To mark our anniversary, we have invited 50 Catholics to choose a person from the past 175 years whose life has been a personal inspiration to them and an example of their faith at its best Reflecting on my memory of Basil Hume, the two words that come to mind are “authenticity” and “reassurance”.Hume was neither an intellectual, a social activist nor a controversialist; he was first and foremost a monk and a man of prayer, formed by the Rule of St Benedict, of which the first word is Ausculta – “Listen”. And he saw the pastoral role of a monk as being contemplata aliis tradere: to pass on to others what has been contemplated – contemplated, and found to be true. His (relatively infrequent) public pronouncements had the ring of authenticity