THE P RTAL
February 2014
UK Page 3
Thoughts on Newman
Newman: The Head
that Honoured the Hat
Stephen Morgan
I
t was
a great joy, several weeks ago, to learn that Pope Francis has named Archbishop Vincent
Nichols amongst those to be made a Cardinal on 22nd February. Members of the Ordinariate of Our Lady
of Walsingham have more reason than most to be glad at this news because of the constant support and
solicitude Archbishop Nichols has shown in these first, nervous years of the Ordinariate’s existence. But as
I thought more about the imposition of (that is the word that used to be used – later years took to using the
grander and less threatening “elevation to”) the Cardinatial scarlet on Archbishop Nichols, the date of the
consistory at which this will take place leapt out at me as having a particular relevance for members of the
Ordinariate. Vincent Nichols, and eighteen others, will be made Cardinals on 22nd February 2014.
the Chair of St Peter
For over eleven hundred years – possibly much longer
– 22nd February has been kept in Rome as the feast of
the Chair of St Peter. Originally it was one of two such
feasts, the other on 18th January, which marked the
Church’s recognition of St Peter’s life and ministry as
the apostle who guarantees the unity of the faith, the
unity of the Church – the occupier of the Bishop’s seat
or cathedra – first at Antioch and later at Rome. Now,
with just the one feast, on 22nd February, it has come
to be seen as a particular day on which to recall that
the guarantee of our faith, the guarantee that we are
Catholic, is our communion with St Peter’s successor.
Newman’s life after his conversion was how he was
cut off from the culture of his Anglican years: what
we might call “patrimony”. The Catholic Church to
which he made his submission in October 1845 was
not one, at least not in England, noted for its liturgical
beauty, musical splendour and cultural riches. It was a
church where the utterly poor, migrant masses and the
marginalised recusants were emerging, blinking, into
public gaze following emancipation.
It was a church anxious not to antagonise the
Protestant majority with ostentatious displays of
rituals that looked and felt foreign. It was a church that
clung to its hastily whispered Low Mass, lest even that
Many members of the Ordinariate had but a short would be taken from it once again.
distance to travel in accepting the fullness of the
Newman was never to hear the Archbishop of
Catholic Faith, but the crucial step for so many was
that coming into full communion with Peter that Westminster say to him and his fellow converts, what
Archbishop Nichols was to say last September, to
marked your reception.
members and potential members of the Ordinariate:
This feast should be, therefore, one of great that through the Ordinariates, “Anglicans who wish
importance for those who have so lately, and often to enter the full communion of the Catholic Church,
at great personal cost, made that journey. Indeed, bringing with them some of the traditions and beauty
because of the price paid, that communion with Peter of the Anglican heritage in which they were nurtured,
should be so much more highly prized and might be a may do so.”
defining characteristic of members of the Ordinariate.
So, as Archbishop Nichols travels to Rome to be made
It is no accident that you Ordinariate brethren in
North America chose the name “The Ordinariate of a Cardinal, let him be supported by the prayers of all
the Chair of St Peter”.
Catholic in this country, but especially by members of
the Ordinariate, calling upon the heavenly intercession
the day after Blessed
of Blessed John Henry Newman, that what was said in
John Henry Newman’s birthday
Punch of Newman upon his being made a Cardinal in
The other thing that struck me about the date was 1878 might be true also of Archbishop Nichols: that “it
that it is the day after Blessed John Henry Newman’s isn’t the hat that honours the head, but the head that
birthday. One of the sadnesses that one detects in honours the hat”.