Promises to Place
By Francis Davis
This is the story of a pioneering contribution to a place and its people, in which the Church fulfilled a valued and transformative role as a civic partner. Professor Francis Davis explores the apostolate, or calling, of Monsignor Nicholas France MBE (1943-2024) to serve and contribute to the life and wellbeing of communities in the area known as the English Central South, and the Channel Islands.
Catholic social thought is often presented by philosophical theologians as a series of principles, or sweeping metaphors grounded in the courtly Papal Encyclicals scribed far from local shores.1 One consequence of this ‘fly over’ approach to critical reflection has been the omission of the learning that comes from action. Another gap is the analysis of place as a substantive factor in how social justice is served, built and involves Christian personalities that shape and are shaped by social and ecclesial forces.2 3
The brilliant Christian anthropologist Mary Douglas once argued that what we do together we come to think. Neil Jameson, the late National Organiser of Citizens UK, agreed believing that it is action that leads to the best radical thinking, not the other way round. Similarly, this is a story of Catholic social action worked out in ecumenical context in response to concrete social needs in and from a parish, communities and a Diocese. It is the story of the sometimes prophetic but consistently faithful response of one cleric, Monsignor Nicholas France, to concrete needs and how they then shaped his social thought. It is also a personal story to me in that in various ways I collaborated with, supported and advised France in several of his civic contributions – and built others from them - from 1991 until his retirement in 2018.
Monsignor Nicholas France was educated and then served throughout his life as a Parish Priest only in the Catholic Diocese of Portsmouth. Portsmouth Diocese includes the modern counties of Hampshire, much of Berkshire, the Isle of Wight, some of Oxfordshire and Dorset and all the Channel Islands. Its geography, needs - and his ordination promises - definitively shaped each other.4 Notably it is from one Catholic school in this patch too that Baroness Louise Casey, Jon Cruddas, Penny Mordaunt and Dame Caroline Dineage all went on to make their own distinctive stories.
France’s family home was in Petersfield, now within the South Downs National Park. He wanted to be a Priest before he was ten. His banker agnostic father did not object and his pious mother celebrated.5 There was a thorough Englishness of the South to the culture of his formation.
Educated by the Benedictines at Douai Abbey near Reading he retained a close link to the community throughout his life, and his schoolfriend Fr Peter Bowe OSB (by now an expert on inter-religious dialogue) was at his funeral.
After Douai the young Nicholas progressed to Allen Hall, a seminary then at St Edmund’s in Ware, where he trained alongside another Portsmouth Priest, the future Bishop Peter Doyle of Northampton. With the Cold War raging he left ‘genuinely concerned that he might one day have to risk his life in the face of Russian incursion’. He had been struck too that many of his seminary teachers, such as the theologically famous Fr Charles Davis, had been leaving the Church. ‘Fr Davis said the Church lacked love’, France would reminisce. However, with history rather than theology being France’s passion, he would shrug that off with the observation ‘but he always seemed just grumpy himself to me.’ The promises France would make to Bishop, people and place upon ordination at times acted as an insulation against ‘too much’ dissent. Those promises and his incardination (a formal commitment to serve a single diocese permanently) also acted as a kind of anchor when things were tough.
France’s ordaining Bishop was Derek Worlock, then Bishop of Portsmouth. He became Bishop’s Secretary in succession to the future Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor. These were formative years. Canon David Hopgood, a current Portsmouth Diocesan Vicar General, observes that from this time ‘like words printed inside a piece of seaside rock, so Vatican II was woven like a thread into his ministry’.6
Worlock became friends with the local Labour MP, Frank Judd who later directed OXFAM and became a Labour Peer. Shared anti-poverty campaigns emerged. Judd, Worlock and France would meet up with volunteers to cook a Christmas lunch for the poor from the Catholic Cathedral each year.
