As many of you know_, my roots are deeply embedded in the Midland soil of the Archdiocese of Birmingham, although, when I first left home, it was to work in the University of London, and to live for a happy three years overlooking Clapham Common. In fact, although Birmingham born and bred, I have Kentish blood in my veins, as my father was born in Maidstone, but he was never sure which side of the Medway, and therefore whether he was a man of Kent or a Kentish man. Landlocked Birmingham could not be more different geographically from your diocese bounded by sea and river, the nearest English diocese to continental Europe and the focus of centuries of arrivals and departures, both voluntary and involuntary, in times of war and peace. At the back of your cathedral stands a statue of a modern saint, Francesca Cabrini, a woman canonized by the Church for her unstinting devotion and pastoral care for refugees and migrants here in Southwark and later in her adopted home of America. Southwark Cathedral has always been not merely an impressive symbol of the Church's presence, but the first spiritual home for thousands of exiles from distant lands. That statue surely speaks of a community which understands and cares about the fear of exile. As Catholics in England and Wales we have a heritage of exile and return which is particularly resonant in a diocese bounded by the Thames and the Channel.

This diocese embraces a part of England deeply embedded in the national imagination and culture, in its sense of itself and its identity. The white cliffs of Dover have been emblematic of England's historical relationship with the world, and royal palaces from Richmond to Greenwich have been at the centre of political and religious power struggles over many centuries. Chaucer, Shakespeare and Dickens have punctuated our literary and social history with Southwark sights, sounds and smells. There is a real sense in which geography has shaped the history of this part of England, its place on the edge making it both vulnerable and inherently changeable and flexible. This part of the country is also, of course, deeply embedded in the history of English Christianity from the time of King Ethelbert and St Augustine of Canterbury onwards. These counties south and east of the Thames do not feature strongly in the story of English recusancy, having only a handful of priests outside London at a time when Lancashire and Staffordshire had several dozen, and few major gentry centres to shelter them. However, they did see the departure of religious exiles and the arrival of seminary priests through the river and coastal ports, on which the whole story of Catholic England rests.

Among the numerous anonymous and famous religious exiles was Elizabeth White, a Dominican nun at Dartford in the sixteenth century, whose convent survived the dissolution but was finally driven out after the death of Mary Tudor. Elizabeth White was also the half sister of St John Fisher, the most famous bishop of the English Reformation, not only for his resistance to Henry VIII and his martyrdom₁ but for his long and fruitful episcopate in Rochester. He was, of course, remarkable in being resident in his diocese, the smallest and poorest in England, and 90% of his thirty years of service until his imprisonment in 1534 was spent within the diocese. Fisher was famed as a theologian and polemicist and as a preacher, at a time when clerical preaching was not at its best. He stands as an eminently suitable patron for the priests of the Archdiocese of Southwark, a trenchant defender of the sacramental priesthood against Luther, who defused Luther's argument for a priesthood of all believers by agreeing with it. He then went on to point out that the common priesthood of all believers did not mean that there was not a need for a distinctive sacramental priesthood, which exercised leadership. In his Defence of the Sacred Priesthood, published in 1525 and edited for the twentieth century by Mgr Philip Hallett, rector of Wonersh and Vice Postulator of More and Fisher's cause, Fisher significantly developed the late medieval understanding of episcopate and priesthood. He placed greater emphasis of preaching and education in the broadest sense and on pastoral care rather than merely supervision. He was rare in his own generation in writing about the pastoral role of the clergy. Cecilia Hatt, editor of Fisher's works, has commented that his greatness while being less immediately attractive than that of Thomas More, lay in 'striving for, and minding about, each individual soul'. That is not a bad example for the priests who follow in his footsteps as pastors, if not as martyrs.

In terms of the history of the modern diocese of Southwark, of course, the story goes back to 1850. Conflicts arose during the hierarchy negotiations themselves, over the question of London, and how it came to be the only modern capital city in the world with two archbishops and two cathedrals. Rome suggested, ironically, at the prompting of Thomas Grant, the agent in Rome, that London should be divided in two dioceses by the river. The Roman consultors to Propaganda had discovered for themselves that London had been divided into two sees since the time of Innocent Ill in 1215 and felt no impulse to change it, especially as there was a large and growing population south of the river. Wiseman was furiously opposed to the idea, and even when he was defeated on this, proposed that he should be in charge of both, at least for the time being. Until Grant's arrival in summer 1851, he lived at St George's and presided both sides of the river. Wiseman's point was that there was as yet no cathedral north of the river, and besides, a firm hand would be needed to control the 'nest of traitorous priests' which were harboured south of the river (troublemakers like Daniel Rock, an escapee from Staffordshire, who had organised a petition to Rome to secure the rights and privileges of the secular clergy before those of the episcopate were put in place).

