The joyful celebrations of the extraordinary life and work of England’s newly canonised saint, John Henry Newman, need to be followed by a serious response.

The joyful celebrations of the extraordinary life and work of England’s newly canonised saint, John Henry Newman, need to be followed by a serious response. Enough is known of his principles and values to make it fairly certain that, were he alive today, he would see much of his own mind and heart alive in the contemporary Church in England and Wales. But there would be reservations and disappointments, too. And perhaps what would concern him most is the continued absence of any systematic consultation among bishops, priests and laity on the many challenges the Church now faces.

Newman was a pragmatist, and he would have recognised that such consultations would have been difficult, and perhaps even confrontational, during the papacy of Pope John Paul II. The Polish Pope brushed aside the report of the Liverpool Pastoral Congress in 1980 when its proposals were presented to him by Cardinal Hume and Archbishop Worlock. Since then there has been an absence of the sort of joined-up strategic thinking that the Congress represented. Indeed, after the rebuff in Rome, the hierarchy of the time took the view that English and Welsh Catholicism needed to keep a low profile if it was to avoid papal displeasure. That became a settled habit of aversion to risk. In the papacy of Pope Francis, this is no longer necessary or desirable. Were Newman among us, he would undoubtedly have said so.

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