The Prince meets the Pope
Thousands gather to witness Pope Francis canonise the convert John Henry Newman
The Prince of Wales talks to Pope Francis in St Peter’s Square, Vatican City, yesterday, after Cardinal John Henry Newman was declared a saint by the Catholic Church. The Prince joined a mass to celebrate the life of the theologian and poet, who died in Birmingham in 1890 and is the first English person to be canonised in almost 50 years.
The Pope declared John Henry Newman a saint yesterday, the first Briton to be canonised since 1976. An audience of tens of thousands, including the Prince of Wales, applauded as Newman’s name was read out and the choir sang Alleluia.
Afterwards, the Prince attended a reception at the Pontifical Urban University, on a hill above St Peter’s Square, where he met the brothers of the Birmingham Oratory, which was founded by Newman.
He also met Anglican and Catholic clergy from across the British Isles, MPS, the US ambassador to the Holy See, Callista Gingrich, Cardinal Marc Ouellet of Canada, and Cardinal Vincent Nichols, the head of the Catholic Church in England.
Also in attendance was Melissa Villalobos, an American mother at the centre of one of the miracles attributed to Newman as a candidate for sainthood.
Wearing a black dress and headscarf, she told how, in 2013, she had suffered complications with a pregnancy after developing a condition called subchorionic hematoma, which can cause unstoppable bleeding.
One day, with her husband away on business, she began bleeding uncontrollably and collapsed on the floor of her bathroom. “I was losing a lot of blood and I reached out to [Newman] and said ‘please Cardinal Newman, make it stop.’ And he stopped the bleeding and saved my daughter, too.”
Mrs Villalobos says that the air in the bathroom filled with the scent of roses – something claimed to be a classic sign of a saint’s intercession.
Newman, born in 1801, was a prominent Anglican at Oxford University, until 1845 when he converted to Catholicism. His conversion caused a sensation; one of his sisters never spoke to him again.
Monsignor Roderick Strange, a biographer of the saint, told The Daily Telegraph: “At that time Catholics were a despised minority. To go from a position of such distinction to become a Catholic left many of his contemporaries asking: ‘What could you be thinking?’”
Newman became a priest and later cardinal. As one of the great apologists for his faith, he helped found the Birmingham Oratory and what is today University College, Dublin.
His writings are considered masterpieces of Victorian theology, including the Apologia Pro Vita Sua, or Defence of One’s Own Life, in which he explained the reasoning behind his conversion.
Monsignor Strange says that Newman helped to develop a Catholicism that was “quintessentially English”, and arguably contributed to growing acceptance of the faith in England. He died in 1890. Newman is the first Englishman born since the 1600s to be canonised.
As well as Mrs Villalobos’s miracle, the Church has acknowledged the claim of Jack Sullivan, an American deacon, that praying to Newman resulted in healing an apparently incurable spinal disease.
Mrs Villalobos and Deacon Sullivan joined thousands of pilgrims from all over the world in St Peter’s Square. Among them was Fr James Bradley who had travelled from Southampton and described the canonisation as “beautiful”.
Newman, he explained, “was a man of great intellect and holiness, and it’s that combination of reason and faith that draws people to Christ”.
Fr Cyril Jerome Law, who was born in China and did his doctorate on Newman’s teachings, had flown nearly 10,000 miles from Macau to attend.
“He was a man of truth and holiness,” he explained, “and every race and tongue can see it.”
In his homily, delivered surrounded by Swiss guards, Anglican and Catholic clergy, Pope Francis quoted from a sermon by Newman describing the Christian character as “cheerful, easy, kind, courteous, candid, unassuming”.
The Prince of Wales has also paid tribute to the saint’s celebrated ability to disagree without anger.
Speaking at the reception, the Prince said: “Difference is not to be feared. Newman pioneered dialogue with other Christians and saw Catholics in Britain become fully part of wider society, enriching our community of communities in a way for which all Britons must owe him eternal gratitude.”
