Wednesday, October 19, 2005

Cause for Newman's beatification gets its miracle, green light

The Times (London) reported on October 19, 2005, that the Venerable John Henry Cardinal Newman may soon be England's first canonized saint since the Reformation. The article's author, Richard Owen, reported from Rome:
The Vatican is preparing to give England its first post-Reformation saint by putting Cardinal Newman -- the 19th-century priest whose conversion from Anglicanism to Roman Catholicism shocked Victorian England -- on the road to canonisation, thanks to a long-awaited miracle.

Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor, the Archbishop of Westminster, who is in Rome attending a Synod of Bishops, said that he had raised the issue of John Henry Newman's beatification -- the step before sainthood -- three years ago with the late John Paul II, who described Newman during his visit to Britain in 1982 as "that great man of God."
Candidates for beatification must, however, as Owen noted, be shown to have been responsible for at least one miracle, usually a medically inexplicable cure. The article continued:
Although a dossier on Cardinal Newman's beatification was first opened in 1958, no miracles had, until now, been attributed to his intercession. "I had to tell John Paul that the English are not very good at miracles," Cardinal Murphy-O'Connor said. "It's not that we are not pious, but the English tend to think of God as a gentleman who should not be bullied."

Yesterday, however, the cleric responsible for arguing Newman's cause, Father Paul Chavasse, the Provost of Birmingham Oratory, which was founded by Newman in 1848, said that a deacon in the Diocese of Boston in the United States had testified that he had recovered from a spinal disease after praying to Cardinal Newman. "At last we have a miracle cure," he said.
Read more here. (A tip of the hat to "New Catholic")

Brief Newman bibliography:

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