![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
John Henry Newman, sneaky bastard
Sep. 18th, 2010 12:23 amEasily the most amusing thing I've read today, courtesy of the FT:
"Pope Benedict XVI is set next week to honour the Victorian churchman and writer Cardinal John Henry Newman, by beatifying him – bringing him to the penultimate stage of full sainthood. The ceremony, at a park near Birmingham, will be performed before a 70,000-strong congregation, and a global English-speaking audience of millions, via the media.
*^*^*
Newman’s path to beatification has taken half a century – the process began in 1958, on the insistence of the community of priests at Birmingham Oratory, founded by Newman – and it is an arcane, macabre process at the best of times. The candidate’s physical remains are procured and enshrined. Across Catholic Europe, bits of bone and hair of blesseds and saints are treasured in satin-lined gilt receptacles. Cadavers are venerated in glass-sided coffins, their faces reconstructed with wax and enlivened with rouge. Relics signify power, and miracles are sought in their presence, acknowledging the holy ones’ intercessory credit with the Almighty.
*^*^*
On a wet October day in 2008, an assortment of priests and grave-diggers arrived at the cemetery in Rednal, armed with shovels and a mechanical digger. They planned to transfer Newman’s remains to a tomb back at his church in Birmingham. Nothing was found except the brass name-plate and a few bits of rotten wood. A solution to the mystery was discovered in the archives of the Birmingham Post. A journalist at the burial reported that, on Newman’s orders, the grave was filled with compost to hasten decomposition. His corpse (someone described him in great age as toothless and shrivelled like “a shrimp”) had apparently dissolved into the soil. He had cheated the relic hunters."
"Pope Benedict XVI is set next week to honour the Victorian churchman and writer Cardinal John Henry Newman, by beatifying him – bringing him to the penultimate stage of full sainthood. The ceremony, at a park near Birmingham, will be performed before a 70,000-strong congregation, and a global English-speaking audience of millions, via the media.
*^*^*
Newman’s path to beatification has taken half a century – the process began in 1958, on the insistence of the community of priests at Birmingham Oratory, founded by Newman – and it is an arcane, macabre process at the best of times. The candidate’s physical remains are procured and enshrined. Across Catholic Europe, bits of bone and hair of blesseds and saints are treasured in satin-lined gilt receptacles. Cadavers are venerated in glass-sided coffins, their faces reconstructed with wax and enlivened with rouge. Relics signify power, and miracles are sought in their presence, acknowledging the holy ones’ intercessory credit with the Almighty.
*^*^*
On a wet October day in 2008, an assortment of priests and grave-diggers arrived at the cemetery in Rednal, armed with shovels and a mechanical digger. They planned to transfer Newman’s remains to a tomb back at his church in Birmingham. Nothing was found except the brass name-plate and a few bits of rotten wood. A solution to the mystery was discovered in the archives of the Birmingham Post. A journalist at the burial reported that, on Newman’s orders, the grave was filled with compost to hasten decomposition. His corpse (someone described him in great age as toothless and shrivelled like “a shrimp”) had apparently dissolved into the soil. He had cheated the relic hunters."
