The Pope We All Need

Avignette from Victorian England offers a good starting point for thinking about the current state of the Western civilizational project. The place: the village of Olton in England's West Midlands. The date: October 2, 1873. The occasion: the dedication of a new Catholic seminary, St. -Bernard's. And in that age of magnificent ecclesiastical oratory, the preacher is a man whose sermons are still read, studied, and prayed over today: John Henry Newman, a founder of the reforming Oxford Movement within the Church of England, whose study of church history had led him into full communion with the Catholic Church three decades earlier.