THE
P RTAL
January 2019
Page 10
Thoughts on Newman
A Peculiarly British
Joyful Mystery
“When England returns to Walsingham, Our Lady will return
to England” ~ The Revd Dr Stephen Morgan ponders this in
relation to Blessed John Henry Newman
A chance conversation
with the estimable Mgr John Armitage in a Norfolk car park
several months ago got me thinking about the national characteristics of devotion to the woman many
of us grew up calling St Mary the Virgin.
There is, it has always seemed to me, something
inescapably French in the delicacy and courtesy of
Our Lady of Lourdes and the imagery and devotions
to Our Lady of Fatima could not but be Portuguese.
Guadeloupe is as Latin American as Our Lady of Pilar,
Monserrat and Garabandal is Spanish and no visitor
to the Shrine of the Mother of Victories at Wigratzbad
could mistake the South German character of the
cultus. But what of Mary’s Dowry? brought him to the fulness of Catholic truth – in this
case, primarily Irenaeus of Lyons’ powerful defence
of the Incarnation and his presentation of the parallel
between Christ as the New Adam of St Paul’s Epistle
to the Romans and Mary as the New Eve: the fact that
the Latin name for the first woman, Eva, was reversed
in the Archangel’s greeting to the First Woman, Ave,
appealed to Newman’s sense of humour, as much as
the rich typology appealed to his subtle mind.
The estimable Monsignor reminded me of the
particular character of Our Lady of Walsingham: she
is Mary of the Annunciation, the joyful and expectant
Mother of Nazareth, not the Mother of Sorrows at the
foot of the Cross nor the Help of the Sick nor yet the
Queen of Heaven. No impartial observer – let alone a concerned
expatriate – would look at England today and see it as
a place of Mary’s hopeful joy. Britain – if you’ll pardon
this Welshman broadening the focus – is marked
rather by an existential anxiety.
Whatever one says of thinks about Brexit, and who
Theologically understood, of course, she is all of doesn’t (as Flanders and Swann would have said), it
those things and more besides but devotionally at hardly bespeaks a nation at ease with itself and the
Walsingham, in England, she is primarily the young laughter evoked by popular culture’s desperate and
woman “full of grace” whose response to those tidings often slightly sordid attempts at distraction, simply
brought by the Archangel was an unconditional and heightens the feeling.
joyful “fiat” and its associated hymn of hope.
Charlotte Boyd started negotiations to buy a cowshed
Originally rather revolted by the devotions to the in Stiffkey’s fair vale barely three years after Newman’s
Mother of God that he witnessed on his Mediterranean death. She saw, in Pope Leo XIII’s (the Pope who
journey of 1832/3, Blessèd John Henry Newman bestowed the Cardinal’s hat upon Newman) lapidary
developed into a passionate votary, whose devotion to phrase, that “When England returns to Walsingham,
Our Lady will return to England”.
Our Lady was thoroughly English.
Returning to Walsingham is returning to England’s
Nazareth, to the house, to the place of the lasting,
hopeful joy of the Annunciation, where faithless Eve’s
work was undone in faithful Mary. Perhaps we could
do no better for our country than to betake ourselves
to a Norfolk car park and, praying Newman’s aid,
commit ourselves once more to the cause of our only,
As always with the man, it was the Fathers that lasting joy.
That devotion was, like so much else about Newman,
driven by a profound intellectual conviction, a real
assent to the core truth that the Virgin of Nazareth’s
response is the cause of our joy: that the sorrow that
flowed from Eve was overmatched and overcome by
the joy that flowed from Mary.