Authorities in Rome have indicated that they want next year’s beatification of John Henry Newman to be conducted in Birmingham, his adopted city. This is a challenge that raises deeper questions – what is the real significance of Newman’s life and work; what is it that should be celebrated? In Britain and elsewhere, Newman’s name is often invoked in support of various causes of the moment. This is a chance, therefore, to claim him back for the mainstream, as one of English Christianity’s brightest stars. It should be the responsibility of the entire Church in England and Wales and handled by its bishops’ conference. Indeed its president, Archbishop Vincent Nichols, who only recently transferred from Birmingham to Westminster, is still the best person to preside over the preparations, particularly as his former see is vacant.

What would Newman himself advise? The most famous of all his sermons, known as the “Second Spring”, was preached to the newly appointed Catholic bishops of England and Wales in July 1852. In it he remarked upon the furore that had gripped the nation since the announcement of the restoration of the hierarchy two years earlier. “But what is it, my Fathers, my Brothers, what is it that has happened in England just at this time? Something strange is passing over this land, by the very surprise, by the very commotion, which it excites … almost without parallel, more violent than has happened here for centuries…” Goaded by a somewhat triumphalist presentation, that event set off a tidal wave of conflicting emotion in Church and State from Crown and Parliament to the smallest country village. He felt that this unexpected demonstration that relations between England and Rome still touched a sensitive national nerve could nevertheless be a sign of hope and a point of growth, the start of a second spring for the English Catholic cause. Indeed, his own beatification and subsequent canonisation ...

Rwandan student Tindyebwa Agaba graduated this week from Exeter University with a 2:1 in politics, six years after he first arrived in Britain. His father had died of Aids, his mother and sister were missing, and after fleeing genocide in his own country, he lived rough in London. His life was transformed by two things: his own ambition and the support of his adoptive parents, the actors Emma Thompson and Greg Wise. ...

Family life in Britain is undoubtedly in crisis, and the breakdown of relationships has reached epidemic proportions. More marriages end in divorce than ever before, and an increasing proportion of the population has dispensed with weddings altogether, preferring the less publicly binding status of informal cohabitation. British Churches, the Catholic Church included, will therefore be sympathetic to the call from ...

Gordon Brown has manifestly not done enough to explain why British troops are dying in the dust and heat of Afghanistan, fighting an enemy whose aim seems to be the replacement of one corrupt Afghan regime by another. True, the Taliban sheltered al-Qaeda in the days when it first declared war-by-terrorism on Western civilisation and carried out the attacks in the United States on 9/11. It is equally true that the Taliban ...

Benedict XVI's new social encyclical will take an hon­oured place in the series of such documents dating back to Rerum Novarum in 1891. Caritas in Veritate will be instantly scanned for what it has to say about contemporary concerns, such as the credit crunch, global warming, mass migration and unemployment. But its real if less newsworthy significance is in its development of the tradition. Each social encyclical ...

More than 100 British people, assisted in many cases by friends and relatives, have gone to Switzerland to end their own lives. Although assisting in another's suicide is illegal, the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) has decided on compassionate grounds that criminal proceedings against the relatives would not be in the public interest. This reflects the wisdom that good law needs a stern face but a kind heart - justice ...