The listening cardinal
Church decisions can sometimes be hard to comprehend, but in appointing Timothy Radcliffe a cardinal Pope Francis seems to have scored a bullseye.
IN THE MID-EIGHTIES, when Timothy Radcliffe was Prior of Blackfriars in Oxford, he was sometimes invited to preach to undergraduates at Sunday Mass. The chaplaincy was always fairly full, but once word got out that “Father Tim” was coming, it was packed. Here was a preacher of thrilling contradictions: orthodox but open-minded, humorous but deadly serious. He never seemed to want to be the centre of attention, but to “make himself transparent to the Lord”: “He must increase; I must decrease.” He quoted St Augustine: “God loves each of us as if there were only one of us.” Our hearts burned within us.
In between times, we’d often bump into Timothy in Oxford, and feel better for a quick chat. “Why do people like him so much?” I asked one of his friends last week. “Because he likes them,” he answered. In his white(ish) habit, or moth-eaten jerseys, he was a faintly shambolic figure. The Canadian theologian Janet Soskice remembers the master of Campion Hall, Paul Edwards SJ, observing that Timothy reminded him of a rather grubby teddy bear: “You want to pick him up and throw him in the washing machine.” So we wouldn’t have guessed that he would become probably the most influential English cleric of his generation, Master of the Dominican Order from 1992 to 2001 (the only member of the English province to have held this post); then, more recently, appointed by Pope Francis to lead three-day preparatory retreats for participants in the two sessions of the Synod on Synodality in Rome, in October 2023 and earlier this month. Timothy has been loyal to all the popes whose papacies he’s lived through, but he has a special love for Francis, the Lord of the Rings pope who urges us to keep travelling, “though we do not know the way”.
And none of us would have predicted the red hat. But when the news came through that Timothy Radcliffe was one of 21 new cardinals to be created in early December, social media went mad. There were detractors (of whom more later), but on the whole people reacted with words like “rejoicing” and “over-joyed”. The Church’s decisions can sometimes be hard to comprehend, but in appointing Timothy Radcliffe a cardinal Pope Francis seems to have scored a bullseye.
TIMOTHY PETER JOSEPH RADCLIFFE, the fourth of six children, was born on 22 August 1945, into an English recusant family. His great-uncle Dick, Dom. John Lane Fox, a powerful early influence, had been a chaplain in the First World War. “Every night he went into no man’s land to retrieve the wounded, or to bury the dead,” Timothy once told me. “He lost an eye, and the fingers of one hand, but he emerged joyful and free. His joy came from his faith. I came to see that it overflowed from his life with God.”
His parents were devout, but “never pious”, and, gentry though they were, were always at pains to put others at their ease. One summer evening, they entertained the local cricket team. The supper was a bit messy, so the places were laid with finger bowls. The captain of the team, never having met a finger bowl, picked his up and drank from it. Quick as a whip, Timothy’s father followed suit.
The Radcliffe children – five boys and a girl – were brought up in an atmosphere of good-humour, which Timothy carried into priestly life: “A really good confession,” he once wrote, “usually ends in laughter.” After prep school at Worth, he moved on to Downside, which he adored. One contemporary, Philippe Byrne, remembers him staring out of the window during lessons, then getting top marks: “Maddening!” In his 79 years, Timothy claims to have had just one transcendent experience, when he was 16. He was in the great abbey church at Downside, by a beautiful late-medieval statue of Our Lady, when the heavens seemed to open and he had a view of infinity. “It was quite brief.”
Timothy feels “deeply, deeply sorrowful” that so many Downside monks have been implicated in the scandal of the sexual abuse of children by priests, which he calls “the worse crisis for Christianity since the Reformation”, and to which he believes the Church has yet to respond adequately. The roots of the scandal, he believes, lie in clerical control and self-importance. There will be no “Your Eminence” for him, and the Pope has agreed to his request that he be dispensed from having to wear a cardinal’s customary outfit.
As an old Gregorian, Timothy might have felt drawn to the Benedictines, but when he entered religious life in 1965, aged 20, it was with the Dominicans. He loved their classlessness, and their motto, “Veritas”: truth. “The pursuit of truth has been the hallmark of his preaching, his theology, his pastoral care and his human sympathy,” says Robin Baird-Smith, who has published all but the very first of Timothy’s 10 books (now translated into 24 languages). “The Truth as he proclaims and lives it is devoid of intellectual pirouetting and theological mumbo-jumbo.”
One might imagine that such a master of the homily would have felt an obvious draw to the Order of Preachers. But as a young friar Timothy dreaded the pulpit. Between 1974 and 1976, as a university chaplain in London, he begged his students to help him and, over many sessions in the pub with them, came up with the guidelines he still follows in writing his sermons. Never preach the same homily twice. Work out what you want to say well in advance, allowing time for pondering and pruning. Use the word “sin” as rarely as possible. Try to imagine deeply the lives of the people to whom you’re speaking.
