Nichols: "And I remember there was a Protestant school nearby, and I was the first Catholic priest ever to go to it. It had been there for 100 years. It was at that time that things were moving quite rapidly, actually. So if anything, what that taught me was not to be afraid to be yourself – and also that the possibilities were endless."
Here is the complete paragraph on the Latin Mass (silence is telling) CH: As you approach your 80th year and near retirement, are there any decisions or aspects of leading the diocese – whether in child protection, social issues, or doctrinal matters such as the Latin Mass – that you look back on with regret, or might have done differently? CN: There’s maybe hundreds probably. On the child abuse things, I think we were probably a bit slow to appreciate two things. One, the long-term destructive impact of abuse of a child. The first time I met and sat with survivors of childhood abuse was 20 years ago, and I’ve been doing it fairly consistently ever since. What is perfectly true is that some people never recover. They never recover in their ability to form and sustain stable relationships. It’s almost as if their capacity for trust has been destroyed – and that can be trust in God as well. So I think that we’ve tried and tried, and it’s quite difficult not just to show that we’re growing in our understanding, because a victim of abuse will be thrown back into disarray by new events of abuse. When stuff is reported in the papers – a new story of horrific abuse – many survivors are knocked back by that. So I think we were slow to learn that this never goes away. There isn’t a kind of final settlement for most people. There is for some. And that makes drawing survivors into a group to become an advisory body very difficult. That’s not just Church learning – you see that even in the old investigations. It’s very difficult to hold a group of survivors as a stable body because individually they’ve been damaged. So I think we’ve learned a lot and we’re making steady progress. We’ve got outside audits now of every diocese, every religious order. They’ve been done with an external dimension and the audits have been published. So we’re being accountable, and I think the resources are better. That’s probably been slow. In other public issues, I’ve been probably a bit more forthright and aggressive in terms of public comment. I haven’t become convinced that that’s a great way to do business, frankly, and certainly not in a public culture now, which is so geared around confrontation. And therefore, confronting statements don’t often lead to solutions. I much prefer the example we’re being given by Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa in the Holy Land, where he says, “What is our objective? Our objective is to stay – to be a steady presence.” When the priests and the religious sisters in the Holy Family Parish in Gaza said – after Netanyahu said they were going to start [clear] in Gaza City – they said, “We will stay.” And they embodied that principle of Cardinal Pizzaballa, if you like, potentially to the point of death. So I think more and more it’s the presence that matters. The messages will go out in all sorts of other ways. And that presence depends on clinging to God and trusting in His providence – and knowing that even if we’re in the valley of darkness, we’re not left. So that comes right back around to why that prayer before the Blessed Sacrament is so crucial. Because it enables us to do what we should do, which is to be present – not to go away – but not necessarily to see the life of faith as frontier fighting or oppositional politics. That, I don’t think, is the most fruitful way of conducting things. Others would disagree with me.
Quesion: Are there any decisions [....] - such as the Latin Mass – that you look back on with regret, or might have done differently? Answer: completely avoids content.