Grant's close involvement with Ullathorne in the negotiations for the hierarchy in Rome inevitably brought him to more public attention, and given that one of the key problems in establishing the hierarchy was finding twelve men of sufficient stature to take on episcopal posts, his fate was sealed. Ullathorne described him as 'the ablest, most judicious and influential agent that the English bishops ever had in Rome'. He was ordained as Bishop of Southwark on July 6 1851 in the church of the English College, Rome and arrived in St George's Cathedral on Sept 14 to take up his new responsibilities aged only 35. It did not take long before antagonism arose between Grant and Wiseman over money and the division of the old London district funds between the two new dioceses. Grant suggested that an independent commission formed from the two chapters should examine the books and reach a fair division of resources: Wiseman was offended by the implied lack of trust in this, and was mistrustful of the Southwark chapter, which he believed was packed with anti-Roman Gallicans. Exhausted with the dispute, Grant took his case to Rome, but it dragged on through the 1850’s, with little co-operation from Wiseman. Grant also proposed, as early as 1855, the division of Southwark into two dioceses, which Wiseman seized on as another opportunity to try and reunite London in one see. Nothing came of either scheme for another thirty years.

Grant remained close friends with Ullathome in Birmingham for the rest of his short life. Ullathorne admired his intellect and administrative capacities and they shared a sense of frustration at the way in which Wiseman operated. He was unstinting in his praise when Grant died during the Vatican Council on 1 June 1870 in the English College: 'A great light is put out in our little church in England. A saint has departed from this world.... He was always praying, reading, writing, thinking of everybody but himself. So many consulted him on all kinds of subjects, from theology to Canon Law and civil law, from cases of conscience and the business and trials of life, down to the records of past events, points of literature, and the characters of public and private men with whom one has to deal'.

The Church of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries over which Grant, Wiseman, Ullathorne, Manning, Bourne and Amigo presided was characterised by a sense of separation from mainstream culture. There was a clear absolutism of belief, a competitive or confrontational attitude to other Christians, a clear distinction between the spheres of clergy and laity and huge resources were put into building and missionary campaigns at home and abroad. No-one could doubt that it worked and met the needs of the day with great effectiveness. Its extraordinary success is indicated in its great social and devotional mixture and by its mass lay activity in devotion and liturgy, fund-raising, moral and physical support of the clergy, widespread attendance at Catholic schools and astounding charitable generosity. This powerful culture, the result of a reinvention of English Catholicism as it emerged from penal times, shaped the Church of the twentieth century and allowed, even encouraged us, to believe that there was no reason why it would not continue in the same way.

Out of a determination to assert the distinctive and separate identity of English Catholicism, the Catholic community created a counter culture of its own around its parishes, schools, convents, charities and societies. Bred in our distinctive separate history as English Catholics, we developed particular ideas of a parish based on the concept of contradiction and opposition to an increasingly materialist secular world around. Copious provision was put in place for Catholic education and seminary formation which meant a role was open to working class boys which offered a real opportunity to affect their community, to attain status, to exercise leadership, to do good. Priesthood offered a positive and attractive role model. The assumption took root that there were never too many priests, and that the growth of parishes, Catholic numbers and ordinations would continue in the same way, but all too often those assumptions did not keep pace with a changing Church or society.

