I'll have to break out that 900-page Kerr biography again. Earlier this year, I got through page 100 before being lured away by the charms of another:
The Vatican is preparing to give England its first post- Reformation saint by putting Cardinal Newman – the 19th-century priest whose conversion from Anglicanism to Roman Catholicism shocked Victorian England – on the road to canonisation, thanks to a long-awaited miracle.
Although a dossier on Cardinal Newman's beatification was first opened in 1958, no miracles had, until now, been attributed to his intercession. “I had to tell John Paul that the English are not very good at miracles,” Cardinal Murphy-O'Connor said. “It's not that we are not pious, but the English tend to think of God as a gentleman who should not be bullied.”
Yesterday, however, the cleric responsible for arguing Newman's cause, Father Paul Chavasse, the Provost of Birmingham Oratory, which was founded by Newman in 1848, said that a deacon in the Diocese of Boston in the United States had testified that he had recovered from a spinal disease after praying to Cardinal Newman. “At last we have a miracle cure,” he said.
Thanks, Jester.
