By Susan Brinkmann, OCDS
Staff Writer
The Church is coming to the defense of John Henry Cardinal Newman against attacks by a British homosexual activist who claims the Cardinal was a closet homosexual who was in a same-sex relationship with his long-time friend, Father Ambrose St. John.
The controversy began when the Church announced plans to move the body of Cardinal Newman from its current resting place into a sarcophagus in the church of the Birmingham Oratory, the community founded by Newman. The body is being exhumed in preparation for the Cardinal’s beatification which is expected to take place later this year. Typically, officials exhume and examine the body of persons about to be beatified then move the remains to a place for veneration by the faithful.
However, because Cardinal Newman is buried in the same grave as his friend, Fr. Ambrose St. John, this led Peter Tatchell, a well known British homosexual activist, to assume that the Cardinal was in a gay relationship with the priest and that the Vatican was attempting to cover up this fact by moving the body before the beatification.
“The Vatican is embarrassed that Newman is currently buried in the same grave as the man he shared much of his life with, Father Ambrose St. John,” Tatchell wrote in an editorial appearing in a variety of prominent British newspapers, including the BBC, the Independent, the Guardian, and the Daily Mail. “Although inseparable in life and buried together for 118 years, the Catholic Church now wants to tear them apart.”
Tatchell goes on to say: “I have been tipped off by an insider high up within the Catholic Church. He, too, is appalled; confiding to me that the bid to move the Cardinal’s body is all about burying any hint that he might have been gay and been in love with St John.”
While refusing to name his “source,” Tatchell says: “To be blunt: homophobia is at the root of the Vatican’s sordid scheme.”
Even while asserting that there was no way to prove – or disprove – a sexual relationshiop between the two, Tatchell asserts: “There is little doubt that Newman and St John were mentally and spiritually in love; sharing a long-term same-sex relationship. They were inseparable. They lived together for over 30 years, like a married husband and wife.”
The publication of Tatchell’s remarks, and the fact that so many newspapers carried the column, outraged British Catholics and prompted the Vatican’s Office of the Causes of Sainthood to commission Fr. Ian Ker, a theologian at Oxford University and the world’s leading Newman scholar, to write an article for the Vatican’s newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano.
“If wanting to be buried in the same grave as someone else indicates some kind of sexual feelings for the other person, then C. S. Lewis’s brother Warnie, who is buried in the same grave in accordance with both brothers’ wishes, must have had incestuous feelings for his brother which were mutual.” Father Ker wrote in the Sept. 2 issue.
“Or again, G. K. Chesterton’s devoted secretary, Dorothy Collins, whom he and his wife regarded as a daughter, while thinking it presumptuous to ask to be buried in the same grave as the Chestertons, nevertheless directed that she be cremated and that her ashes should be buried in the same grave. Does this mean that she had more than filial feelings for one or both of her employers?”
Fr. Ker later told the Weekend Australian that homosexuals were using Newman’s close friendship with another priest as a political ploy. “Clearly” Fr. Kerr said, Newman “did love his dear friend” but he called it “ridiculous” to claim, a century after the fact, that they were homosexuals who lived “as husband and wife.”
“There is no evidence for that whatsoever, and everything he (Cardinal Newman) wrote and said suggests he would have thought homosexuality was immoral, not to mention that it was illegal at the time. Theirs was a close friendship that some people are now trying to misrepresent and use for their own purposes.”
John Henry Cardinal Newman was born in 1801 and became an Anglican priest. He championed the Oxford Movement, which sought to return the Church of England to its Catholic roots. His conversion to Catholicism in 1845 caused a sensation in Victorian England. He died in 1890 and is buried at the oratory country house at Rednall Hill.
In April of this year, the Vatican accepted as miraculous the cure of an American deacon with a crippling spinal disorder as a result of prayer to Cardinal Newman, thus paving the way for his beatification. The case of 17 year old New Hampshire boy who survived serious head injuries from a car crash is being investigated as a possible second miracle.
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