‘He was a man of great intellect and holiness, and it’s that combination of reason and faith that draws people to Christ’
‘Newman pioneered dialogue with other Christians and saw Catholics in Britain become fully part of wider society’
Yesterday I was in the Vatican for the canonisation of John Henry Newman, the 19th-century English theologian. At the end of a beautiful Mass, Pope Francis got aboard his Popemobile and drove around St Peter’s Square, waving to the pilgrims. Something I love about my church is that it is simultaneously grand and popular. Catholicism is the faith of kings and subjects, with a T-shirt for every occasion.
I can’t pretend it’s all sunshine and lollipops: the pilgrims are overjoyed, but the local politics are dire. The impression of Pope Francis as a smiling democrat is a triumph of PR. In reality, even his fans admit that he rules the Vatican with an iron fist with no tolerance of dissent. He is a wonderful pastor, capable of inspiring charity and modesty, but he is also determined to push the Church in a certain direction, to make it more decentralised, less Eurocentric, less “rigid”, a word His Holiness sometimes uses to describe conservatives.
He’s usually referring to priests under 40, which goes to the heart of the matter. A lot of what we call the culture war in the West is in fact a generation war, and Pope Francis is an old man in a hurry. He wants to implement the reform agenda of the Sixties, and there’s a palpable fear among his generation that, after they’re gone, the Church will return to its old ways. He’s got a point. The vast majority of younger clerics I meet are far more traditionalist in their outlook.
I wouldn’t dare conflate politics and religion, because they are different, but Pope Francis is in a similar generational category to world leaders like Hillary Clinton or even Sir John Major, who worked so hard throughout their lives to build a liberal consensus, only to see it undone by their successors. Of course, the most famous conservative upstart of all – Donald Trump – is of a certain age, too, which might undermine my thesis, except that Mr Trump shares the Pope’s love of iconoclasm, that “let it all hang out” spirit of the Sixties.
Ultimately, their leaderships are a triumph of charisma over tradition. Both men are perceived as bigger than the office they occupy and, when they leave the stage, there’s a real worry that the institutions of papacy and president will be radically altered by the controversy they brought.
We live in an age of equality, yet titles still exercise real power. The Prince of Wales showed up to a reception after the Mass, and the party fell silent. I joined the queue to shake his hand and, as I burnt to a crisp in the Roman sun, found myself telling a fellow guest that I might be intellectually a monarchist but emotionally I remain republican. He was horrified. What kind of Englishman am I?
I’ve been meditating on this because Newman was, like me, a convert from Anglicanism to Catholicism – and there’s been an attempt in the past few days to suggest that this made him an ecumenical figure, drawing the two traditions closer. I can’t agree. When Newman converted, in 1845, it was a social scandal that divided his own family, and although my own conversion was not nearly as controversial, when you jump ship, you do necessarily leave something behind. And become something new.
It’s not that I’m any less English for being a Catholic, but I am now part of a universal church, and does this not have consequences? The Queen is my sovereign, no doubt, and the monarchy works brilliantly, in part because it has resisted the politics of personality that are now corrupting the American presidency. But I take the view that the king of my heart is a Jewish carpenter who was crowned not with gold but thorns – and all are equal before him.
For an ideal state, I’d go back even further than many conservatives, to the Garden of Eden, when there were no lords or ladies at all.
That said, when the Prince of Wales shakes your hand, you turn to jelly and bow. I am always amazed by the effortless royal manner, which inspires a kind of equality of its own. He could be talking to a bishop, could be talking to a supermarket manager. I announced: “I am a leader writer for The Telegraph.”
“Oh, gosh,” he said.
While in Rome, I decided to climb the Scala Sancta, which are the 28 steps that Christ is said to have walked on the way to trial. This is done on one’s knees.
I started off with great bravado, saying 10 Hail Marys, or a decade, on each step and praying for the soul of someone I had known. But come step eight, my knees were shot to pieces, and by step 13 the decade had shortened and my prayers had turned into angry damnations. By step 24
I had consigned at least two piano teachers to Hell and was on the verge of collapse – but waiting for me at the very end was a statue of Mary with such patience and love in her eyes that I almost broke down in tears.
I was passed on the stairs by a man on all fours carrying a disabled child on his back. That is love, giving till it hurts, and it’s what faith is really all about.