Newman's Unquiet Grave: The Reluctant Saint Read Free Page A

development, ecumenism, conscience, moderate Marianism, the role of the laity, local discretion over Roman centralization – underpinned the renewals of the Second Vatican Council leading to Paul VI’s verdict that it was ‘Newman’s Council’. But the Council had its dissenters, resisters, at the very heart of the Curia. Cardinal Giuseppe Pizzardo,
one of those who represented the continuity of the Curia of Pius XII at the Council, commented that these ‘new ideas and tendencies’ were ‘not only exaggerated but even erroneous’. 2 0 That resistance to the renewals of the Council, and hence to Newman’s influence, was never entirely broken, and it is arguable that the tide has been turning in recent decades with the promotion of the view that nothing of importance had been altered, or renewed, by Vatican II.
Will the beatification, and probable canonization of Newman, break this resistance? Will this honouring of Newman prove, as theologian Nicholas Lash hopes, ‘a powerful signal that the Church has not abdicated its dedication to the movement of renewal and reform that the Council so wholeheartedly initiated’? 21 Those who share Lash’s perspective have urged that Newman should be named a Doctor of the Church in confirmation of the acceptance of his theology.
There is, of course, another possibility: that Newman’s elevation to the altar might signal the taming and enfeebling of his legacy by the resisters of Vatican II and of the fullness of his teaching. Newman’s habit of ‘saying and unsaying’ towards a conclusion makes him vulnerable to distortion (obviously by those on both sides of the Catholic divide). One can only hope that his unforgotten voice will continue to find its way home and into the hearts of all pilgrims of conscience for the benefit of the fullness of Christianity.
     
Epilogue ‌‌
     
Newman was aware that people thought him saintly, and he suspected that the Church might attempt to make him an official saint. In the time-honoured tradition of most figures who make it to sainthood, Newman assured his contemporaries, and posterity, that he was no saint; his reason: that he was a ‘literary’ man. It is likely that the request that his grave be filled with compost was to ensure that there would be no relics left to venerate. As it happens, Newman’s beatification was sanctioned with some difficulties and after half a century, despite an inflation in saint-making during the long reign of Pope John Paul II. While cults of sainthood developed around the relics of thousands of holy people from Christian antiquity to the end of the Middle Ages, the saint-making process, as it is practised in the Catholic Church today, is relatively recent, dat-ing from the seventeenth century. Saints or Blesseds are traditionally deemed to have led exemplary lives. They provide the faithful with examples of how God wishes us to behave: not always an obvious notion since some behaved very oddly indeed by contemporary standards of holiness. Saint Simeon Stylites sat naked for thirty years on top of a pillar sixty feet high; the aerodynamic Joseph of Cupertino (patron saint of pilots, along with Our Lady of Loretto) used to fly up to the church rafters and scream when in ecstasy; Saint Margaret Mary Alacoque would routinely eat cheese, to which she was allergic, to bring on a vomiting fit. Benedict XVI recently promoted the life of Saint Jean Vianney, the Curé d’Ars, as an exemplar for today’s priests, although it is known that he beat himself with a metal scourge at night, and slept on the floor with a log for a pillow. John Paul II canonized and beatified a great many individuals, more apparently than all the previous popes put together from the time that the formal processes began in the reign of Pope Urban VIII (1623–1644). The choices were invariably associated with his many trips around the world. He was criticized by Spanish socialists for proclaiming the holiness of large numbers of