The canonisation of John Henry Newman, which Pope Francis announced will take place on 13 October 2019, comes at a timely moment for a Church grappling to evangelise a fragmented, postmodern world, while simultaneously grappling with internal divisions.

Newman took as his motto Cor ad Cor Loquitur (“Heart Speaks to Heart”). He understood that people do not come to Christianity through hectoring, bullying or ideological arguments, but in a process of falling in love.
In Rome, among some Catholic groups, there are attempts to colonise Newman, and claim him for themselves. His genius is that he defies any factional label. His writing is dialectical and paradoxical. He critiques religious liberalism while resisting narrow forms of orthodoxy, and was a fierce critic of Pius IX, writing of the First Vatican Council which in 1870 declared the Pope infallible: “We have come to a climax of tyranny. It is not good for a pope to live 20 years. It is an anomaly, and bears no good fruit; he becomes a god, has no one to contradict him, does not know facts, and does cruel things without meaning it.”