No one was ever more eager to submit to the judgment of Rome than Cardinal Manning, who served as Archbishop of Westminster from 1865 to his death in 1892. Yet one can imagine Manning raising a celestial eyebrow at Cardinal Newman’s imminent elevation to sainthood.
“I see much danger in an English Catholicism of which Newman is the highest type,” he wrote in 1866. “It is the old Anglican, patristic, literary Oxford tone transplanted into the Church. It takes the line of deprecating exaggerations, foreign devotions, Ultramontanism, anti-national sympathies. In one word it is worldly Catholicism, and it will have the worldly on its side, and will deceive many.”
