The man who could be England's first saint since the Reformation
From Richard Owen in Rome
THE Vatican is preparing to give England its first post- Reformation saint by putting Cardinal Newman — the 19th-century priest whose conversion from Anglicanism to Roman Catholicism shocked Victorian England — on the road to canonisation, thanks to a long-awaited miracle.
Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, the Archbishop of Westminster, who is in Rome attending a Synod of Bishops, said that he had raised the issue of John Henry Newman’s beatification — the step before sainthood — three years ago with the late John Paul II, who described Newman during his visit to Britain in 1982 as “that great man of God”.
Candidates for beatification must, however, be shown to have been responsible for at least one “miracle”, usually a medically inexplicable cure.
Although a dossier on Cardinal Newman’s beatification was first opened in 1958, no miracles had, until now, been attributed to his intercession. “I had to tell John Paul that the English are not very good at miracles,” Cardinal Murphy-O’Connor said. “It’s not that we are not pious, but the English tend to think of God as a gentleman who should not be bullied.”
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,13509-1832171,00.html
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
