A friend has lent me The Worlock Archive by journalist Clifford Longley, published in 2000. I have been flicking through it and it strikes me, while not being a biography, as a fair-minded assessment of the late Archbishop of Liverpool. But the picture of Derek Worlock that emerges depresses me. These are some of Longley’s remarks:
“On the national stage, Worlock gave the Catholic Church in England and Wales its internal structures of secretaries and boards, committees and commissions.”
“He was… too much in love with the Church, not enough in love with God.”
“Gradually he became de facto and eventually de jure Secretary to all the Catholic bishops of England and Wales… On becoming the first post-Vatican II English bishop in December 1965 he moved to prominence on the national stage as Episcopal secretary of the Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales and President of the Conference’s Laity Commission.”
“What he really thought and felt about his faith is hard to excavate.”
“He found the appointment of Dom (later Cardinal) Basil Hume OSB to Westminster, and his own move to Liverpool instead, hard to accept. It had been his conviction for some years that he was himself a fairly obvious choice to succeed Cardinal Heenan at Westminster…He felt he had earned it and would have been right for it.”
Ok, these quotes are taken out of context; nevertheless, they do provide a feel of the man: absorbed in administration and committees, exercising great power behind the scenes, highly assiduous and ambitious, working his way up to the top job. (more...)
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