Monitor: All The News Of The World - Cardinal Basil Hume

Tributes to the Roman Catholic archbishop, who died on Thursday aged 76

Friday 18 June 1999 23:02 BST
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The Guardian

YOU KNEW that this was a person engaged on a lifelong mediation about the meaning of life and death. Everything he did had that connection. He lived in the circle of final questions. To those of us who are all too easily, and almost all the time, distracted from those questions, his unflinching belief that God was at the centre of them worked as a rebuke, yes, but also a model to watch and think about and incoherently, occasionally, to follow. (Hugo Young)

The Daily Mail

BASIL HUME'S piety confounded the secular values of his time, and the cheerful way in which he faced his death from cancer was a heartening example of the strength of his faith. If the life-long conflict between his conservative heart and progressive head was never resolved, it was because this kind and deeply spiritual man contained within himself the dilemma that faces any Christian in the modern world. (Piers Paul Read)

The Express

THOSE WHO thought a monk could not do the job of Cardinal Archbishop of England and Wales turned out to be wrong, Basil Hume did it superbly. He was not without his blemishes. But his monkishness really remained his strength for he always retained the simplicity and spirituality of the man of God. (Mary Kenny)

Daily Telegraph

TO ALL he seemed a patently good man. Because English Catholics trusted him, they let him lead them out of their historical ghetto to a fuller part in the life of their country and a friendlier relationship with their fellow Christians.

The Times

HIS PARTICULAR qualities of imagination and of humility were simply not consistent with those of a doctrinal rigorist, and it was the qualities he did possess in abundance that in turbulent times had given the English Catholic Church nearly a quarter of a centuryt without any major trauma or division. Few churchmen this century, inside or outside the Catholic Church, have died more deeply loved.

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