A former student of Trinity College
and Fellow of Oriel, John Henry Newman, is heading towards canonization after a
Boston deacon claimed that prayers to the Oxford theologian cured
him of a spinal disorder.Newman was a key member of the Oxford
Movement, also known as Tractarianism, which was a controversial Anglican high
church movement active in the 1830s. He was made vicar of the University Church
of St Mary the Virgin on High Street in 1828. Newman shocked the Victorian Anglican
church by his conversion to Catholicism in 1845, and founded the English
Oratory in Birmingham
in 1848. Newman’s beatification cause, the
first step towards becoming a saint, was opened in 1958. He can already be
described as the Venerable John Henry Newman, but canon law requires a miracle
to be performed by the individual before they can be considered a candidate for
sainthood.Until the miracle described by
the Boston
deacon, who cannot be named, no miracles had previously been performed at Newman’s
intercession. “I had to tell [Pope John Paul II] that the English are not very
good at miracles,” Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor said in an article in The
Times. “It’s not that we are not pious, but the English tend to think of God as
a gentleman who should not be bullied.” The current head of the Catholic Church,
Pope Benedict XVI, is said to have admired Newman since his days as a student.
In a letter to Trinity
College, where Newman was
the first Honorary Fellow, he praised the Cardinal’s “disciplined commitment to
the pursuit of religious truth”. Father Robert Byrne, Provost of
the Oxford Oratory which was founded by former members of Newman’s Birmingham oratory, said “Newman has long been associated
with Oxford and
so we are absolutely delighted with the
news.” If canonised, Newman will be the first
English saint since the Reformation. Other Oxford
saints include St Frideswide, the patron saint of Oxford,
and St Edmund Campion, a scholar of St
John’s college martyred at Tyburn in 1581 and canonised
in 1970. Clare Hopkins, archivist of Trinity College said “[The honorary Fellowship] was
an honour that meant a great deal to him, as it was only six years after the
Statutes of the University had changed to allow Catholics to be members,
something that had been denied to them since the reign of Elizabeth I. His
visit to Trinity was his first visit to Oxford
since his conversion…Trinity
College remains very
proud of John Henry Newman today.”ARCHIVE: 3rd week MT 2005
Oriel fellow on the way to being canonised
