The Westminster Waltz - reprise

I've had such a busy week once more that The Sensible Bond has barely got a look in. I admire anyone who can produce readable copy every day. I can't, at least not with all my other duties. The mind has to soak up stuff and think about it before elaborating anything - if there is anything - worth saying. Comment for comment's sake is a bit like gravy for gravy's sake!

But two things during the week occupied my thoughts. The first thing was the result of Damian Thompson's Westminster diocese succession straw poll on his Telegraph blog Holy Smoke. Damian asked his readers to email him with their nomination for the successor of Cormac Murphy O'Connor in the archdiocese of Westminster. He received 200 emails - not spectacular but not negligible either - and the person who polled the largest number of votes (35) was prolific English theologian Aidan Nichols OP, currently a visiting professor at Oxford University. Fr Tim Finigan of The Hermeneutic of Continuity and the Australian Cardinal Pell (not Archbishop Nichols of Birmingham, as I previously stated) came in joint second. No English bishop polled more than a couple of votes.

Thompson's poll was an exercise in popular democracy, though the votes could hardly be said to represent a wide cross-section of the Catholic Church in England and Wales. I shouldn't think for a minute that anyone in the Congregation for Bishops is poring over the results at this very minute. In fact, I rather think that whatever noises are made about the end of clericalism, Damian Thompson's poll will be sneered at. Still, I hope that nobody on high dismisses Aidan Nichols because he's popular with readers of a Telegraph Blog.

And I suggest there are in fact many reasons why they shouldn't dismiss Nichols. I have only met him the once but I was struck by his being both frighteningly learned and disconcertingly modest. I know him to be popular with the younger Dominican brethren. There is no doubting his credentials as an outstanding Catholic intellectual. With monographs on Bulgakor, Congar, Balthasar and Ratzinger, studies on the Anglican theological tradition, Dominican saints and the new Catechism of the Catholic Church, not to mention essays on Aquinas, contemporary spirituality, theological methodology, and the churches of the East, we can safely say Nichols is as industrious and as deeply read as they come.

But, in terms of his being a candidate for Westminster, what really stands out is his programme for evangelisation. His book Christendom Awake caused a minor stir when it was released, although it did not perhaps make a splash where it should have, in the curial offices of the English bishops. Still - and here was the second interesting thing this week - nobody in those offices can have missed the release of his new work with its wry title, The Realm: an unfashionable essay on the conversion of England, the launch of which was splashed all over the front page of The Catholic Herald on Friday. Within this latest work, we get not so much the voice of the heavyweight intellectual - though there are some wide-ranging discussions of complex cultural, historical and literary matters in addition to theological ones - but that of a sincere religious and preacher, devoutly setting forth how the Churchmen in this country can do - or do again - what they were sent here to do lo those fourteen or fifteen centuries ago!

So, does that mean Fr Nichols might be a good candidate for Westminster? Not on its own, that's for sure. There is the question of administration to bear in mind. Nichols has never run a diocese. He's never been superior of the English Province of the Dominicans either. There's no doubting that the administrative side of the post might be better placed in the hands of men more experienced and proven as number-crunching book-balancers. But, what Fr Nichols has got is vision, insight, a mind, a facility for expression, and an enthusiasm for mission which in our age might seem frankly naive ... with perhaps the naivety of the child who has received the kingdom of heaven. Nichols knows that the Catholic sanctuary must again become the gateway between heaven and earth, rather than an inward-looking, sentimentalized or banal circus ring. He's fully committed to the idea that discipleship is contructed not merely on the ethics of service but on a fully mature and informed apostolic faith. Above all, he is not afraid to talk in terms of conversion, and conversion of the public square, in an age where indifferentism and a false irenicism (cf. Pius XI's Mortalium Animos) sit squarely in the hearts of many a Catholic. Give the man a crozier, for pity's sake!

Clifford Longley apparently tried to start a fight about Nichols in the pages of The Tablet last year, saying his appointment would be a disaster for ecumenism. It made me laugh at the time since Nichols, I'm given to understand, was once a lecturer in ecumenical theology in Rome and knows a damn sight more about the East and the Anglicans than Longley ever will. But Longley's article struck me as the action of an agent provocateur, attempting to cause controversy as a way of making Nichols appear as a controversial figure. There are more ways than one to overthrow a man's chances of a mitre. But in my view, the only controversy around Fr Nichols is the controversy that any faithful disciple causes by attempting to remain true to his vocation. I only hope they're watching this in Rome with as much attention as they should.

The amiable, bumbling Cormac will soon ride off into the distance, and we need a man with a clear head and a backbone of steel to replace him. I'm not saying Fr Nichols will be in with a good chance - I rather think he won't in the long run - but naming a better candidate might be hard.