Meet Bishop Tom Williams

Bishop Thomas Anthony Williams

Born: 10 February 1948
Ordained priest for the Archdiocese of Liverpool: 27 May 1972
Ordained bishop for the Archdiocese of Liverpool: 27 May 2003

Personal

How would you describe yourself?

Sometimes it’s hard to describe yourself; it’s about how other people see you. I’m a native of Liverpool, inner-city Liverpool, where my parents and grandparents were born. I’m proud of being a priest in this diocese for over 30 years and now an Auxiliary Bishop of Liverpool and Assistant to Archbishop Patrick Kelly.

I’ve been parish priest in the inner city for 25 years and for the last 6 years I’ve been auxiliary assistant to Archbishop Patrick - what people call an Auxiliary Bishop. I was involved in primary school chaplaincy and have been a secondary school chaplain in a girl’s grammar school. I was also one of the chaplains to the Royal Liverpool Hospital for over 9 years.

National role

With my experience in hospitals, Bishop Howard Tripp (Auxiliary Bishop Emeritus, Southwark) asked whether I would take over from him as the bishop responsible for hospital chaplaincy nationally. For the last 5 years, I’ve been trying to do that to the best of my ability. We’ve started a healthcare reference group and I get a lot of very good, practical support from mostly lay healthcare professionals who give up their time for free.

Life

Before I was ordained bishop, I used to play golf once a week. In the 6 years since, I’ve played at my golf club less than 20 times. As a parish priest, you can control the pastoral things you do. You can mostly guarantee that you are going to get a day off because you can plan it. Since I’ve become a bishop, it’s very difficult because other things happen and you need to respond. You need to plan more effectively. I snatch moments - I play golf whenever I can, which is not very often now, I also watch the occasional football match and about 4 times a year, I go to a race meeting with my sister or members of the family or close friends. I also try to go skiing once a year - I’ve just come back from the French Alps for 6 days which was fantastic.

If you hadn’t become a priest, what would you have done instead?

Not a clue – I’ve been in colleges for the priesthood since I was 13. The people who I most admired as a child were the local priests. My father was a docker and I was guaranteed a job on the docks being the eldest son - that was one of the conditions of being a docker in the 60s. I think I might have started off on the docks. I had a lot of jobs as a teenager working my way through college; I worked as a milkman, behind a bar, as a plasterer, on a building site, as a joiner’s mate, in a shipping office So I had quite a lot of experience in holiday jobs. I don’t think that I would have ever gone to teacher training college because I had a fear and loathing of teachers as a teenager. I think that I would have worked with people at some level if I hadn’t become a priest.

Best piece of advice received

My father’s advice and mother’s advice have always been words of wisdom which linger with me.

As a priest, the two phrases that stick in my mind were from my first parish, St Francis in Garston, which I went to in 1972. I was very apprehensive and had never heard of the parish priest before and he didn’t know anything about me and he said can I just say two things to you:

'If you don’t make this house your home, you’ll find one somewhere else. Always remember that this is not a priest’s house, it’s a house for priests.’

Those two mentalities of belonging and feeling at home were words that I’ve looked back on with fondness ever since. It’s been a principle in my own life – wherever you are and wherever you are appointed - the first thing you’ve got to do is to make it a home.

Healthcare Reference Group

Supporting Catholics in Healthcare

We’ve got to make it clear to the rest of the world, that we are part of the community as the Catholic Church, not just an added on extra or a local group. We want to be at the table.

We are often finding an over-generalisation of Christian documents which do not include the Catholic community. I think we are a golden thread right the way through the NHS. It’s about people who are putting into practice their faith in an everyday environment of caring for the sick. We have a very strong rich tradition of caring for the sick and it needs emphasising.

The government will talk sometimes about involving churches and religions and I would say to them that no-one has spoken to us; no-one has made reference to us in any way. There is an element sometimes of saying that we are here. The reference group has been effective in the sense that we’ve published things and we need to publish more – we need to be a bit more outspoken in terms of asking people to recognise what a lot of Catholics in all their different guises do as ordinary people.

Published documents

We published a whole hit list of six documents.

The first necessity as a group was to publish something in negotiation with NHS trusts. A Guide to Catholic Chaplaincy for NHS Managers and Trusts was written not as a general theory or exercise or paper - it wasn’t for general consumption, but written specifically for hospital managers.

We have also produced a small publication for staff in wards called Caring for the Catholic Patient. It has been a best seller. It has had three or four reprints. We need to produce a few more documents – one on dealing with our ecumenical friends and other religions for hospital chaplains themselves.

The other thing that we have been able to do is to collate and collect service level agreements and various contracts. You need to deal with each particular trust in a particular, individual way. We’ve tried to arm each bishop with a very effective and good bishop’s advisor in his own diocese who can help him to negotiate with trusts and to wave the flag to say that we are here and this is what we want and this is how we want to work in partnership with trusts.

The essence of all the documents is what that word partnership means. I thought the best way to tackle the trusts was to let them know who we are, basically this is what the Catholic Church means by spirituality, 'chaplain', supporting patients,Sacraments.

Otherwise we were being interpreted by other denominations in a very inaccurate way. It was just about clarification – about saying this is who we are.

We hope that there will be a lot more documents to come, illustrating and explaining the identity of Catholics - not to make us a particular group, but to answer the particular needs of patients.

It’s about how we deal with patients and how people who are professional in each of their aspects of life - whether it’s hospital chaplain or consultant or someone who works in the wards or someone who works in the mortuary or a clerk in the department - it’s about how they see their faith in practise in dealing with the sick.

The importance of spirituality in healthcare

Some people have a very weak understanding of the word spirituality - this is what I believe; therefore this is what I am. One of the confusing things about spirituality is that people see it as private – I would say it’s not private, it’s personal. If it’s private, it can be what you want it to be; if it’s personal, you make something which is objective a personal thing and you understand it from a personal perspective. Spirituality is not about ghosts and spirits and Casper the Ghost. It does mean that there's more to life than the material.

A good example is the death of someone in the family. From a practical perspective you can ask how much does a funeral cost. From a spiritual perspective, it’s about support, understanding; the Christian understanding of life, death and hope.

Compassion in healthcare

I’m always pleased when the good things about caring are explained and examples are given. There are some wonderful examples of people showing compassion in healthcare everyday. We need to make people aware that these things are happening.

I’ve never met so many fantastic people as I’ve met in hospitals. When doctors go round on their ward visits, they might see a knee; as a priest, we see a mother, father or carer. It’s about having the eyes to see in healthcare. If we are not careful, we are in danger of seeing things in too clinical a manner. If the balance isn’t right then you don’t see the person, instead you see the illness or the situation.