March 2 2023 will mark 100 years since Cardinal Basil Hume was born.
By the time of his death, he was a much admired and respected figure in the country and greatly loved within his own Catholic community.
The approach to his centenary gave Emeritus Bishop of Middlesbrough John Crowley a chance to reflect on the six years he spent with him as private secretary after the cardinal arrived in London in 1976 at the age of 53.
We then republish in full Bishop John’s homily from Cardinal Hume’s funeral Mass in Westminster Abbey on June 25 1999…

 
During those early years at Westminster, Cardinal Hume was keen to keep himself physically fit, which meant that part of my role was to be squash partner and running companion, writes BISHOP JOHN.
He had a well-developed sense of humour, and that made for relaxed living in community with him. The other members of the Archbishop’s House community were religious sisters, initially Dominican, but for most of his time the Sisters of Mercy provided that vital supportive ministry. The Cardinal valued enormously their presence, especially as a praying community. We all gathered in the house chapel at the beginning of the day. Looking back, those early morning prayer times together before the busy days unfolded are a precious memory.
If there was a particular quality of Cardinal Hume I would want to highlight in this article, it would be his manner of relating to others. He had the profound conviction that each person he met was superior to him in some way, possessing some talent, skill or gift which he lacked. This approach to others meant that everyone he met felt valued and appreciated. It was an especially lovely gift, which enabled others to be quickly at ease in his presence.
Like every human being, the Cardinal had his failings – his path to sanctity was, as for us all, in the midst of and not despite human weakness. That said, the private man was, essentially, the public one also. What others saw was what he was. The inspiring words he spoke and wrote about the things of God were words he inhabited himself. It showed through. God has blessed us richly through his life and through the manner of his holy death.

Funeral Mass for Cardinal Hume OSB, Westminster Cathedral, June 25 1999

Readings: Wisdom 13: 1-9; 1 Corinthians 1:25-31; Luke 19:9-14

Dear sisters, dear brothers,

Two short months ago when told of his terminal cancer, the Cardinal was, at first, tempted to say, “If only…”
“If only I could start all over again, I would be a much better monk, a much better abbot, a much better bishop. But then I thought” – these are his own words – “then I thought how much better if I can come before God when I die, not to say thank you that I was such a good monk, good abbot, good bishop, but rather God be merciful to me a sinner? For if I come empty-handed then I will be ready to receive God’s gift. ‘God be merciful to me a sinner’.”

How long ago it all seems now since that famous newspaper article in September 1975. It listed for the very first time the name of Basil Hume as one of six front-runners for Westminster. Each candidate was given a little write-up, noting main advantages, main disadvantages. Under the Abbot of Ampleforth, the main disadvantage was brief and to the point. It read “Much too humble to make known his abilities. Could easily be missed!” How grateful we are to God that he wasn’t!

To his own family and some lifelong friends, he was George or Basil, to others Your Eminence, but to most of us, he was just Father. The Cardinal answered to many titles. “How would you prefer to be addressed?” said one of his new priests way back in 1976. Back came the surprising reply, “I can cope with just about anything short of, ‘Hey you!’”

But to all of us, whatever we called him, Cardinal Hume has been an outstanding spiritual leader, a man we shall achingly miss, and for whose life we are so grateful to God. Our first thoughts in love today are for his family, for his own personal household and staff next door (particularly the Sisters of Mercy), the priests of Westminster Diocese where he had come to feel so much at home, his monastic brethren, and his many friends. Because he was not just admired but loved, the Cardinal’s death has provoked a lot of sadness, a shaking amount of personal grief all over the place.

But our main task today is to say, “Thank you, God” for giving us a shepherd after your own heart. Isn’t it already clear that through his life, and in the manner of his dying, God has amazingly blessed us, and far beyond the boundaries of Church or religious belief? In a quite extraordinary way, it seems that everyone thought of him as a personal friend. Among the sacks full of letters which engulfed Archbishop’s House when his terminal illness became known, a sizeable chunk of them began with the words, “I am not a member of your Church…” or “I am not a believer…” But each letter bore its witness to a man of God who had touched people’s hearts in a remarkable way. That universal appeal was somehow symbolised when Her Majesty the Queen conferred upon the Cardinal the Order of Merit. How moved he was by the graciousness of that gesture.

Now I begin to feel the Cardinal tugging impatiently at my alb, commanding me to return to the Scriptures for this Mass, all three of which he so carefully chose. Throughout his life he was much more fearful of praise than criticism. To a friend whose virtues were being a bit over-sung in his hearing, he remarked, “Enjoy that, but don’t inhale please!” So, back to the Scriptures, and particularly to the final words of that second reading, “As it is written, ‘Let him who boasts boast of the Lord.’” That’s surely what we want to do at this Mass.
Pope John Paul can perhaps help us here. He once wrote, “We need heralds of the Gospel who are experts in humanity, who know the depths of the human heart, who can share the joys, the hopes, the agonies, the distress of people today, but who are, at the same time, contemplatives who have fallen in love with God.”

