Joseph Pearce
Newman’s conversion in 1845, sixteen years after Catholic Emancipation and five years before the re-establishment of the Catholic hierarchy in England, heralded the birth of a Revival which would see the resurrection of the Faith in the English-speaking world.
In September 2010, I was honoured to be invited to serve as an official commentator on EWTN’s live coverage of Pope Benedict XVI’s visit to Britain. It was, indeed, a joy and a privilege to follow the Pope as he visited venues in London which resonated with Catholic significance. He visited Westminster Hall, in which St. Thomas More had stood trial, and visited Westminster Abbey to pray at the shrine of St. Edward the Confessor. He blessed the crowds in Hyde Park, only a stone’s throw from the site of Tyburn Tree, the Machiavellian altar on which numerous Catholic martyrs were slain. It was as though the places selected for the Pope’s visit had been carefully chosen to remind Englishmen of their Catholic heritage and to warn of the dangers inherent in secularist intolerance towards the Church. The purpose of the Pope’s visit, however, was not primarily to celebrate England’s Catholic heritage but to beatify John Henry Newman. In so doing, the Pope was not so much celebrating history as making it. Newman was the first Englishman, other than the Martyrs, to be beatified since the Reformation; he was also the first Englishman born since the seventeenth century to be raised to the altar.
John Henry Newman was born in 1801, at the very dawn of the nineteenth century, and lived until 1890 as the sun began to set on this most catalytic and cataclysmic of epochs. During Newman’s long and eventful life, new ideas would cause seismic shifts in the way that modern man perceived himself. Karl Marx adapted the ideas of Hegel in the service of revolutionary politics, » Read More
https://theimaginativeconservative.org/2024/10/legacy-john-henry-newman-joseph-pearce.html