Resignations, scandals, pressure on numbers: it might be easy to get disheartened about the Church in England and Wales. But an analogy using the English weather may help bring some perspective, as Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor explains in his soon to be published memoirs, An English Spring.Adapting Newman’s famous “Second Spring” sermon, the cardinal writes in the foreword: “Aren’t English springs always full of promise, and always marred by cold and grey and rain? And yet isn’t the rain also a promise of crops to come, of labour not in vain? The pattern of my life, like that of the Church in recent years, has been an uncertain time of hopes and joys, of fears and of ‘keen blasts’.”In the memoirs he will examine the clerical s