The Cause of the Canonisation of John Henry Cardinal Newman

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Newman’s hoped-for beatification ‘a great opportunity ecumenically’, says Newman scholar

Categorised as News and published Friday, November 28th, 2008
Editor of Newman’s Letters and Diaries reveals a hidden history: Georgetown, U.S.A., 1953
Preacher of the Pontifical Household on Newman

Monsignor Roderick Strange, Rector of the Pontifical Beda College in Rome, has spoken of Newman’s significance for the modern Church, and suggested that his beatification could be a ‘great opportunity ecumenically’, reports Richard Owen in Times Online.

Speaking in Rome, Monsignor Strange said that Newman, as a convert to Catholicism, “while never regretting his move remained positive about what was good in Anglicanism, and appreciative of what he had learnt from it”. Newman’s future beatification should not be presented as “Roman Catholic triumphalism”, he argued.

At a Rome meeting, attended by Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re, head of the Congregation of Bishops, Monsignor Strange described Newman’s sermon ‘The Infidelity of the Future’ (1873) as an “almost prophetic” warning of the challenges to faith in our own time, which had foreshadowed Pope Benedict’s own words on “the dictatorship of relativism”.

Monsignor Strange, author of the recently published John Henry Newman: A Mind Alive, noted Newman’s analysis that “Christianity has never yet had experience of a world simply irreligious”.

Whereas “subjectivism and relativism place us at the mercy of the dictator … a life lived according to conscience is a life lived in obedience to objective truth”, said Monsignor Strange, adding that “Newman’s own life bears witness to that”.

At present, the Vatican Congregation for the Causes of Saints is examining a cure which occurred in Boston, in the United States, in 2001. If this is recognised by the Church as a miracle, then it would clear the way for Newman’s beatification.

For the Times Online article, click here

To see the sermon ‘The Infidelity of the Future’, click here (leaves site)