Into the mainstream with Cardinal Hinsley

Extract

It is a commentary on the insouciance of English Catholicism that so far the material on the history of the 1930s has consisted of sundry memoirs, a brilliant essay by Adrian Hastings (in Bishops and Writers) and a novel by Bernard Bergonzi (The Roman Persuasion). With the aid of the Westminster Archives and the Public Records Office in Kew, Thomas Moloney has put the study of the period on a scientific basis. Even the dullish title of his book— Westminster, Whitehall and the Vatican. The Role of Cardinal Hinsley 1935-43 — gets it about right: there were subterranean links between Westminster and Whitehall that no one, least of all the Catholic press, suspected. The Southern Desk of the Foreign Office had a keen and abiding interest in Catholic and Vatican affairs.

It was particularly intrigued by the appointment in 1935 of Mgr. Arthur Hinsley as fifth Archbishop of Westminster. He was now sixty- nine. He had not lived in England since 1917, when he became Rector of the Venerabile in Rome. Further back lay the foundation and headmastership of St. Bede’s Grammar School in Leeds, and a quarrel with the local Bishop, the eccentric and irascible William Gordon. The young Fr. Hinsley fled Leeds and was incardinated in the diocese of Southwark. While a curate in South London (Sutton Park and Sydenham) from 1904—1917 he maintained his academic sharpness (according to our author, p. 21) by lecturing at Wonersh. A likely tale in the Modernist period, but that is not the sort of question that detains Moloney.