FEATURES / Timothy Radcliffe OP
In giving a red hat to the former head of the Dominicans, Pope Francis has scored a bullseye, with social media overwhelmingly rejoicing in the recognition of a popular priest for whom the marginalised and the suffering have always been at the heart of his ministry / By MAGGIE FERGUSSON
The listening cardinal
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 openminded, 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 “overjoyed”. 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 goodhumour, 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 latemedieval statue of Our Lady, when the heavens seemed to open and he had a view
PHOTO: ORDO PRAEDICATORUM
Timothy Radcliffe with Pope Francis 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
4 | THE TABLET | 19 OCTOBER 2024
For more features, news, analysis and comment, visit www.thetablet.co.uk
