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Published: 17 September 2010
by ILLTYD HARRINGTON

I WAS standing precariously on the high wall which separated our school from St Illtyd’s Roman Catholic Church, Dowlais, South Wales.

It was February 1939. I was seven years old and in the middle of my challenging rite of passage. 

Suddenly the dark baritone voice of my teacher Ms Theresa O’Brien came – “get down from there you heretic – on the day the Pope himself lies dead in Rome.”

O’Brien was a Kerry woman with limited vocabularly. Her use of the world heretic puzzled me. Later, I gathered she had attended a lecture given to the Catholic Women’s Guild where a visiting Jesuit explained away the burning of Protestants in Mary Tudor’s reign – an act of religious barbarism Ms O’Brien regretted missing. 

Needless to say, our priests hammered us with fable and fear. The Pope was God’s vicar on Earth and the confession box was the best insurance against sudden death – because once your soul was clean you are afforded a safe passage to heaven. 

My Aunty Minnie had a huge picture of all of the Popes. She also warmed her Guinness by plunging a red hot poker into it. 

In due course, God inspired the cardinals to elect the secretary of state Cardinal Pacelli as Pope Pius XII. He had worked out a concordat with Mussolini in 1929, creating a Vatican city state. Mussolini responded with huge amounts of money and the blessing of the papacy.

He did the same deal with Nazi Germany after Hitler came to power in 1933. The church had always survived on convenience and compromise. 

Before his state visit – the first ever by a Pope –  he will beatify cardinal John Henry Newman. Even Ann Widdecombe has been drawn into the act by making a film of this saintly man.

The truth beneath this glossy ceremony is a story of furious vindictive deception and treachery.

Cardinal Manning, the head of the church in England and Wales, was a London playboy – a friend of the famous and never missing the opportunity for a posh drawing room party. The restoration of the Catholic hierarchy in 1829 was a powerful step to reconverting England to the true faith.

His leadership hinged on Newman. Both had started out as Anglican priests. Newman dominated Oxford with his stirring sermons, his exquisite prose, his hymns amid the circling gloom. Manning became the Archdeacon of Chichester – a convert par excellence. It became popular and fashionable to be a Catholic again – “the distant brethren flooded to the gates of the Holy See.”

Newman’s Birmingham Oratory was known in Rome and in Birmingham. His great triumph was to explain away the irrecon­cilability of Henry VIII’s 39 Articles of Faith of Roman Catholicism with membership of the church. His plausibility made him Rome’s best recruiting sergeant since the dark days of 1530s. The light of god shone upon him. But the cardinal hat was given in 1875. It is the most coveted accolade for any Catholic clergy. 

But the new Pope generously offered a cardinalship to Newman – an act rather like making a private a field marshal overnight. But there was a snag. Cardinals were required to live in Rome. Newman initially expressed his doubts, after all he didn’t want to miss those comfort­able evenings with his longtime young confidant brother Martin. 

The Pope eventually excused him from that geographical obliga­tion. But letters for Newman sent, according to the protocol, to the Bishop of Birmingham were passed on to Cardinal Manning. They mysteriously took six months to arrive.  Then a mysterious notice appeared in The Times – saying Father Newman was grateful for the offer but was unable to accept it.

Newman pointed his long expressive fingers of suspicion at Manning for this. The Bishop of Birmingham’s rebuke at Manning’s malicious bed of lies caused the vipers in the Vatican to hiss in disapproval. 

Newman had the last laugh. 

He was the voice of the true Conservative church. 

Cardinal Manning has a pub named after him in Victoria – and a large portrait looking regal and, rather like the Queen Mother, no one quite knows who he is if you ask. 

After my irreverence of 1939, we sang out “Faith of our fathers. living still in spite of dungeon, fire and sword.” 

Ironically, one of my last duties of the GLC was to deliver a very large cheque to the rebuilding cost of Newman’s Brompton Oratory in Knightsbridge, a great London landmark.

• Illtyd Harrington is a former deputy leader of the GLC