Faithful and true, Father Basil's flock are praying for him

IN WESTMINSTER Cathedral, things are all bustle and fret. At 12.20pm. It's not the 20-strong crew of American youths with their LL Bean rucksacks emblazoned with "England Tour 99" that's the problem; nor the Italian beggar with the rosary around his neck and a mouth full of broken teeth, nor the tall black guy beside the font talking to himself as if on a mobile phone, though both his hands are empty.

It is none of the usual standard-issue flotsam of visitors to the mother church of British Catholicism; it's the camera-men. There's a cameraman in the marble pulpit to the right of the congregation, as they wait for the 12.30 requiem mass to begin. There's another stamping down the legs of his wobbly tripod on to the shiny wood floor. Someone with sound boom is stealing surreptitiously down the nave and Ann Heneage, information officer at the Friends of Westminster Cathedral stall, is getting cross. "People are complaining about photographers going down the aisle," she says, "they're even going on to the altar and shining lights on to the congregation. I've spoken to Security but ..."

Outside the cathedral, to her future dismay, half a dozen more camera teams are setting up - everyone from Sky to Channel 4 News - each team with its dreamboat anchorperson. Nobody knows exactly what they're waiting for.

"It's the big mass at 5.30," says one, as if this wholly everyday occurrence will metamorphose into a full memorial service, complete with insightful eulogy by a celebrity friend. Perhaps they think that, when the leader of a religious movement boasting four million adherents dies, you expect a fair selection of them to show up at the diocesan church, including famous converts like the Tory matriarch Ann Widdecombe and the Duchess of Kent.

But it isn't like that. If you want to see Cardinal George Basil Hume's co-religionists - the ones he felt he truly represented and led - look around you. At the 12.30 mass there are 400 Catholics specially turned out to pay their respects; a tall stocky Anglo-Catholic matron, beefy labouring men in orange T-shirts, a black nun, a Chinese woman with her blind daughter, slightly tottery widows, slick-haired codgers with blue- striped shopping bags, lots of people on sticks - but equally, a surprising number of young girls with lustrous hair and thoughtful expressions. In other words, the whole constituency known as "ordinary people".

They sit on the austere low church chairs, kneel on the unyielding rubber kneelers and scrutinise the sumptuous, aspirational, heaven-storming architecture above them, from the ornately spiked crucifix dangling like a fancy sword to the eight noble porticoes holding up the triumphal arch over the altar. Press photographers pick their way among the swirly marble pillars looking for picturesquely sad Catholic faces grieving for their dead leader.

The mid-mass sermon is a recital of Cardinal Hume's own meditation on death: "Death - the gateway to a better place." It is sonorous but full of platitudes. "Death is a terrible foe unless we take it as a friend, death is the ultimate absurdity unless we see it as a fulfilment, Faith gives answers where reasons fail. Faith admits us to death's secrets ..."

The congregation never nods or shows a sign that it is listening; but the breeze of the late Cardinal's reassuring cadences blows through their hearts.

For he believed in it all, and told the flock to believe in it too. Cardinal Hume spent 23 years negotiating between the progressive strains of liberal British Catholicism and the doctrinaire inflexibility of the Vatican; but he never disobeyed the Pope. He believed in obedience. His French mother, a colonel's daughter, was a byword in imperiousness. It was from her that he inherited a sense of rightness - that there are things that you just don't argue with - and a feeling for diplomacy and compromise.

When it came to faith - the belief that the consumption of Christ's flesh and blood made you live for ever, the belief in life after death and the sanctity of the individual soul - he insisted it was all true and the faithful loved his confidence and believed it with him.

"I think he had a strong sense of the arduous nature of authority," said George Bull, a cathedral visitor. Mr Bull is a distinguished writer and translator, who met Cardinal Hume while writing Inside The Vatican. "He told me once about how the cardinals felt when electing the present Pope," said Mr Bull.

"He said: `When we met in Rome he was one of us, with all the cardinals milling about together, then suddenly the election was made and the new Pope was standing in white giving his blessing to the world and we all said, Dear God, what have we done to this man?' "

Talk to the people outside the cathedral and you hear the same things again and again - how they remember meeting him on his frequent pastoral visits, well beyond the environment of Westminster, and how many people think of him as their friend. "Of course we were friends," said Mrs Ginty of Tipperary and Finsbury Park, who proudly claims to have attended the funeral of three previous cardinal-archbishops.

"He was much friendlier than [Cardinal] Heenan. He was what you'd call homely."

Anne McCafferty from the west of Scotland met him when he visited a care centre in Chiswick, west London. "There were lots of handicapped people at the reception, and he spoke to all of them for ages," she said. "I called him Your Gracebut he just said, `No, no, call me Father Basil'."