Birmingham Mail speaks to new Archbishop of Birmingham
Dec 8 2009 By Maureen Messent
The Most Rev Bernard Longley was today being installed as the ninth Archbishop of Birmingham. Prior to the pomp and ceremony of the occasion, MAUREEN MESSENT found him in a relaxed mood as he talked exclusively to the Birmingham Mail of his hopes and prayers for the city.
HIS aunt’s a Jehovah’s Witness. His great grandmother, as a girl, would join in shouts of “No Popery” at Protestant Orange Order marches through Liverpool.
Small wonder, then, that the pink-cheeked 54-year-old Mancunian who is to be consecrated today as Birmingham’s ninth archbishop – one of the most senior clerics in the English and Welsh Catholic Church – lists setting up strong ties with worshipers of all faiths and persuasions near the top of his priorities.
“You need to trust insights into other paths”, says Bernard Longley.
“As Catholics, we believe that the fullness of Our Lord is present in our Roman Catholic beliefs, but the road to salvation is also present within other faiths”
The words are softly spoken, the blue eyes steady behind owlish spectacles. This man, you feel, could have made a reassuring family doctor or solicitor, known for his patience in listening, his desire to understand the emotions and opinions of others.
This is heartening to Catholics because many of us thought that whoever the Pope chose to follow the charismatic Vincent Nichols, now Archbishop of Westminster and, therefore, likely to become a cardinal, might find himself working in Vincent’s shadow, regarded as a safe pair of hands, worthy rather than inspiring.
We got it wrong. Oh Lord! How wrong we got it. He is a towering priest, a diplomat, theologian, singer and scholar who has risen through the clerical ranks quickly, probably noticed in his teens and encouraged.
His dad, as he calls 81-year-old Fred Longley, a one-time maintenance man for the presses churning out the northern editions of The Daily Express in Manchester, would take the young Bernard and his sister, Kathleen, to Mass, his faith and observance making a deep impression on his children.
“My mother wasn’t a Catholic at this stage”, he recalls. “But my father always prayed she’d convert one day – and she did. Quite by choice, by the way. Mind you, she’d always get Dad and us out of bed and ready on Sunday morning.”
It was a modest start in life. Bernard was an altar boy at eight, had decided he wanted to be a priest by the time he was 12, an ambition reinforced by his then-parish priest, Tom Wharry.
“He exuded this enormous happiness,” says Bernard. (We Catholics use our bishops’ christian names, we mean no disrespectful over-familiarity).
“I probably didn’t realise it at the time but from Fr Tom I was absorbing an example of fidelity and hope in the priesthood that’s never left me.”
He was a bright kid, gaining a place at Manchester’s Xaverian College, in those days a Catholic grammar school, where his contemporaries are rueful that he’d sweet-talk them into giving them their pocket money for missionaries around the world.
Then there was his music. His splendid tenor voice paved his way to part-time studies at the Royal Northern College of Music while he still a schoolboy.
After that, he studied English Literature as a choral scholar at New College, Oxford – the first Longley to reach university, so imagine for a minute his father’s pride in this versatile and talented son. He got himself talked about, too. As an officer of the Oxford University Society, he had at one point to dash from meetings at which a white tie and tails were de rigeur, to Evensong in his college’s famous choir.
“I used to pull my cassock over my posh clothes,” he says, “and must have looked a bit eccentric, shall we say?”
It gained him a reputation, recently repeated in some newspapers, as a bit of a dandy. Is that true of our Archbishop in his salad days?
“Sorry to disappoint you”, he beams, “I was too happy to be at Oxford not to work hard.”
God continued to call him. Within a year of gaining his degree, he entered the local Wonersh seminary, sang in its choir and became a respected student. His boss at that time, Fr Peter Smith, now Archbishop of Cardiff, recalls the night he complained Bernard was playing his radio so loudly that “the racket was bouncing round the courtyard”.
A reasonable assumption, perhaps, except “the racket” was actually Bernard, standing alone in the dark to practice a favourite aria.
