Apostate saint
IT WAS DIFFICULT enough when John Henry Newman became Blessed. Now that he has attained sanctity, the thing appears impossible. How to historicise, let alone criticise, a saint without self-exposure as secular bigot or, worse, Protestant?
One might have thought that the historians at least could argue about pre-Blessed Newman, as they do about St Edward the Confessor, without turning red in tooth and claw.
A few years ago, the staid and charitable pages of the burst into bitter song in lamenting or defending Newman’s memory and questioning the spiritual credentials of those who trod either path.
