor.
Soon after I was ordained, he gave me and another priest a tour of the Cathedral. The most memorable part of that tour was to go with him to the Cathedral entrance and see the way he interacted with the poor. They approached with beaming smiles because they knew he would accept, respect them. There was no question of their asking him for money: they knew he never had any on him anyway! All they wanted was what he always did give them: a blessing, an individual blessing.
But, of course, the Cardinal was not an angel! Even occasions of such piety he could combine with a disarming urbanity.
As we entered the Cathedral and made our way down the north aisle, we paused to pray at the casket of St John Southworth. Then, turning round, he pointed to a slab on the floor, under Gill’s Station of the Cross. And he told us, ‘This is where I’m going to be buried.’
‘Why here?' I asked. We all know he wasn’t buried there in the end. But, with a mischievous twinkle in the eye, he nodded over towards the grave of Cardinal Heenan and said, ‘It’s so that I can vie with him for popular devotion!’
Cardinal Newman, Blessed John Henry Newman, said tellingly that we shouldn’t be disappointed that priests are not angels. For ‘had angels been your priests, my brethren,’ he said, ‘they could not have condoled with you, sympathised with you, have had compassion on you, felt tenderly for you, and made allowances for you, as we can: they could not have been your patterns and guides, and have led you on from your old selves into a new life, as they can who come from the midst of you.’
It was because he wasn’t an angel that Cardinal Hume could relate to us. And because he was so interested in the individual. It was this which gave him such authority.
One charming saying of his which captures, I think, his gift for relationship was when he said, ‘I think one of the most important qualities is to be able to say, even on bad days, the sort of “Hi” which invites further dialogue, rather than the “Hi” which is: “I want to go past rather quickly”.’
One day, as a seminarian, I found myself sitting next to Cardinal Hume at a festive meal. I’d hardly spoken to him before. My best friend was due to leave the College to return home that day and had to leave the table early to catch a flight. As my friend walked out of the refectory, the Cardinal said to me, ‘You’ll miss him, won’t you?’
I wanted to say, ‘How did you know? How could you possibly know?’ I realise now the truth in that other saying of Cardinal Newman’s, that ‘a gentleman has eyes for all the company’.
‘A gentleman has eyes for all the company.’ Cardinal Hume had eyes indeed for all the company, most especially the company of the poor around Westminster, as they did for him, especially the poor man who used to tell everyone round here, ‘I’m wearing the Cardinal’s trousers, you know’, because he was!
Cardinal Hume’s interest in so many people was also firmly rooted in a conviction that ‘every single person is made in the image and likeness of God’. He had much to say about this. That ‘every single person can tell me something about God which nobody else can’. And that ‘every single person has something which I don’t have and is, in that respect, superior to me. That is the ground of my respect from them.’
He was convinced that it’s particularly in those who are pushed to the margin that Christ is to be found. He said, ‘No words can substitute for the actual experience of being close to those who are handicapped or suffering.’
But he was at the same time convinced ‘the Catholic Church is not a kind of welfare wing of the government. We’re not social workers. We will do social work but we bring to it a unique perspective because it’s our conviction that we’re serving Christ in people who suffer. We do it because we love them and because God loves them.’
He was absolutely convinced that it is Christ you serve in the poor.
He would have liked the way Pope Francis puts it: ‘when we reach out to those in need, we touch the wounded body of Christ’. And, yes, to ignore the poor is to despise Christ.
Yet both of these holy men temper their stern warnings with mercy. Francis said recently and very powerfully that we need to understand that Matthew 25 is at heart an act not of condemnation but of mercy on the part of Jesus. For all that we may have lived for ourselves previously, here we are being given a last chance, he says.
And Cardinal Hume was often at pains as well to reassure us that our God is not a God who seeks to condemn. We need to trust in God’s mercy, for ours is a God who seeks always to forgive, he would say. Indeed, he would reassure us, ‘he will look for every reason to forgive, to make excuses for us, to understand’. Death, he used to say, will be God taking us up into his loving arms and letting us tell him everything we ever wanted to tell him about ourselves.
You know, when Cardinal Hume was in the last fortnight of his life, he received a summons to the Palace. I love the fact that, as he was summoned into the royal presence, he insisted on rising from his wheelchair in spite of his carers’ protestations, saying, ‘If anyone thinks I’m going to meet my Sovereign Queen sitting on my backside, they can think again!’
The Queen asked what it was like to know one is so close to death. To which he replied, with a radiant smile, ‘Well, Ma’am, it feels like one is sitting in the front row of a theatre, waiting for the curtain to go up on what one knows is going to be the most extraordinary spectacle one has ever witnessed!’
Such confidence speaks of a deep peace, doesn’t it? The peace which comes surely from a life given over to the Lord, your old trousers given away, your bank account emptied for the money to be distributed to the poor (as he instructed his secretary to do in his final week), a homeless shelter launched.
At peace because he’d already met Christ in so many of the poor , already met and fed and watered and clothed and visited, and, through this Centre, housed Christ in the poor. All that awaited him, he knew, in all humility, was to hear the Lord say, ‘Come now, good and faithful servant, and enter into your reward.’