Newman's Unquiet Grave

Book excerpt: John Henry Newman was the most eminent English-speaking Christian thinker and writer of the past two hundred years. James Joyce hailed him the 'greatest' prose stylist of the Victorian age. A problematic campaign to canonise Newman started fifty years ago. After many delays John Paul II declared him a 'Venerable'. Then Pope Benedict XVI, a keen student of Newman's works, pressed for his beatification. Finally, in 2019 and after authentication of the second of two miracles attributed to Newman, he was canonised (made a saint) at a ceremony in Rome given by Pope Francis and attended by HRH Prince Charles. In Newman's Unquiet Grave John Cornwell (author of A Thief in the Night and Hitler's Pope) tells the story of the chequered attempts to establish Newman's sanctity against the background of major developments within Catholicism. His life was marked by personal feuds, self-absorption, accusations of professional and artistic narcissism, hypochondria, and same-sex friendships that at times bordered on the apparent homo-erotic. John Cornwell investigates the process of Newman's elevation to sainthood to present a highly original and controversial new portrait of the great man's life and genius for a new generation of religious and non-religious readers alike.