In 1973, in anticipation of the 1974 first ever Housing Association Act, an ecumenical group gathered at Worlock’s House in Portsmouth at the suggestion of local Anglican Canon, Bill Sargent. As the young Secretary took notes, Worlock and Sargent became two of seven people to invest £1 each to establish Portsmouth Housing Association. It went on to build over 500 homes and establish what is today the pioneering John Pounds Community hub and centre in one of the city’s poorest neighbourhoods.7 The seeds for Worlock’s work with Bishop David Sheppard, to support the Eldonian Housing Association in Liverpool when he became the city’s Archbishop, were sown.8
In 1962 another Portsmouth Priest of the Murphy-O’Connor family, Cormac’s older brother Patrick, had established the St Dismas Society for the homeless and rootless in Southampton. Its first warden, inspired by Dorothy Day’s anarchist Catholic Worker movement, was Anton Wallich Clifford. He went on to found the Simon Community for the homeless and work with the Anglican priest and activist, Fr Ken Leech, to launch what is now the £50 million turnover Centrepoint charity. Clifford, Leech, the Murphy-O’Connor’s, and Worlock were all in the network of associations that backed a new national advocacy group (in part pump primed by Jewish philanthropy) called Shelter as it got off the ground and grew. Soon the Liberal MP for the nearby Isle of Wight, Stephen Ross, would promote a private members bill which would become, in 1977, the first ever Act of parliament to give rights to homeless families.9 With these passions, a prison for lifers, and a local
neighbourhood low on income, all being supported from Bishop’s House
France’s post Vatican II outlook gathered and strengthened a social dimension.
Even when Worlock was translated to Liverpool, France and Worlock stayed in regular touch and the Archbishop visited almost every year. Later, on one such visit Worlock was that time in the company of Bishop David Sheppard and together they exhorted me, fresh from university over a rather nice lunch, to commit (Worlock) to ‘the inner city’ and (Sheppard) ‘the defeat of racism’. I was already a community organiser but was struck by their earnestness. When Worlock died, France had been with him near the end. He then became his literary executor.
Spells in parishes in Aldershot and Winchester brought new friends and ecumenical breakthroughs. Visit contemporary Winchester Cathedral and you will see the beautiful pieta in the Lady Chapel which was donated by the Catholic community under France’s leadership. Lasting ecumenical partnerships were forged. Notable friends from that time included Professor Terence Morris, LSE Professor and author of the first ever sociology of a British prison;10 also Admiral Michael Gretton of the Royal Navy whose sailors, with the army, formed the backbone of so many Hampshire parishes.
France’s caution regarding the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament though was more strongly reinforced by the presence of Michael Quinlan, Permanent Secretary for Defence, and his own wider family. At times a grandly constructed Winchester Presbytery and these elite links could give him the feel of a ‘Society Priest’ relaxed at great Boarding Schools or among the glitterati. Later he would celebrate the (unsuccessful) marriage of Chef Marco Pierre White at the Brompton Oratory. Being at ease in such circles did however mean that in his next two roles he was not fazed when he encountered resistance to his solidarity with the poorest.
To his astonishment as the 1980’s became the 1990’s France found himself appointed to Southampton by Bishop Crispian Hollis.11 His brief was to merge two urban congregations to create a new City Centre Parish with a thousand Mass goers, but he went further.
For the first time the Catholic Church became known to the leaders of the city as a civic partner. Briefed and supported by a young parish community organiser (whose post was part of the first Catholic project funded by the then newly established Anglican Church Urban Fund), the present author, he lobbied in support of a council anti-poverty strategy, for the poorer families in local schools and in favour of better facilities for the mostly Global South merchant seafarers who were often in port. Indeed, concerned for South Indian and Filipino seafarers, France and I would often be found in the port together on board unseaworthy ‘rust buckets’ under foreign flags where accidents (and beatings) were high. While I gathered data and statements, he would offer prayer and the Eucharist. I have a lasting impression of him boarding a ship with a reputation for egregious behaviour and which had refused him entry, or a time for Mass, and proceeding to celebrate the Eucharist – Christmas three days early – for Catholic crew while others ate their meals about him and ship officers looked on with fury. ‘Christ, the Church’ he said, ‘is on your side ..and cares for each of you’.