Numbers of clergy and laity did grow rapidly in the first half of the twentieth century, based on the great campaigns of the Victorians. They peaked in the interwar years and parishes expanded in the hope of continued growth in numbers - and numbers were what mattered. Ordinations nationally almost doubled between the wars from 119 in 1913 to 215 in 1939, yet still anxiety about the shortage of priests persisted. During the 1940s in particular the number of clergy rose (nationally) from 5642 in 1939 to 6643 in 1949 (15%) (Beck p436). Between 1904 and 1949 the number of churches in Southwark almost doubled from 150 to 280, and surely would have done but for the interruption of the Second World War. Mass attendance figures doubled between the 1920s and late 1940s, and allegedly represented by 1950 an attendance level of 94%. That expansion was a cause for the sort of self-congratulation expressed at the celebration of the centenary of the hierarchy in 1950, but how much of that clerical increase was due to speeded up wartime ordinations to avoid conscription and the post-war ordinations of men returning from the forces, alongside spectacularly high levels of recruitment from lreland? There never was a golden age, although some thought they were living through it. It now seems almost laughable that Archbishop Beck, writing in 1950 could assert that, 'Signs are not wanting, however, that the drift of materialism is at an end. The day of doctrine is returning, and for that reason alone the situation provides an opportunity and a challenge to the Church in this country'. (English Catholics 1850-1950 pp 610-11)

But what was it all for? And what was it perhaps disguising? The government's own Mass Observation Survey revealed that even during the war years (supposedly times of increased church attendance) 6 out 10 of the population did not go to church, and that the 'vague religiosity' of the great mass of the population was fed more by the hugely popular films of the times such as The Song of Bernadette and Bing Crosby's Going My Way than by churchgoing. At the beginning of the 1960s studies of parishes and social change were already beginning to reveal that traditional parish structures 'might not be adequate to meet the needs of and multiple problems of a modern urban civilization' and that the structure had 'not as yet adapted itself sufficiently to the new conditions and to a changed situation in the mid twentieth century.' (quoted in Hornsby-Smith p52)

I believe increasingly that it is now the mid twentieth century which is beginning to look like the exception, the aberration in our history, when we thought we'd got it right. The particular circumstances and a triumphalist view of history convinced English Catholics that continued expansion was possible and achievable without very much strategic thought or effort. Long after population growth had peaked, sources of immigration had largely shifted to the West Indies and Indian subcontinent, and the conversion of England had begun to look less likely, the Catholic community carried on building, assuming there would be laity and clergy to occupy the spaces.

In the last quarter of a century or so, aspirations to a world built on democracy, justice and peace have hit the buffers of violence and terrorism, hopes of feeding the world have disappeared into globalisation, sexual freedom and honesty have been perverted into obsession, sleaze and AIDS, the technology which was going to create the brave new world of leisure and freedom has turned into a monstrous machine, the promise of full employment has ended in battery hen offices and call centres. I think something similar has happened in the Church and affected not only the laity but particularly the generations of priests who reached adulthood and probably entered seminary between the accession of John XXIII and the accession of John Paul II. For the men ordained in the 1960s and 1970s there was also much promised: a return to the radical Gospel message, rediscovery of the dignity and role of the laity, a move away from aspects of Church life which stifled rather than nourished people, the development of episcopal collegiality and renewal of religious life, catechesis and liturgy in a new ecumenical atmosphere. Yet the years which followed in the 1980s and 1990s also brought disillusion, falling numbers of clergy and laity, uncertainty and a growing sense of crisis, compounded by revelations of the depths to which some men had been driven. This, I am convinced, has shaped the way in which we read the past and look to the future. There is a temptation in this atmosphere either to reject and abandon the past in order to invent a new future, or to wonder what has happened to the golden age, to the might of English Catholicism which had triumphed in the 1950s and was ripe for the challenge of the Council in the 1960s. What we are left with is the sense of disappointment and disillusion which comes from experiencing numerical decline, failure and loss of momentum, but is really based on a misreading and misunderstanding of our history.

Priesthood takes place within a particular church and each particular or local church is shaped and characterized by its history. The local church and the clergy of this area have particular histories, which can be both a burden and a blessing at the same time. Pastores Dabo Vobis points towards the importance of connection with the history and culture of the local church when it suggests that, 'the specific historical and contextual conditions of a particular church are elements which must be taken into account in sketching the proper configuration of the priest and his spiritual life.' (PDV, 82) That proper configuration takes place appropriately in the light of the common memory of the local church. So dominant has been the common memory of the period between 1850 and 1950, that we need to stretch it a little further than the last hundred years or so to understand more fully the context in which we live and work today. The present striving for ways of building communion and the apparent lack of confidence in our present clerical roles and relationships between priests and laity suggest that we need to break out of the unhistorical present and encounter a broader sense of our history. There we will find different attempts to create community, other 'models' of interdependence between clergy and laity and we may develop an awareness that the interaction between change and continuity is the driving power in the Church.

