He is an appropriate saint for an increasingly diverse country
towering intellectual, a friend of the poor, a stickler for religious dogma and a hero, at least posthumously, of the gay-rights movement. With the canonisation on October 13th of Cardinal John Henry Newman , English Catholicism has acquired its first saint who lived any more recently than the 17th century.
As behoves an unusual cleric from an ever more diverse land, the ceremony in Rome was full of peculiarities. The British state was personified by Prince Charles, who would lose his entitlement to the throne, and hence his future status as ceremonial head of the Church of England, if he were to become a Catholic. The cardinal’s home town of Birmingham was represented by the lord mayor, Mohammed Azim, an adherent of the Muslim faith in which a plurality of the city’s youngsters are being raised.
Whatever Newman would make of tinkering with his relics, he would probably have appreciated the diverse state of Catholicism in England. Since 1983 the share of people in Britain who call themselves Anglican has tumbled from 40% to 12%, while Catholics have slipped less drastically, from 10% to 7%. They have also done better at attracting people to church and retaining the young. About a quarter of British Catholics go to Mass most weeks.
Behind these numbers lie huge contrasts. Strongholds created by Irish migration to the north of England are in decline, while Polish, Filipino and Latin American migrants join older residents to pack out the churches of London. “At least half a dozen Catholic churches in the London area attract thousands every weekend and they’d be [called] mega-churches if they were Protestant,” says Stephen Bullivant of St Mary’s University.
Cardinal Newman’s Victorian world might seem remote to England’s Catholic newcomers. But shrines and saints are something they relish. Catholics from southern India are now among the keenest venerators of the shrine of the Virgin Mary in Walsingham, an ancient English pilgrimage site. The tomb of England’s new saint, in Birmingham, will draw visitors from many places and persuasions.
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