Ticket to Oblivion?

Newman, a sensitive soul as well as a brilliant mind, suffered for decades from what Dorothy Day once described as the “long loneliness” of the convert. That suffering was considerably mitigated when Pope Leo XIII, in one of the first acts of his great reforming pontificate, announced his intention to create Newman a cardinal and permit the now-elderly man to continue living in the Birmingham Oratory rather than in Rome (which was then the rule for cardinals who were not diocesan bishops).