England’s first saint since the Reformation
From Richard Owen in 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”.
