The Tablet’s home news editor joined the pilgrims travelling to St Peter’s for the canonisation.

Friday 11 October
“I was just nattering away to him,” John Henry’s mum confides to me in a low voice as we wait for our flight to unboard. “And now it turns out he’s a bishop!”

To be fair to her, Alan Hopes, the Bishop of East Anglia, is travelling to Rome for Cardinal Newman’s canonisation incognito. And you could hardly blame him, because it feels like half of the English Church is aboard Ryanair’s Friday afternoon flight from London Stansted. John Henry – at a guess, six, and travelling with his mum and aunt to see his patron canonised – is sat behind Bishop Alan, and behind them is a large crowd of young Catholics from the Youth 2000 festival, who have booked an Airbnb in Rome at the last second. And behind them sit some very serious young men in tweed, whom I mentally assign to one of the Oratories.

As we file on to the tarmac and into Rome’s hot, autumn sunshine, I am struck by Newman’s ability to bring together very different parts of the Church. Myself included: I grew up in the Oxford Oratory and was received there as a teenager, standing out somewhat with my face piercings and tattoos. But I had never had any particular devotion to Newman, and I nursed a convert’s uncertainty about the saints, a part of the Catholic faith that I liked in principle, but felt no great attachment to.