While the Southampton parish comprised a geography of inner-city poverty and Grenfell Tower-like tower blocks, it was also home to university dwellings and to hundreds working in the local hospital. One such resident and parishioner was Dame Sheila Quinn, a feisty sometime President of the Royal College of Nursing who in that role had clashed with Mrs Thatcher over pay. She had gone on to win ‘Nursing’s Nobel’, the Christiane Reimann Prize, for her global contribution to nursing and health.
Working with Dame Sheila, strongly supported by France, I established ‘Catholic City Centre Care’ to mobilise over one hundred volunteers to provide meals on wheels, a luncheon club, and home help for the vulnerable and the housebound. Among our volunteers was a young accountant and future Treasury minister in the form of Mark Hoban, current Chair of the Cardinal Hume Centre. Referrals came from the city council’s lists of their frailest residents and funding from foundations and a monthly special collection in the parish. The parish continued to employ up to 20 part time home care support workers for another 32 years. For France these new initiatives were ‘one lung’ of a healthy parish with the other being ‘prayer’. So, as the parish’s social commitment grew, he also made sure it became the first in the UK to offer Eucharistic Adoration from 8am to 9pm seven days a week – as a chain of prayer throughout the day.
France often said that he saw English Catholicism as a branch of nonconformity. His school, Douai, had in its long history faced mistreatment by the French state. He was proud to be a successor of Archbishop Milner in Winchester who had tended a flock at risk from English penal laws in the 18th Century. He had some sympathy for the way Irish workers had historically faced poor treatment by landlords, and in the parish were Irish men permanently impacted by brutal questioning when mistakenly arrested regarding an IRA bombing in England in years gone by. He respected Methodism’s proximity to the urban poor.
A particular memory that stuck with him were conversations with a friend of Worlock’s, Patrick Keegan, an advocate for the Young Christian Workers and friend of its founder Cardinal Cardijn, who had emphasised the priority of the lay voice and contribution to social justice, workplace justice and social concerns.
In Southampton, while he had very good relations with the successive Team Rectors of the main Anglican City Centre Parish, he always found the United Reformed Church, the Methodists and the small but fast growing independent Community Church easier to work with than the local Anglican ‘industrial chaplains’, who he found ‘strangely clericalised’ and too ‘dismissive of lay workers’ themselves.
He had read Robert Gray’s life of Cardinal Manning before Southampton, along with documents of the Second Vatican Council naming the need to identify the joys and sorrows of the world. In Southampton though he turned to Alan McClelland’s work on Manning’s public life and contribution and sought out friends nearby with whom to discuss the social encyclicals. Naturally, every book that emerged from the collaboration of Worlock and Sheppard in Liverpool was most often read before publication and then championed to all. In 1992 he helped co-host a national conference to explore theologies of urban mission and poverty, organised with Richard Zipfel, then head of the Bishops’ Conference Department for Community Relations, Robina Rafferty who had served on the Archbishop of Canterbury’s Commission that drafted Faith in the City and Christine Allen, now Director of CAFOD. He also facilitated the local college of higher education to work with me to develop new Diplomas in Church and Social Care Practice and Pastoral Studies to build up lay skills.
Also in 1992 I wrote to every school in the Diocese wondering if they would be interested in helping with a Bishop’s Appeal for refugees in the then war torn former Yugoslavia. Within weeks we had a unanimous response and almost every parish in the Diocese joined in as did local synagogues, mosques, temples and Christian congregations and schools right across the South (and then nationwide). In that first year I spoke at just under a hundred school assemblies and to thousands of members of ecumenical, education, media, business, trade union, Inner Wheel and Rotary networks.
