Pope Benedict XVI, is due to carry out a state visit to the UK from September 16 to 19. His programme is to culminate with a public Mass in Coventry, at which he will beatify the ‘Venerable’ John Henry Newman. He will be performing the second stage of the English Cardinal’s Canonisation, or path to sainthood, by virtue of which Newman will be pronounced ‘Blessed’.
The false ecumenical movement in the UK owes much to Newman’s ‘developing doctrine’, which was particularly used in formulating the Agreed Statements of ‘The Anglican Roman Catholic International Commission’ (ARCIC). The visit is expected to boost the popularity of both the clever Anglican distortions of Newman and the old errors of Rome among undiscerning Christians.
In the 19th century, Newman saw the Anglican church as a way to bring Christians back to Roman Catholicism. It is instructive to learn that, early in 1833, months before the launch of the Oxford Movement, Newman and his friend Hurrell Froude, had visited Monsignor (subsequently Cardinal) Wiseman in Rome. ‘We got introduced to him’, wrote Froude ‘to find out whether they would take us in (to the Church of Rome) on any terms to which we could twist our consciences, and we found to our dismay that not one step could be gained without swallowing the Council of Trent as a whole.’
