Pope Benedict XVI will be visiting the UK from the 15th to the 19th September and on the 19th September will beatify Cardinal John Henry Newman. Newman is not only revered by the Roman Catholic Church he is revered by Anglicans as one of the prime figures in the Oxford Movement which brought alive the Catholic heritage of the Church of England. Sadly, in the CofE we have no process for recognising Saints otherwise perhaps with Cardinal Newman would be the two others, colleagues and friends of his, Keble and Pusey. Today, as some of us look to the Ordinariate, we value the great contribution that these three men made to our spirituality. Perhaps the Ordinariate could be under the patronage of Cardinal Newman and as we leave the Church of England we could say, as he did, it is “the parting of friends”.
Obituary in the Guardian Published Aug. 13, 1890, two days after Newman’s death by R. W. Church, dean of St. Paul’s and a close friend since their days together as Fellows of Oriel College, Oxford
“Cardinal Newman is dead, and we lose in him not only one of the very greatest masters of English style, not only a man of singular beauty and purity of character, not only an eminent example of personal sanctity, but the founder, we may almost say, of the Church of England as we see it. What the Church of England would have become without the Tractarian movement we can faintly guess, and of the Tractarian movement Newman was the living soul and the inspiring genius. Great as his services have been to the communion in which he died, they are as nothing by the side of those he rendered to the communion in which the most eventful years of his life were spent.… He will be mourned by many in the Roman Church, but their sorrow will be less than ours, because they have not the same paramount reason to be grateful to him.”
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