Lord Alton of Liverpool

Pope Benedict has given Vincent Nichols one of the toughest assignments in the Roman Catholic world. It is a task he will approach with his customary enthusiasm and energy.

Westminster will not be a bed of roses. In a hostile, aggressively secularised world, he will have any number of embittered enemies. We are fortunate that Pope Benedict has chosen an archbishop who understands the nature of our fractured contemporary society. Vincent Nichols has been well schooled in how to use high office to work for the common good. His ability to combine this spirituality with temporal concerns has been reflected in his political interventions.

When he assumes his new duties he will be confronted with a whole series of controversial questions about what constitutes our humanity and how human dignity can best be protected. Vincent Nichols is an archbishop for our times. He may well make himself unpopular in some quarters but he will give clear and principled leadership to the Catholic Church in England.

William Oddie, former editor of the Catholic Herald

Increasingly it is the Archbishop of Westminster who is called on as a national spokesman for the Christian community as a whole, as much as or more than the Archbishop of Canterbury. It has not escaped the media that there are now more Roman Catholics in church on Sunday than there are Anglicans. Given the increasing intellectual and moral confusion of Anglicanism over issues such as homosexual priests and women priests, a Church that knows its own mind on these issues will appeal to the media. The significance of this appointment is that Archbishop Nichols can handle the media and will spot difficult questions coming. And unlike many of his brother bishops, he has made it clear that he will support the Pope.

Clifford Longley, writer, broadcaster

The Catholic Church needs to find a fresh message for the age we live in, and Vincent Nichols is the right man to deliver it. He’s always been interested in what makes society tick, and what goes wrong when it becomes dysfunctional. That means finding language that will cross barriers and doesn’t only make sense to other Catholics, but says things that people of all persuasions and none can recognise instinctively as wise and true.

But we don’t want more lectures from church leaders on bankers’ greed, and so on; we know all that. We need to hear how society needs to reform, and how we need to reform ourselves too, so we don’t just dig ourselves out of the hole we are in and then go and fall into it again. It’s about values, but more specifically, it’s about rediscovering the virtues.

Archbishop Nichols understands that — his job is to make it sound convincing and attractive, not like a sermon. We need the Catholic Church to have a human face, not just user friendly but kindly too. People crave authenticity. He needs to be himself. I’ve known him more than 30 years, and I am very optimistic he can do all that.

Nicholas Lash, Norris-Hulse Professor Emeritus of Divinity at Cambridge University

The gravest challenge that Archbishop Nichols faces, together with his brother bishops and with other Christian leaders in this country, is to find ways of helping the churches to come to grips with the extraordinary extent to which, within only a few decades, Christian beliefs and practices have become, not unknown, but apparently unintelligible to considerable numbers of people. Most people think they know what Christianity is about, and they don’t.