The beatification of Cardinal Newman

When the Vatican beatified Joan of Arc in 1909, a modest 478 years after her excommunication and death at the stake, it was a political response to the 1905 separation of church and state in France. She was declared a saint in 1920, the year following the dedication of the Sacré Coeur in Montmatre, at a time when there was a strong revival of the church in France following World War I.

So, it being established that the Vatican plays politics with the process, what are we to make of the canonization of forty English martyrs in 1970 - exactly 300 years after the excommunication (and incitement to assassination) of Queen Elizabeth I, the beatification of eighty-five English martyrs in 1987, and the beatification last week of the most famous convert from the Anglican to the Roman Catholic church?

Well, that's a rhetorical question. It's bloody obvious. The Vatican has never ceased to regard Britain as a lost province, and all these actions have been designed to undermine the legitimacy of the Anglican church. The first pastoral visit by a pope to these shores came ten months after Benedict XVI issued an extraordinary Apostolic Constitution (Anglicanorum Coetibus) inviting Anglicans to enter into full communion with the Catholic Church while retaining their traditions, devotions, and liturgical practices.

I rather doubt those traditions will include John Foxe's 1563 best-seller, The Book of Martyrs, featuring the Protestants burned by the Catholic Queen Mary, which shaped British popular opinion about the Roman Catholic church down to recent times.

Why the recent Catholic offensive against the Anglican church? Again, bloody obvious. The Canterbury  communion has its head up its own arse and has become so marginal to the life of the country, and so estranged from the international Anglican/Episcopalian communion, that it is ripe for take-over.

Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn. But it would have persuaded me that there was some depth to the chattering of media pundits if they had at least mentioned the political implications of the pope's visit. But no, we just had more of the usual cant about sexual "rights" mixed with sanctimony about paedophile priests. Seems to be the only thing thing that gets what passes for British public intellectuals aroused.

Sic.