Nicholas France chaired the appeal as it grew, with me as Director, to collaborate with Caritas12 Austria, to fund rape victim support for Muslim survivors and garner donations from the US too. In today’s money over a million pounds was raised. France, Dame Sheila Quinn and I, led by Bishop Crispian Hollis, visited Croatia and Bosnia on fact finding visits meeting Ministers, Diplomats and the great Cardinal Franjo Kuharić . Upon our return Bishop Hollis went public calling for airstrikes to mitigate Serbian ethnic cleansing13.
We were both constantly on local Radio and TV advancing these causes. Another fruit of this period was that Dame Sheila, a parish council member named David Palmer and I became involved on the founding board of a new (secular) Southampton Care Association (SCA). Led by Anglican Priest Brian Strevens and with Sheila, then I, as Executive Chair, we established the first ever NHS social enterprise dental practices, provided domiciliary care and hospital at home and, in a partnership with La Sainte Union College of Higher Education and Southampton University, I established the first Masters in voluntary sector management in the UK, a research centre on the voluntary sector and another on primary health care. In 2007 we were pleased to receive a The Observer social enterprise of the year award, presented by the then Third Sector Minister, Ed Miliband MP. SCA by then employed a thousand people and is still active.
By then France was Catholic Dean of Jersey, a role he loved, and occupied from 1999 to 2018. His first task was to work towards a single parish for the island. Another was to repair and renovate the crumbling Presbytery next to Jersey’s vast St Thomas’s mother church. In the process he came to recognise ever more the way the island’s thriving economy relied for its wealth on the long hours, low paid, unrecognised labour of mostly Portuguese migrant workers. Invited into the crucial farming and hospitality sectors these migrants were not permitted to buy or rent property and so lived tenuous lives in guest houses, sheds and sub-standard flats. Risks to children were high as was automatic ejection if a worker got a reputation for speaking up for their plight.
France learnt basic Portuguese to be able to celebrate sacraments in that language. In a partnership with the local FE college, he opened English language classes for workers, renovating an unused building as a ‘Welcome Centre’. The Centre’s café provided affordable food but also a hub to connect to parish pastoral workers, Deacons and volunteers. He encouraged migrants to stand for election to Jersey’s parliament, the States, encouraged them to vote and advocated their welfare to the Chief Minister and all who would listen – and some who would not. The island newspaper ran a cartoon of France lifting up the carpet of the house of Jersey with its huge wealth above and the struggles of its have nots hidden squalidly below.
In 2012 France’s Parish Deacon, Iain MacFirbhisigh, summoned me to Jersey. My brief, he and France advised me, was to draw up an evidence base of social need on the island. The first fruit of this work was the launch of Caritas Jersey under the brilliant leadership of John Scally.
Once again France had been adamant that Caritas should be lay led ‘to ensure the expertise’. He gathered former States’ Ministers, current probation experts, eminent business leaders to serve on its board. He made excerpts of the social encyclicals14 available and encouraged volunteers to explore their pages.
As Caritas grew it organised an annual lecture (given at various stages by, for example, Rev Dr Angus Ritchie, and Jonathan Cox), developed housing projects, a family support scheme for those visiting prison inmates and a campaign to encourage minority groups to vote in island wide elections. Then followed the launch of a campaign for an island Living Wage led by Scally and Caritas’s chair, Mark Lewis. Victory was secured with the Jersey government, port, retail and banking sectors at various stages being engaged.15 In 2014 France was awarded MBE for services to migrants and the community on Jersey. Eleven years later Caritas Jersey still runs alongside a thriving St Vincent De Paul Society whose contribution France also supported. As well as its anti-poverty work it has been prominent in efforts to resist the introduction of assisted suicide to the Channel Islands.16
In retirement he returned to Southampton where by now a new Bishop was rolling back almost every facet of the advances for which Monsignor France had worked all his life. Lay people removed from committee majorities, key lay staff sacked allegedly without due process, home grown clergy increasingly replaced by those gathered from outside the place in which he had grown, served and given his life.17 He was kind to many alienated by this approach not least his old friend Rev Ray Lyons. But he was loyal still to the promise to Bishop, people and place that he had made all those years ago.