We are now facing the same phenomenon of half empty churches which other denominations have lived with for a century, what Robin Gill has called the 'millstones' which weigh down the churches and block our vision. Gill has argued that, until recently, the Catholic Church bucked the trend and therefore did not suffer the depressive effects on the community of worshipping in half empty churches. (The Myth of the Empty Church, 1996, p293-4) We have now rapidly come into line with the other churches in this respect. It has had a profound effect on our experience and understanding of communal worship, which we have scarcely thought about, when your childhood memories are like mine, of packed pews into which additional bodies were shoehorned, in order to make more room for those who had to stand, or of queuing outside the cathedral to be sure of a seat for the Holy Week services.

Yet what we are living through now is not a crisis of any worse proportions than most other periods of post Reformation life in this country, but it is coloured by a received view that the Church of the first half of the twentieth century was the perfect society on which the optimism and promise of the 1960s was supposed to build, and from which we have entered a long dark tunnel of decline. What we are doing at present is to continue to commit personnel and resources to maintaining the fixed geographical existence of our parishes and we build our lay and priestly formation and catechetical practice around this, as though it were an unchanging reality. The historical reality is that this was not always so, and the Catholic community has constantly adapted to meet contemporary needs, with greater or lesser success.

There is a school of historiography which regards the Catholic mission of the 16th and 17th centuries as a very partial success, with lack of co-ordination ensuring that disproportionately few seminary priests left the south east ports of arrival and moved up country to serve other pockets of surviving Catholicism. Large numbers of priests were actually picked up and arrested at the ports and found themselves imprisoned in Southwark in the Marshalsea, Clink, Queens Bench and White Lion. It is certainly true that the capacity of the Recusant Catholic clergy to organize themselves into an effective missionary body was almost nonexistent, and bitter rows between Seculars and Jesuits broke out before the last of Mary Tudor's priests were cold in their graves.

The Catholics who went about their daily lives in an indifferent and often hostile world after the Reformation and before the Catholic Revival adapted flexibly and rapidly to fewer priests: they had no option. The priests of the Recusant period had to be capable of communicating truths in ways in which people could realistically live them out. As the structures which had sustained medieval Catholic life were ripped away, the maintenance of Catholic life became more difficult and circumscribed and had to be constantly reinvented - this has much more to tell us about our current situation than any other period of our history. Patterns of survival varied enormously as Catholics found different ways of living creatively with lack of resources, scattered congregations, few priests and little institutional life as they moved from Christian culture to denominational identity. The mobility of many clergy and the fragmented nature of Catholic congregations meant that the laity became the mainstay of the mission and the necessity and provision for independent local and domestic action emerged.

We all live in a number of interlocking circles or move on from one community to another, often geographically separated - only 20% of British adults now live where they were born. The parish as traditionally understood in the twentieth century as a geographical entity reflecting a genuine community is no longer the case. Many people either 'vote with the steering wheel' or parishes are sustained by people who no longer live within the bounds. It becomes much harder to say what a parish is, and this needs to inform our thinking for the future - but remember that stable parishes are a relatively recent phenomenon in our history. The Recusant priests did not work within boundaries.

Our mission is nurtured in the parish, but we need to ask ourselves what is the experience of many of our fellow men and women who, for whatever reason, find themselves on the edge of the parish? Their experience may not be reflected. The people on the margin are not simply those who turn up to Mass once a month, but people like Mrs Tracey, who after a lifetime's unselfish and hidden service to one parish, felt she had become a dinosaur because she didn't understand 'all these changes' or intelligent middle-aged Catholics who search the city for a homily to feed them through a busy week, or people who want to believe but are ill at ease with some of the institutional attitudes which they (accurately or otherwise) absorb. The worst aspect of living on the margins of a family, or a community or a society is that no-one listens to what you have to say, to your needs, your ideas. The need to be listened to, to be heard, is one of the most desperate and deeply rooted in our humanity. Real loneliness is not the need of someone to talk to me, but the need of someone to listen to me. We cannot hope to understand, or to be understood, if we are not ready to listen, to pay attention, to be prepared to be changed by what someone else speaks. Human communication, speaking and listening, can be a means of dominating and controlling each other, rather than sharing our lives together. In our hunger for human communication, we can find ourselves demanding more of each other than we are able to give, or giving too little. This is where respect must flourish and possessiveness or arrogance be controlled. Are our parishes places where people are listened to?

