Pope places John Henry Newman on path to possible sainthood

VATICAN CITY — Pope Benedict XVI placed Cardinal John Henry Newman, an influential 19th-century Anglican convert, on the path to possible sainthood Friday by approving a miracle attributed to his intercession.

Newman, a hero to many Anglicans and Roman Catholics alike, can now be beatified. A second miracle is necessary for him to be declared a saint — an event which, if it happens, would make him the first English-born saint since the Reformation.

Newman, who lived from 1801 to 1890, was one of the founders of the so-called Oxford Movement of the 1830s, which sought to revive certain Roman Catholic doctrines in the Church of England. Anglicans split from Rome in 1534 when English King Henry VIII was refused a marriage annulment.

In 1841, Newman published a paper demonstrating that the Thirty-Nine Articles, the doctrinal statements of the Church of England, were consistent with Catholicism. Amid the outcry from Anglicans, Newman retired, and in 1845 joined the Roman Catholic Church. A year later he was ordained a Catholic priest.

Monsignor Mark Langham, the Vatican official in charge of relations with Anglicans, said Newman was a “key figure” for both Roman Catholics and Anglicans today, responsible for having revived the rich tradition of Anglicanism that stressed the continuity with the old church.

For Catholics, Langham said, Newman represents someone who anticipated by some 100 years the ideas about the Catholic Church’s place in the world that were articulated during the Second Vatican Council, the 1960s meetings that brought many liberalizing reforms to the church.

“Because so many of his ideas anticipate Vatican II, he is seen as something of a trailblazer in opening up the Roman Catholic Church to the world and the wider sense of its obligations to other Christians,“ Langham told The Associated Press.

Many theologians, Benedict chief among them, “hold him in very high esteem as one of the great minds,“ he added.

The miracle approved Friday by the pope concerns the medically inexplicable cure of a Boston-area resident, John Sullivan, who suffered from debilitating back pain for years but was cured after praying to Newman. Calls seeking comment Friday from Sullivan weren’t immediately successful.

No date has been set for the beatification ceremony.