Cardinal Vincent Nichols joined Catholic and Anglican bishops for a two-day joint meeting in Liverpool on Tuesday. Those present for the talks on Christian unity included the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, and the Catholic Archbishop of Liverpool, Malcolm McMahon.
This was the first joint meeting of the members of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference and the Church of England’s House of Bishops since January 2019, when they gathered in Leicester. The event began with midday prayers in the Metropolitan Cathedral of Christ the King, Liverpool’s Catholic cathedral, and was followed by a half-mile “fraternal pilgrimage walk” along Hope Street to the Anglican cathedral on St James’s Mount.
The two cathedrals are situated at either end of Hope Street, home of many of Liverpool’s cultural institutions, as well as the Sheppard-Worlock memorial which commemorates the friendship of Archbishop Derek Worlock of Liverpool with David Sheppard, his Anglican counterpart.
Cardinal Nichols and Archbishop Welby were photographed together besides the memorial, which comprises sculptures of the two former bishops facing each other.
Worlock and Sheppard had first met in the 1960s while working in parishes in East London. Worlock was heavily involved as a secretary in the Second Vatican Council, and was England’s first “post-conciliar” bishop when he was appointed to the Diocese of Portsmouth in 1965; Sheppard had the distinction of being the only ordained minister to play Test cricket, scoring 1172 runs for England, and was made Bishop of Liverpool in 1975. When Worlock was appointed to the archdiocese in 1976, Sheppard was his first visitor, bearing a bottle of wine.
They became an inseparable pair, affectionately dubbed Tweedledum and Tweedledee or “Fish ‘n’ Chips” by Liverpudlians, and were regarded as one of the most significant forces for ecumenism in the country in a city which could otherwise have been rife with sectarianism. When St John Paul II visited Gilbert Scott’s Anglican cathedral in 1982 he received a standing ovation described by Cardinal Basil Hume as “the most earnest and insistent prayer for Christian unity I have ever heard”.
Both primates have significant links to Liverpool. Archbishop Welby is himself a former Dean of Liverpool Cathedral, while Cardinal Nichols was born and educated in Liverpool and served as a priest in the archdiocese for fourteen years.
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