As Master of the Order of Preachers, looking after Dominicans in 107
countries, in every continent except Antarctica, this meant striving to
understand very different cultures. But he also practises his
disciplined empathy closer to home. “Timothy presided at my daughter’s
wedding,” says Helen Ghosh, Master of Balliol College, “and when she
went
to chat to him the day before she mentioned to him in passing
that friends would be singing Joni Mitchell’s ‘A Case of You’ during the
service. He must have gone away that evening and listened to the song.
At the wedding the next day he used as one text the lines, ‘Go to him,
stay with him if you can, but be prepared to bleed’. The congregation
was largely non-religious but, two years later, people still talk about
him and it.”
Timothy was good to my daughter, too. Just down the road from Blackfriars, at Somerville College, Izzy got fraught and sleepless ahead of finals. I happened to mention in an email to Timothy that I was worried about her, and he was immediately keen to help: he could go and visit her, she could come to talk to him. When I saw him a year later, the first thing he asked was, “How’s Izzy?”
MY OWN FAVOURITE of his sermons, still available on YouTube – was preached on Good Friday during lockdown. He talks about how, in the course of the Passion, words fall away, leaving only silence: “The silence of the Cross, the overflowing silence of a love beyond our comprehension.” For all his courtesy and gregariousness, one senses in Timothy a core of solitude and silence. He aims to get up before dawn, and to give three hours to silent prayer.
This fuels him to be fully present to everyone he encounters once the world wakes up. In the spring, Tablet board member Robert Binyon and I asked whether we might go to chat to him about – dread subject – fundraising. We thought he might give us advice over a cup of coffee, but no, we had a long, jolly lunch in Co^te Brasserie, and conversation ranged far wider than The Tablet’s balance sheet. Robert remembers especially a comment Timothy made over pudding: “He talked about how, having caught no fish, the disciples were told to set out again and throw out the net. It returned full and unbroken. That reflects an optimism about the Church which we must cherish.” I asked Timothy whether he might help us formulate a mission statement. Almost before we got back to London, this dropped into my inbox: “We are called to live the tension between the convictions of the Church and the questions of the world. The Tablet’s mission is to live this tension fruitfully, for and with its readers.”
Prayer, preaching, emails: alongside all these he makes proper time for reading. He is what his friend Fr James Alison calls “a true Thomist”, rooted in St Thomas Aquinas’ belief that God is the beginning and end of everything, and that we, as human beings created by God, are on a journey back to Him. But his sermons are also threaded through with magpie treasures from numerous other saints – Teresa of Avila, Catherine of Siena, John Henry Newman – and from popular culture. Since he was 12, Timothy has read fiction every night before going to sleep. In Alive in God, he draws on contemporary novelists Zadie Smith, Emma Donoghue, Hanya Yanagihara. Some might point out that these writers are not obviously religious. And there are some who say that Timothy’s writing has “more breadth than depth”. But he is driven by a yearning to reach out to non-believers; a longing to communicate that Catholicism is “not just a moral code designed to keep us in order, but a vibrant way of life”. He keeps in mind especially the young, living in a world in which they “often struggle to dream of a future”. If he battled with some aspects of John Paul II’s papacy, he loved him for loving the young.
The suffering and marginalised have always been at the heart of Timothy’s ministry, and many will know him first and foremost as a passionate champion of the warm inclusion of LGBT+ Catholics in the Church. In a recent piece in L’Osservatore Romano, he looks back more than 30 years on being part of a team providing Masses for gay and lesbian Catholics in London. “Gay people do not need a special liturgy,” he writes, “they need a community in which they are sure of a warm welcome.” Some of the best priests he has known are gay. His intuition is that “most gay Catholics in mature committed relationships usually move beyond much interest in sex anyway. What they seek most of all are ‘love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. There is no law against such things’ (Galatians 5:22).”
His tolerance can cause outrage. Timothy Radcliffe “is an antichrist”, tweeted Nick Donnelly @Protectthefaith on the announcement that he was to become a cardinal. “Only an antichrist would blasphemously say that sodomy can be ‘eucharistic’ and ‘expressive of Christ’s gift’.” If this sounds vicious, it’s not untypical. At the Synod, some simply refused to sit next to James Martin SJ, another ambassador for LGBT+ Catholics. And this demonstrated for Timothy why the Synod – “the greatest exercise of listening in the history of humanity” – is so vitally important. Over time, he believes deeply that it will encourage us not just to respect but to celebrate difference. “The greatest gift will come from those with whom we disagree,” he has written. “If we dare to listen to them.”
He acknowledges that it will be some time before the Synod bears obvious fruit. But how much time has Timothy got? In 2021, he was diagnosed with cancer of the jaw, and underwent a 17-hour operation. He awoke with a raging thirst, yet was refused drink for several weeks. Lying prone and completely incapable, he experienced God’s love at a new and deeper level: a love not to be sought or bargained for, but “pure gift”.
Nobody can predict how long he now has ahead of him. “While his cancer is currently inactive,” says James Alison, “Timothy has told me that it’s like living with a hand grenade in his mouth. If it turns active, he could have as little as a few weeks. Luckily this doesn’t seem to hold him back from living in joy. I’m praying that he will be with us not for weeks or months, but for years.”
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