In a little book by the French literary and cultural scholar, Theodore Zeldin, called 'Conversation', the author advocates real listening, understanding and an openness to the other. It is a risky business, but is the stuff of real communication, which risks changing lives. This is what Zeldin means in describing a conversation which catches fire and which changes people's ideas and feelings. If we do not understand someone and what motivates and shapes their lives, there will never be a relationship which flows from, and is the fruit of conversation. To listen to someone is to attend to what they have to say, to respect and understand them as an individual. In order to reach that understanding, there has to be a conversation.

The future mission of the local church will only gain confidence and strength from a conversation with those on the 'fringe' as well as with those whose commitment is already strong, and from engaging in conversations and partnerships with other individuals, organisations and bodies which share some of our values, principles and aspirations. Community as reflected in the Church, has to be more dynamic and courageous than the sustaining of pockets of worshipping communities which no longer reflect many people's experience in the rest of their lives. We need to find ways of adjusting from an exclusive emphasis on sustaining parish life into conversation, linkage and partnership with other networks in people's lives - leisure, work, sport, neighbourhood, travel, education. The leadership, teaching and authentic witness of priesthood needs to be integrated into the cultural networks which connect our society together. In 1950, Bishop Beck asserted that, 'As the distinction between Catholicism and materialism grows sharper, there may be fewer and fewer opportunities of close working together even in the merely political or economic field'. That attitude has to be turned on its head: as the distinction between Catholicism and materialism grows sharper, we have to strive even harder for opportunities for close working together, especially in the 'merely' political or economic field.

This is a challenge which forces us to ask some difficult questions of ourselves -like, what are our parishes for? A seaside parish in a northern diocese found itself some years ago without a resident priest. They quickly worked out how to survive, by inviting visiting clergy to take a working holiday in the comfortably renovated presbytery, under the general oversight of the pastoral council working with the deanery clergy. Then they found themselves asking another question. 'What we are trying to work out now is what we are surviving for. What is our mission and purpose for remaining in existence?' They decided it was to find ways to be of service to the entire community, and have developed a wide ministry to the town (heavily populated with retired and elderly) by visiting and supporting all the bereaved, not just Catholics or other Christians. This sort of question - what are we surviving for? - may have arisen in some form or other in the course of discussions in your parishes. If it hasn't, perhaps it should be asked now. What is the mission of our parish in the particular circumstances of our locality at this point in our history? What is our history telling us, not just about the past, but about the future?

We live in a present which is shaped by our past, but there is a danger that we come to serve the things which we have inherited rather than making them serve the needs of the community. By taking an unhistorical view of the Church we have trapped ourselves into a pattern of life which no longer reflects our vision of what we want the community to be. John O'Donoghue has written about our contemporary 'obsession with spiritual programmes', in which, 'The past is forsaken as unredeemed; the present is used as the fulcrum to a future that bodes holiness, integration or perfection'. What will take us forward is not a new pastoral plan, or restructured parish, deanery or diocese which forsakes the past as unredeemed, but renewed energy, commitment and missionary leadership which recognises and embraces the changing world we live in and engages in conversation with it. Archbishop Vincent Nichols said at the 2003 NCP conference, 'An invisible priesthood is a contradiction in terms. The priest needs to be visible not only in the church, but on the streets, in people's houses, in schools, hospitals, prisons, even - or especially - when his presence is a cause of contention or perhaps hostility'. Being a visible presence in the Catholic community and the wider society has never been comfortable in this country. The life of a Catholic priest in England has not been easy for at least 400 years, so take courage.

The mayor of a small French town recently galvanised the whole town in putting on a spectacular show, a sort of contemporary secular version of the medieval mystery plays, for no other reason than to energise and involve the residents in a creative communal enterprise. By way of explanation for this extraordinary event he said, 'My belief is that Janvry should be a place where people live, not just a place where people sleep at night... It is easy for people to get in the way of thinking that everything should be done for them whether by politicians or entertainers... people, all kinds of people can, if they want to, do almost anything for themselves. It makes us actors in our own lives.' Could we hope to say that of our parishes?