Pope canonises luminary John Henry, four others
VATICAN CITY: Pope Francis yesterday declared five people saints, including Cardinal John Henry Newman, a leading 19th century Anglican who converted to Catholicism and became one of the most influential Christian figures.
Underscoring Cardinal Newman’s luminary status in Christianity, Prince Charles, who will become head of the Church of England when he becomes king, attended the canonisation Mass in St Peter’s Square and said it was a cause for celebration by all Britons.
“Whatever our own beliefs, and no matter what our own tradition may be, we can only be grateful to Newman for the gifts, rooted in his Catholic faith, which he shared with wider society,” Prince Charles said in an article in the Vatican newspaper.
Prince Charles praised Cardinal Newman, the first British saint in more than 40 years and the first Englishman born since the 1600s to be canonised, as “this great Briton, this great churchman and, as we can now say, this great saint”.
Such has been the fascination with all things Cardinal Newman among British Christians leading up to the canonisation that Father Ignatius Harrison, provost of the Birmingham Oratory that Newman founded in 1848, speculated that the new saint would have been a “remainer” in the Brexit debate because he believed in unity.
Cardinal Newman was a man of towering intellect who wrote theology, novels, philosophy, history and poetry.
In 1833, just eight years after he has ordained an Anglican priest, Cardinal Newman helped launch the Oxford Movement that aimed to return the Church of England, which split with Rome in 1534, to the teachings and rituals of early Christianity.
He was the movement’s chief promoter and became increasingly critical of certain Anglican teachings and was opposed to a national Church with no links to Rome.