“Archbishop Vincent Nichols to be made a cardinal. Let this be a fresh start” was the headline over Damian Thompson’s Telegraph blog on Sunday. Of course, he is right. I speak as one of those whom the Cardinal-designate once enjoined to “learn to hold their tongue”: and I now have no more to say on the subject of what all that was about, except that now I will indeed hold mine – all that is now, I hope, behind us: Rome has been satisfied that the Soho Masses are a thing of the past. Archbishop Nichols should now have the good will and prayers of all of us for a happy and fruitful future as leader of all English Catholics. What worries me is not the archbishop, but the interpretation of his red hat (and of the motives of the Pope who announced it) which is now being put about by certain elements in the English Church who do not want a fresh start. It all fits in only too neatly with what the editor of this paper this week, in a must-read article in the Spectator, called “the gulf between what you might call the Fantasy Francis — the figure conjured up by liberal imagination — and the actual occupant of the Chair of St Peter”. Such people do not want to believe that Archbishop Nichols put the Soho Masses behind him: nor do they think that the Vatican of Pope Francis even wants him to. The Guardian’s report of Archbishop Nichols’s elevation this week dredged up the Soho Masses (which, of course, it thinks were an excellent thing) and gives us, one more weary time, the liberal take on Pope Francis’s air-born press conference during his return from the World Youth Day. The Soho Masses, said the Guardian, were “staunchly defended by the archbishop” (the paper says nothing about the fact that he suppressed them). “In 2010,” the paper continued, “Nichols laid into critics of the Soho Masses, saying: ‘Anybody from the outside who is trying to cast a judgment on the people who come forward for communion really ought to learn to hold their tongue’. It was a sentiment [this is still The Guardian] echoed by Pope Francis, who last year declared: 'If someone is gay and seeks the Lord with good will, who am I to judge?'" Oh dear. And of course, the Soho Masses Pastoral Council (which still, it seems, exists) is delighted. Terence Weldon, a member of it, runs a blog called Queering the Church, in which he reveals, under the jubilant headine “Welcome CARDINAL Vincent Nichols”, the following, all of which will be embarrassing to the Cardinal-designate: this is something he could live without; these people, I fear, are determined not to let go of his coat-tails. Weldon reveals: