The complicated cardinal

From The Philadelphia Inquirer-

Anyone with overly pious views about who is suitable for canonization will be puzzled by the pope's beatification of John Henry Newman this weekend. Newman wasn't a lifelong Catholic, and he wrote against the Catholic Church well into his 30s.

About a decade after he left the Anglican Church and became a Catholic, Newman's writings on the church's duty to consult the laity brought him into disfavor with the Vatican. In the 1860s, he drew criticism from England's highest-ranking Catholic prelate, Archbishop Henry Edward Manning, who wrote of Newman to a Vatican source, "I see much danger of an English Catholicism, of which Newman is the highest type. ... In one word, it is worldly Catholicism, and it will have the worldly on its side, and will deceive many."

Newman was determined to resist any imposition on English Catholics of what was then called an ultramontane attitude, or what we would today call ultraconservative. The infallibility question provides a good illustration.

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