Jogger's Progress

When John Cardinal Heenan, leader of 4.1 million Roman Catholics in England and Wales, died last November, church watchers and the oddsmakers at Ladbroke's began guessing which of the realm's 18 bishops would replace him. Last week Pope Paul VI provided the answer: none of them. He bypassed the entire hierarchy and appointed instead tall, white-haired Dom George Basil Hume, 52, abbot of the Benedictine monastery at Ampleforth in Yorkshire. Hume is the first monk to become Archbishop of Westminster since England in 1850 permitted the restoration of the Catholic hierarchy.

Just Failed. The Tablet, the influential Catholic weekly, welcomed the appointment as "sagacious and imaginative," while the wider-circulation Catholic Universe thought the selection of a monk "puts an emphasis on spiritual values." But others stressed the negative. The bishops, who would be the normal candidates, are generally better known for fund raising than spiritual or intellectual attainments. Last fall the national priests' conference drafted a memo that indirectly criticized the quality of the bishops. In the words of a well-placed Vatican official, the English hierarchy "just failed to produce a leader with the qualities Pope Paul demanded."

These qualities apparently include a reputation for scholarship, in addition to administrative acumen--in Hume's case, earned in the limited sphere of Ampleforth. There he has headed since 1963 a community of 130 scholastics, as well as a distinguished boarding school. While Heenan and most of the other bishops have been ethnic Irish, Hume is an upper-middle-class Englishman with useful Establishment connections. No bookworm, he is also a fitness buff devoted to jogging and squash.

After the appointment, Hume indicated that he had had no desire to leave Ampleforth. He learned of his appointment by telephone during dinner. Said he: "I must confess I did not enjoy the rest of the meal." But "a monk does not choose what he does; he does what he is told by his authorities."

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