St. John Henry Cardinal Newman
St. John Henry Cardinal Newman
John Henry Newman, one of the great Christian intellectuals of the nineteenth century, was born in London in 1801. His spiritual quest having begun in adolescence, he later went on to study theology at Oxford University. Subsequently, he became an Anglican pastor, a fellow of Oriel College, and leader of the Oxford Movement which studied the Catholic roots of the faith in England. In 1842, while writing his “Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine”, he began to mature his conversion to Catholicism. He was admitted into the Catholic Church in 1845 and ordained a Catholic priest in Rome on 1 June 1847. Following his ordination, and with the encouragement of Pope Pius IX, he founded the first Oratory of St. Philip Neri in England. In 1852 he was appointed rector of the Catholic University of Dublin, Ireland, a post he held until 1854. Pope Leo XIII made him a cardinal in 1879 and he died in 1890 at the Oratory of Edgbaston. The process for his beatification began in 1958. Newman’s miraculous intercession in the cure of Dean Jack Sullivan, who suffered a serious complaint of the spinal column, was officially recognized and approved by Benedict XVI in July 2009 and beatified on September 19, 2010. Pope Francis canonized John Henry Newman on October 13, 2019.