The Toff vs. the Tough: why the cardinals are at odds

Hume and Winning are divided by class, writes Andrew Brown

Britain's two Roman Catholic cardinals have found themselves at odds over politics and abortion, and the reason behind the division appears to be class. Recent events have highlighted the contrasting backgrounds and outlooks of Cardinal Basil Hume, head of the Church in England and Wales, and Cardinal Thomas Winning, his counterpart in Scotland

Two weeks ago Cardinal Hume introduced a document setting out the bishops' attitudes to the next election, which, if not quite ordering Catholics to vote Labour, should certainly dissuade them from voting Conservative. A week later Cardinal Winning launched a blistering attack on Tony Blair as a "sham".

At the heart of the difference over Labour is abortion policy. The English bishops' statement explicitly refused to endorse abortion as the litmus test by which all candidates were to be judged. Cardinal Winning's attack, by contrast, was directed at Blair's claim to be anti-abortion when his party largely is not. But behind this divergence lies a profounder difference still.

The English Catholic Church, like its leader, is well-mannered, self- assured and very much part of the Establishment. Hume's own background, as the headmaster of Ampleforth public school and brother-in-law of Lord Hunt, the fomer Cabinet Secretary, is reflected in his manner, which is that of a gentleman from the days when gentlemen still ran the country.

Winning's confidence is that of a player, not a gentleman. His background is very similar to that of some great Scottish football managers: Alex Ferguson, Jock Stein, Bill Shankly. (at Ampleforth they play rugby). Like them, he is a fierce disciplinarian who expects loyalty as well as obedience from his team - and as with many a Scottish footballer, he likes to get his retaliation in first. It is impossible to imagine Hume calling a press conference, as Winning did in the middle of the Roderick Wright scandal, to announce that he would no longer talk to the press, because their agenda was so low, hostile and sinful.

Such an attitude of suspicion always ready to burst into open hostility to the outside world is true to the experience of the Scottish Catholic Church, which is largely the product of 19th-century Irish working-class immigration. Sectarian hostility is much closer to the surface in Scotland than in England.

Hume is believed by many people to have a long-term ambition for Catholicism to replace Anglicanism as the natural Christianity of the English ruling classes. No one could imagine Catholicism becoming the Church of Scotland in the way that some Catholics dream that their denomination will once more be the Church of England.

These two attitudes and aims also encompass two ways for the Church to come to terms with the modern world. Both men preside over churches in numerical decline. An ageing Catholic population which ignores papal strictures against contraception is served by an ageing, shrinking priesthood.

Winning's answer is to cleave fast to the forms of Catholicism which have worked in the past. Hume's has been to present a much more reasonable and democratic face to the world. In terms of hard policies, this means playing down some aspects of Catholic sexual teaching, to the anguish of the anti-abortion lobby.

The English bishops' document, by considering abortion as merely the most important issue among many on which a candidate should be judged, laid bare a deep gulf between the official Vatican line, that abortion is always and everywhere murder, and the thinking of middle-class secularised Catholics.

Hume's Church is New Labour. Winning's is Old Labour: Celtic, working- class, and doomed to irrelevance whatever decencies it may embody.