When he died younger Senators on Jersey, who he had inspired to stand for office, expressed sadness. They recalled his encouragement and support for the Living Wage and social justice. He had left heart shaped holes in their lives.18 19
At his packed funeral Canon David Hopgood recalled a human with ‘an infectious smile, generous, (an) ability to talk and hold a court! Faithfulness, vulnerable, at times a little pompous – but a great ability to laugh at himself. Prayerful and loyal - a total inability to cook or cope with domestic things. A sense of innocence - a man of vision who loved the Church, Diocese and Priesthood’.
To this ought to be added no radical, not a theologian of liberation, but no total conservative either. Instinctive in compassion rather than theological in motivation, practical in action rather than theorising in analysis. In a self-styled way he was an advocate for the poor, organiser of works of mercy, and a cleric willing to use his energy and his standing for those with no access to schooling, housing, or safe work. His action and support gave life to an understanding of a purpose of the Church to be to walk alongside the most excluded – and it gave life in context to the Church’s social thought. In each of the parishes he served he told friends he would be happy to die there, ‘in harness’. It was meant.
By deciding to assess need, then act and then to dig deeper into the resources of the subversive Catholic social history that he loved, and the social teachings that he came to know, he found a way to create the conditions for others to take social innovations further and wider still. What he enabled people to do together they came to think, and by acting together, their values and contribution were transformed. Or, we might apply to him something he once asserted in relation to one of his Bishops, namely ‘Glory to him whose power, working in us, can do infinitely more than we can ask or imagine; glory be to him from generation to generation in the church and in Christ Jesus’ (Eph 3.21), but on the side of the poor.
It is in the combined elements, the this ness, of his service that its unique form was forged. A form particular to a person, a Diocese and the manner in which social need reveals itself with urgency in a place rather than from an encyclical first – in this case the English Central South and the Channel Islands. The study of British Catholic social thought and social justice is incomplete without the stories of the lives of many others, lay and ordained, like – but unlike - him who have grasped social action and thought in fresh ways and made them come alive.
Professor Francis Davis is an academic, social entrepreneur and a former trustee of Portsmouth Diocese
An earlier version of this article was published in The Pastoral Review (Tablet publishing)
A. Rowlands (2021) Towards a Politics of Communion: Catholic Social Teaching in Dark Times (London: Bloomsbury)
For example, I. Ker (2012) Chesterton: An Autobiography Oxford: OUP and R. Gray (1985) Cardinal Manning: A Biography (London: Weidenfield)
F. Davis (2022). The crisis in British Christian social thought: evidencing the need for a new ‘empirical political theology’. Theology, 125(5), 335-344
Where a specific source is not provided, I am drawing from extensive conversations with Monsignor France 1990 to 2018
David Hopgood (2024) Homily for Funeral Mass of NF. 30th December 2024
For further information see History in Portsmouth - A Biography of Bill Sargent
www.liverpoolecho.co.uk/news/liverpool-news/25-years-eldonian-dream-3550492 accessed 18th February 2025
D. Wilson (2011) Memoirs of a Minor Public Figure (London: Quartet)
F. Davis (2024). Engaging with the science of cathedral studies: an invitation to the Catholic Church in England and Wales. Journal of Beliefs & Values, 45(3), 420–436.
David Hopgood (2024) Homily for Funeral Mass of NF. 30th December 2024
Caritas is a global confederation of 162 Catholic organizations providing humanitarian aid, development, and social services in over 200 countries, essentially the "helping hand of the Church," www.caritas.org/who-we-are/
https://jerseyeveningpost.com/news/2024/12/05/tributes-for-ex-catholic-dean-who-helped-minority-groups/ accessed 18th February 2025
www.facebook.com/SamMezecJersey/posts/1061126122691774/ accessed 18th February 2025