It was nearly 30 years ago when Cardinal Basil Hume acknowledged almost excitedly that a realignment was taking place within English Christianity.
“This could be a big moment of grace, it could be conversion of England for which we have prayed all these years,” he disclosed in February of 1993. “Now it could be happening – a realignment of Christianity to bring us closer together.”
With hindsight, he might have been overly optimistic but in 1994, Graham Leonard, the Anglican Bishop of London, was ordained a Catholic priest, followed that same year by Conrad Meyer, Bishop of Dorchester, and Richard Rutt, the Bishop of Leicester (once described as “perhaps the last in the line of scholar missionaries”). In 1996, they were joined by Bishop John Klyberg of Fulham.
