Everyone agrees it’s a great thing both for the Church in this country and for the Universal Church that John Henry Newman is now a saint. If the interest in his life and works generated by canonisation leads to a genuine engagement with his thought and a recovery of its riches that will be wonderful.
Some of the interest, however, particularly the attempt to harness the spirit of Newman to 21st-century religious polemics, is a great disservice to a man who spent much of his life having to repudiate the ways in which his views were misrepresented and his motives impugned. Claiming Newman as an icon for gay Christians, or a prophet of doctrinal “paradigm shifts”, threatens to obscure the most crucial thing about his canonisation and the only worthy source from which joy should spring according to Newman himself.
