ALL the main Christian denominations have saints, but the process of saint-making with which people are generally most familiar is the Roman Catholic one: think of those huge ceremonies in Rome when the Pope canonises holy men and women; the extended investigations into a person’s life and works before they are raised to the altars; and the feast days that mark the Church’s calendar.
In Roman Catholic churches in this country, you can guarantee that any celebration of a saint is marked by the congregation singing “For all the saints”. And yet that great hymn, synonymous for many with All Saints’ Day, is an Anglican work, its words penned by William Walsham How, a prolific hymn-writer and the first Bishop of Wakefield.
Bishop How’s original 11-verse version (most hymn books print only eight verses) explicitly celebrates the Apostles, Evangelists, and Martyrs among all those who confessed the name of Jesus “before the world”. As he wrote of this “blest communion, fellowship divine”, he can hardly have imagined that, 150 years later, some of those whom the Roman Catholic Church recognises as saints, or is considering for recognition, would be a special fellowship of Anglicans.
BY 1864, when “For all the saints” was first published, John Henry Newman was working on his autobiography, Apologia Pro Vita Sua, explaining how and why, after years as one of the leaders of the Tractarian movement, he had gone over. Some of his Church of England friends cut him; even for John Keble, it was 20 years before he could speak to Newman again. But Edward Pusey saw it differently. Newman, he commented, “seems to me not so much gone from us as transplanted into another part of the Vineyard”.
By the time he came to write his Apologia, some 20 years after his secession, Newman was once again on such good terms with his old Anglican friends that they helped him by checking his memoirs for veracity. When it came to Vatican officials’ studying his eligibility for canonisation, Newman’s writings, including the Apologia, with its element of Anglican collaboration, would have been vital to their analysis of his holiness.
Friendship also marked Newman’s canonisation in 2019. Six bishops represented the Church of England at the ceremony, and were seated close to the papal throne, where they were greeted by Pope Francis. That presence was described by the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Birmingham, the Most Revd Bernard Longley, co-chair of ARCIC, as helping to develop ecumenical dialogue, and as a sign of the connection between Roman Catholics and Anglicans. The dismay once felt by Anglicans when Newman crossed the Tiber had been replaced by a sense of a saint honoured and recognised as belonging to two traditions.
NEWMAN is not alone: two other significant Victorians who were raised as Anglicans and then joined the Roman Catholic Church as it emerged from the shadows in 19th-century England are also on the path to canonisation.
One is Elizabeth Prout, born into an Anglican family in 1820, who was received in her early twenties and became a nun. If Prout were alive today, she would probably be described as an activist: she found her métier in the slums of Manchester, working with migrants who had fled the Irish famine to work in the cotton mills. She had moved to the city after being discharged from one religious order, and founded her own order, later called the Passionists, with links to the male order of priests of the same name.
By the time she died in 1864, Prout had taught at, or set up, nine schools, while her community was criticised for its supposedly revolutionary ideas, such as requiring religious Sisters to earn their own wages to support themselves. She also taught destitute women skills that would help them to earn a living. In January, Pope Francis declared her “venerable” — just two steps away from canonisation — for her heroic virtue.
Prout is buried at St Anne’s, Sutton, alongside two Passionist priests, Blessed Dominic Barberi, who both influenced her and received Newman, and Fr Ignatius Spencer. Another Passionist and former Anglican, he is also being considered for canonisation.
Fr Ignatius, the son of the second Earl Spencer (and a distant relative of Princes William and Harry), scandalised society in 1830 by leaving the Anglican clergy and going over to Rome. Like Newman, he left behind a body of writing — in his case, diaries in minute handwriting, tracing his life as an Anglican and then as a roving Roman Catholic preacher, which are being studied as part of the process in Rome.
Fr Ignatius’s life and writings have already made sufficient impression that, earlier this year, he — like Prout — was declared Venerable, and his heroic virtue was also recognised.
FORMER Anglicans whose cause is being promoted also include John Bradburne (Faith, 18 June), the son of an Anglican rector, born in 1921, and brought up in Cumberland before becoming a soldier. After leaving the army, he stayed at Buckfast Abbey, Devon, where he was received at the age of 26.
A restless soul, Bradburne travelled the world for years before moving eventually to what was then Rhodesia, where he ran a leper colony. He was shot dead by guerrillas during the Rhodesian bush war in 1979. Roman Catholics in Britain and in Zimbabwe (including its bishops), as well as Bradburne’s Anglican relatives, are working for his canonisation, and this year his cause has been highlighted by celebrations to mark the centenary of his birth. His niece, Kate MacPherson, has described him as relatable, and “a very British person”.
Bradburne’s essence was not just his typically British character, but his two Christian traditions, too, just as they shaped Newman, Prout, and Spencer. When Rome canonises people who have come over from other Christian traditions, it examines the whole of their life for evidence of sanctity, not just the years after their reception. Being Anglican is key. To expand Pusey’s comment, they might have moved to another part of the vineyard, but where their fruitful vines first grew — and in what manner of soil — matters, too.
Catherine Pepinster is a writer, broadcaster, and former editor of The Tablet. Her book, Martyrdom: Why martyrs still matter is published by SPCK.
Read more about saints and remembrance in our leader comment, and from Angela Tilby and Malcolm Guite
