On the surface, all is Christian love and fellowship. But beneath the surface rages a theological battle for the soul of Cardinal John Henry Newman and of the Roman Catholic Church itself. At the high point of his four-day state visit to Britain in September, the Pope will preside at the beatification of Newman, putting him on course to become England’s first non-martyr saint since the Reformation.
On one side of the pulpit are modernising liberals.
On the other are the Ultramontane-style conservatives who reject any compromise with modern society.
Newman is considered a personal hero of Pope Benedict, who has studied his writings. He is also revered by many Anglicans: he was, after all, a convert to Catholicism.
Jack Valero, of the conservative Opus Dei group, who is in charge of publicity for the beatification, said that Newman was the “hero” of all types of Catholics and many Anglicans.
Roman Catholic conservatives hail Newman as one of them because of what they see as his attachment to dogma and tradition and his criticisms of liberalism and relativism.
They are passionate about the Tridentine Latin Mass; they endorse papal infallibility and resist any latitude on issues such as celibacy and contraception.
Yet liberals say that Newman is one of them because he gave primacy to conscience, even saying famously that he would drink a toast “to Conscience first, and to the Pope afterwards”.
The gay community also claim Newman as one of their own because he was buried with his lifelong companion Father Ambrose St John. Of Father Ambrose, Newman wrote: “From the first he loved me with an intensity of love, which was unaccountable.” He later added: “As far as this world was concerned, I was his first and last . . . he was my earthly light.’” Peter Tatchell, the gay rights campaigner, has criticised attempts to portray Newman as a celibate heterosexual.
Tatchell said: “Many of these platonic relationships were, in fact, expressions of latent homosexuality which never found physical expression because the men concerned lived in a homophobic culture where they either had no conception of the possibility of same-sex love or, for religious reasons, dared not express this love sexually.”
The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, has been invited to attend the beatification ceremony at Coventry airport in September to elevate the Church of England’s most famous convert to Roman Catholicism.
Dr Williams has not yet decided whether he will go, and his office said yesterday that he may send a representative.
The Archbishop is faced with his own Newman-style troubles. As the General Synod prepares to debate legislation in July to allow women bishops, he is facing contemporary conversions to Rome by three Anglo-Catholic bishops and their retinues of clergy and laity under the new ordinariate structure begun by the Pope for disaffected Anglicans.
Next week, the Pope will be accused by the author John Cornwell of attempting to hijack the legacy of Cardinal Newman to prop up the conservative Catholic cause. Cornwell is a Fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge, and a former seminarian who wrote Hitler’s Pope, a critique of the leadership of Pope Pius XII during the Nazi era.
In a new book, Newman’s Unquiet Grave, Cornwell argues that the “Catholic pin-up boy” would have regarded his sainthood an “ossifying tragedy”.
Cornwell also accuses the Pope of “distorting” Newman. “He is trying to draw people towards his vision of a magisterial Church dominated by the Vatican and the papacy. He is turning Newman on his head, as if Newman really meant loyalty to the Pope came first and conscience second.”
But Mr Valero said: “This is really a picture of what the Church is like today. It is a battle about what the Church is and how it should work. The Pope is trying to bring all these people together under Newman. The Pope is supposed to be the man who unites the Church.”
After beatification, but before Newman can be canonised, evidence is required of another miracle through his intercession. If the factions scrapping over his legacy make peace, that might just be the miracle required.
Life and tracts for the times
• Born in 1801 Cardinal Newman made an enduring mark on the Church of England by helping to establish the Oxford Movement, an attempt to restore it to its Catholic roots
• He attended Great Ealing School in London, where he preferred the Bible to sport. The titular King of France, Louis-Philippe, taught maths and geography there while in exile in the early 19th century
• Newman became a Calvinist after his father’s bank went under in the financial crash of 1816
• He went to Trinity, Oxford, became a Fellow of Oriel and was ordained into the Church of England in 1824
• He wrote a series of influential essays, Tracts for the Times. Members of his movement were known as Tractarians
• Newman was received into the Catholic Church in 1845 and ordained a priest in Rome
• He wrote thousands of letters, reams of sermons, essays, books and poetry, and an autobiographical novel. Idea of a University is studied by educators today. His autobiography, Apologia Pro Vita Sua, published in 1864, is still regarded as a spiritual classic
•Newman wrote: “I have no tendency to be a saint — it is a sad thing to say so. Saints are not literary men”
• It is said to be impossible to understand 19th-century Britain, or indeed the Church of England or Catholic Church as it was then or is in England today, without some knowledge of Newman
• He died in 1890 and was declared “venerable” in 1991, the first step towards sainthood
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