Beacon from Birmingham

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Tonight is the eve of the joyous beatification of John Henry Cardinal Newman in Birmingham, the highlight of what has been an historic and incredibly successful visit for Pope Benedict to the island of Britain. Newman was an inspirational figure to countless Christians, not least Fr. Jaki, who penned no less than five books and a collection of essays concerning Newman's books and letters.
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Newman also contributed greatly to the foundation of the Catholic University of Ireland (which became University College Dublin) and its University Church, pictured above, where I had the privilege of attending lunchtime Mass on Friday. The parish community has a series of events to celebrate his beatification, which can be viewed on its website here.

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It is most fitting to quote from Fr. Jaki's conclusions on Cardinal Newman's life and conversion on this most special day. Let us remember them both in our prayers along with the individual Anglican converts and groups of Anglicans availing of Pope Benedict's Anglicanorum Coetibus.

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~JT.

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Since the purity of Newman's life had for some time been attested by many, he was not a modern Saint Augustine. There is however, a close parallel between Augustine's Confessions and Newman's Apologia. The Confessions contains many pages about Augustine's struggle to extricate himself from the many traps set by man's mind in his search for truth. In his Apologia Newman "apologizes" to his Anglican contemporaries for having waged an uncompromising struggle with himself, background, and circumstances to gain a grasp of the Catholic truth. Had he chosen for the Apologia's motto, "I have not sinned against light", he would not have exaggerated.

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For Newman it was relatively easy to change from an Evangelical into a zealous member of the Church of England. It was somewhat difficult for him to notice there the Catholic features a divinely established Church had to possess. He took it for a noble task to turn intimations of those features into a vivid reality. He agonized over finding that he merely chased a dream because the Church of England was but a "mimic Catholicism". To part with it meant for him a parting not only with friends but humanly with all. He needed much research and soul searching to muster resolve to make the move and cash his lot with the true Church which, humanly speaking, was, in his parts, rather void of whatever that all represented.

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But what gives to that existential transition, involving as it did all of Newman's human existence, its most decisive aspect was his perception that were he not to make that step he, whom all took for a paragon of saintly life, would remain in the state of sin, the sin of schism. It is that perception of Newman's that governs the last three of his Anglican years and all his years as a Catholic. Ignore or slight that perception of Newman's, and his life and thought will fall to the level of clichés, however pleasing. Ignore that perception of his and an opaque screen will be put in front of the volcanic force with which he kept preaching, especially to converts, that there was only One True Fold, that to belong to it was the key to one's eternal salvation whereas to postpone endlessly one's conversion might inure one into the treacherous habit of living in sin, the sin of schism...

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In making the step from the Church of England to Rome, Newman was fully aware that he was proceeding from shadows and images of reality to reality itself (ex umbris et imaginibus in veritatem). In these Latin words, harking back to a phrase of Saint Paul, he had perceived his life's destiny long before he had decided to have those words be the sole décor of his tombstone. He lived those words all his Catholic life...

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[Extracts from S.L. Jaki, Newman to Converts: An Existential Ecclesiology, pp. 487-488; 502]