Up early watching the beatification of Cardinal Newman

Today we face a sad day in the history of our parish, as some people who do not want to come into communion with the Catholic Church are forcing a vote to disaffiliate from the Anglican Catholic Church of Canada and find new episcopal oversight. Whatever happens, one thing is certain. Division will follow.

Thus these words of Pope Benedict XVI about Cardinal John Henry Newman (from Father Z's blog with his comments in red and emphases) have a special significance.

Let me begin by recalling that Newman, by his own account, traced the course of his whole life back to a powerful experience of conversion which he had as a young man. It was an immediate experience of the truth of God’s word, of the objective reality of Christian revelation as handed down in the Church. This experience, at once religious and intellectual, would inspire his vocation to be a minister of the Gospel, his discernment of the source of authoritative teaching in the Church of God, and his zeal for the renewal of ecclesial life in fidelity to the apostolic tradition. At the end of his life, Newman would describe his life’s work as a struggle against the growing tendency to view religion as a purely private and subjective matter, a question of personal opinion. [We return to a major theme of this Pope’s pontificate and this Visit. There are many people who would forcibly eject any Christian voice from the public sphere. This is especially true in the case of a Catholic voice. Even many Catholics who are not entirely faithful to the Church’s teachings are complicit in this.] Here is the first lesson we can learn from his life: [1] in our day, when an intellectual and moral relativism threatens to sap the very foundations of our society, Newman reminds us that, as men and women made in the image and likeness of God, we were created to know the truth, to find in that truth our ultimate freedom and the fulfilment of our deepest human aspirations. In a word, we are meant to know Christ, who is himself "the way, and the truth, and the life" (Jn 14:6). [The British Humanist Association needs to get this part straight.]Newman’s life also [2] teaches us that passion for the truth, intellectual honesty and genuine conversion are costly. [Bearing witness – martyrdom] The truth that sets us free cannot be kept to ourselves; it calls for testimony, [Martyrdom.] it begs to be heard, and in the end its convincing power comes from itself and not from the human eloquence or arguments in which it may be couched. Not far from here, at Tyburn, great numbers of our brothers and sisters died for the faith; the witness of their fidelity to the end was ever more powerful than the inspired words that so many of them spoke before surrendering everything to the Lord. [NB] In our own time, the price to be paid for fidelity to the Gospel is no longer being hanged, drawn and quartered but it often involves being dismissed out of hand, ridiculed or parodied. And yet, the Church cannot withdraw from the task of proclaiming Christ and his Gospel as saving truth, the source of our ultimate happiness as individuals and as the foundation of a just and humane society.