One hundred eighty years after his reception into the Catholic Church, England’s most famous convert is to be received by all Catholics around the world as the thirty-eighth Doctor of the Church. St. John Henry Newman, beatified by Benedict XVI, canonized by Francis, is now given this new honor by Pope Leo XIV; with it, Newman is offered as a universal guide for the ages. Newman is being offered to us for this moment as well. His age, like our own, was one fraught with technological and intellectual convulsions, and his wisdom has much to teach us today about how to live a vibrant Catholic life in the midst of challenging times.
Newman was born in 1801 into a largely agrarian world in which no one had ever travelled faster than a galloping horse. By the end of the century, when he died in 1890, steam and steel had shrunk the map. At the beginning of his life, a journey from London to Birmingham took more than two days by carriage; by the end of his life, that same journey took just two hours by train. Telegraphs, telephones, and electric light seemed to compress time and space.
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