Cardinal Hinsley: His Last Words on Unity

Abstract

I had just finished reading in his firm flowing handwriting, but with here and there a marked break, what must have been, alas ! one of his last personal letters, when the sad news came through of the heart attack from which he did not recover. He confessed that he had been having a rather bad time lately and was incapable of real work.Then his thoughts reverted to the subject of unity, one of the clear notes of his episcopacy, rarely absent from his serious mind, and to our grievous disunities. ‘In the mission field, I found,’ he writes, that the awful confusion due to disunion was the obstacle to the spread-of the Kingdom of God. In Europe our enemies—the enemies of Christianity, he calls them—make capital out of our divisions. But the mere mixing together, so to speak, of varying creeds and of different ways of worship would be a mechanical union, not the one body of Christ.’ He develops the I heme again and says that our prayers for the indwelling of the Holy Spirit sent to lead us into all truth must be ceaseless. It was the theme of one of his letters from the Collegio Inglese after his elevation, whilst he waited to take up his great task—’ At my age what can I do? ‘But as a soldier he obeys. ‘The troubled years and the awful movement of evil events have revealed that the Holy Father was divinely guided in his choice of a messenger. As the Public Orator of Oxford declaimed, ‘Cardinal Hinsley has become a true leader, not only in his own Church but in the nation at large.’ His broadcast after war broke upon us showed that he spoke with the voice of the nation—sad, stern, courageous, unfaltering.