Those words of the Pope – which incidentally the Cardinal loved and often quoted – capture well our pride in him, and our gratitude to God. For here was a monk, a bishop, who touched people’s lives deep, deep down because he knew God. Because he first inhabited his words, what he then said about God rang true. It had authority behind it. He spoke to us, as someone said, from the inside out.

But here too was someone whose very warm human heart had been broken open, to share in God’s own compassion for others, and especially for those in pain. Because his eyes were fixed on God, he became vulnerable to others and especially to the poor. His very last public intervention just a fortnight ago, and virtually from his deathbed, was to support countries shackled by unpayable debts.
At home, too, in this country, his support for those driven to the margins of life was utterly faithful. No one who knew him had to ask the question why, why this passionate social concern. From the depth of his being, he believed that every human person is made in God’s image and likeness. His logic thereafter was impeccable: the less that dignity was recognised, the more he raised his voice. There was a solid earthiness about his holiness, his wholeness which was anything but otherworldly.

Here tugging at my sleeve again he would want to strike a note of agonised caution, if a false idea of religion, as detached and purely spiritual, upset him, so too did the opposite mistake, the one made by those who would leave God out of the picture. How else to explain his provocative reading from the Book of Wisdom? Its strong meat, echoing the Cardinal’s growing concern that the final judgement on our age might be we were clever but not wise. “If they had the power to know so much that they could investigate the world, how did they fail to find sooner the Lord of these sings?” (Wisdom).

For 35 years as monk and for 23 years as Archbishop, Cardinal Hume centred himself on God. And from that store of wisdom, he fed us. He addressed head-on the God-shaped emptiness which is within everyone. Without ever seeking it he became a reassuring light for perhaps millions of people in this country and beyond. And all the while his deeply Benedictine soul guided him towards balance – the middle ground, the common good, but he did it without ever compromising truth, whether it be in the dialogue between churches, between different faiths, or within his own Church.

In their two very different ways, Archbishop Worlock and himself kept our Church out of the clutches of extremists, to right and left, and far away from those who, by harsh judgements, might easily crush the broken reed. Both pastors were so conscious of those on the outside, of those feeling abandoned by the Church. Their Christ-like instinct was to count the stragglers in, and never out.

You will surely be glad to hear a little more about the Cardinal’s last weeks in hospital. Great credit is due to the staff and chaplain at St John and St Elizabeth’s, as well as to the other hospitals which had cared for him previously. The story of those final days is of someone almost entirely at peace, preparing himself most carefully for that “new future”,

as he called it in a farewell letter to his priests. When the doctors first told him of his advanced cancer, he went straight to the hospital chapel where he sat praying for half an hour.

“I had preached so often on the seven last words of Jesus from the Cross,” he said, “now it was wonderful to find they were such a part of me.”
All during that initial period of waiting for death, he found, to his delight, that his prayer was amazingly sweet, full of consolation. But then to quote him, “The curtain came down,” and it was back to the darkness of faith.
“But I wasn’t worried,” he said, “because I knew what was behind that curtain.”

In those last few days here on earth, he came to a fresh understanding of the Our Father.

It was, he said, like discovering its inner meaning for the very first time. “It’s only now that I begin to glimpse how everything we need is contained right there in the Lord’s own prayer.” In the presence of a friend, he then prayed the opening three sentences of the Our Father, adding each time a tiny commentary of his own. To sit there with him and to listen to what he said was to understand afresh all that he stood for. It was to be the recipient again in a wonderfully privileged way of his most special gift. As few others have done, he raised our minds and hearts right up into the presence of God.

He began…
“Our father, who art in heaven, hallowed by thy name…” He then paused for a moment before giving this thought: “To sing the praises of God; it is that for which we were made, and it is that which will be, for all eternity, our greatest joy.”

“Thy kingdom come: The gospel values of Jesus – justice, love, and peace – embraced throughout the whole world and in all their families.”

“Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven: That’s the only thing which really matters. What God wants for us is what is best for us.”

It was utterly marvellous to be there for that moment.

In those final weeks, curtain up or curtain down, the Cardinal’s one prayer was simply this: “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.”

Humanly speaking, it would have been so lovely to have him lead us into the Millennium. It would also have been the golden jubilee of his priesthood. But that was not to be. Someone else will now break open the jubilee door into this cathedral. Someone else will celebrate the Christmas Mass which ushers in the Great Jubilee of Christ’s birth, 2,000 years ago.

He won’t begrudge them that, because for him now, a new future beckons. All his life he had been a pilgrim, searching restlessly for glimpses of God.

“It is your face, O Lord, that I seek. Hide not your face” (Psalm 26/27)

Now that journey is over. He is safely home behind the curtain, face to face. Our deep love for him and our enormous sense of gratitude for the gift he was provokes a final question: If such were the gift, what must God be like, the giver of that gift?