Letter from Birmingham, England.
Just posted to the main site: “Bus to Birmingham: What I Saw at Newman’s Beatification,” by William D. Wood. Here’s how it starts:
Way back in the twentieth century, when I decided to pursue doctoral work in theology, I never imagined that I would one day teach in an Oxford college. Neither did I imagine that John Henry Newman, of all people, would come to loom large in my day-to-day life. It goes without saying that I never imagined that I would find myself boarding a bus to Birmingham in the middle of the night to attend his beatification Mass. But there I was, on the road to Birmingham, along with other representatives from Oriel College, where Newman was a fellow for twenty years.
According to our invitations, the members of the Oriel delegation were “invited pilgrims.” We had been asked to attend because Oriel was the place where Newman did some of his most important intellectual work, the epicenter of the Oxford movement in the nineteenth century—and, of course, the place where Newman decided to leave the Anglican Church for good. The pace of change is slow in Oxford, so Newman’s presence still permeates Oriel. (For example, our chaplain lives in Newman’s rooms. What in other places would be a shrine is, in Oxford, just another bedroom suite.) On the other hand, the close association between Newman and Oriel is somewhat ironic, since his conversion to Catholicism brought his official association with Oriel to an end. His very last act as an Anglican was to resign his Oriel fellowship, just before his conversion in 1845. At the time, he could not hold it as a Roman Catholic.
Read the rest right here.
Nice reflection by Wood. Historians may see this as an important aid or wedge between the Church of England and the Church of Rome. What it means to the rest of us is unclear. Maybe the terms Church of England and Church of Rome point out to us how power brokers have influenced the leadership more than the Spirit of God. Both “royal” churches did what they do best-excel in pomp and ceremony. How much this, will let the oppressed go free, the blind see, proclaim liberty to the captives and proclaim a year acceptable to the Lord, is something very much in doubt. So it is a question of what we celebrate and how much we have gone off message.
“Another Anglican bishop had a crucifix with the Jesus from South Park on it.” Hoo boy, gotta love Anglican bishops; ABC Rowan once appeared in a cameo on the “Vicar of Dibley.”
Seriously, though, I liked Wood’s final question: Which Newman do we follow, the restless intellectual or the loyal follower? I’ve always followed the former, but I think it’s the latter who was made the saint.
Serendipity led me to another take on Newman, from Brendan Behan, whose “Borstal Boy” I finished readling last week. The passage reflects Behan’s resentments of the English Catholics more than Newman per se, but I think it points to divides among Catholics blue-collar and blue-blood Catholics, that still exist:
“The aristocratic old English Catholics had some kind of double-dealt immunity from the penal laws, and the conversions only started when the Irish got the Emancipation and it became legal and safe to be a Catholic. … But the Irish fought and suffered and many of them died, and kept the Faith, though their last shelters in the forest were cut down to roof England’s Universities, and let Newman, like a long threatening coming at last, think his way into the Church with a good Irish oak roof over him.”