England’s Newest Saint

This morning at Mass the parish Youth Choir sang ‘Praise to the Holiest’ in honour of Britain’s newest saint, St. John Henry Newman — as we may now call him! — who was canonised this morning.  I think we may fairly feel a surge of joyful pride, not because we can take any credit for his holiness, but because he feels close to us: he is ‘one of ours’.  He is the first canonised English saint to have lived since the Reformation; he wrote the words of some of our best-loved hymns; he grappled with the pain of the fissure between the Catholic and Anglican churches.  He knew the English countryside, and the cities of London and Oxford and Birmingham (also Dublin), not quite as they are today, but, importantly, as they were becoming what they are today.  Certainly he lived and worked in a time when the forces that we now call relativism and secular progressivism were stirring and gathering strength, and these did not daunt him in his long and unrelenting search for objective truth.  As no less a person than the Prince of Wales says in yesterday’s Times, he ‘stood for the life of the spirit against the forces that would debase human dignity and human destiny.’ And his way of responding to these things, lucidly and serenely, with conviction but not belligerently, happens to serve as a very helpful example for us in our own day.

Of course, he is a saint not for his relevance to our cultural situation, nor simply because of his intelligence or his writings and achievements, but because of his person; because of the way in which he lived his life.  More than pride, perhaps it is confidence that we should take: here is a man whose example we can trust with a new certainty.  And here is a man who lived not so very long ago, in circumstances not altogether dissimilar from ours, who proved that sainthood is not a quaint idealism of other times and other places, but something alarmingly plausible.  Can British people in the modern world still become saints?  Could it even be that saints are what we are meant to become?

This blog takes its name from a phrase of Newman’s.  As I wrote in my first post, I treasure the gentle paradox of the words: there is a steady slow-burning encouragement in the idea that there is ‘some definite service’ that we are all called to do.  Evidently England’s newest saint did his!  Here is the passage in full:

God has created me to do Him some definite service.  He has committed some work to me which He has not committed to another.  I have my mission.  I may never know it in this life, but I shall be told it in the next.  I am a link in a chain, a bond of connection between persons.

He has not created me for naught.  I shall do good; I shall do His work.  I shall be an angel of peace, a preacher of truth in my own place, while not intending it if I do but keep His commandments.  Therefore, I will trust Him, whatever I am, I can never be thrown away.  If I am in sickness, my sickness may serve Him, in perplexity, my perplexity may serve Him.  If I am in sorrow, my sorrow may serve Him.  He does nothing in vain.  He knows what He is about.  He may take away my friends.  He may throw me among strangers.  He may make me feel desolate, make my spirits sink, hide my future from me.  Still, He knows what He is about.

Bl. John Henry Newman: Meditations on Christian Doctrine, Meditations and Devotions, March 7, 1848.

John Everett Millais’ portrait of John Henry Newman on display at Arundel Castle (W. Sussex), 13th September 2019.