Today we celebrate for the first time the Memoria of Blessed John Henry Newman. Most people will know that the date chosen for his feast day was not the day of his death but the date of his conversion to Catholicism. To understand the reason for that choice, I think one has to be familiar with both Newman's writings and the state of the Catholic Church in England at the time of his conversion. Newman was quite clear about his inability to continue as an Anglican once he had recognized in Catholicism the one true church of Christ. Intellectually, he was forced to abandon the "branch theory" of catholicism. Emotionally, it was much harder.

Mid nineteenth-century English Catholicism was largely the preserve of recusant families and immigrants: not a natural or comfortable home for a middle-class Anglican academic. That Newman was prepared to risk everything with which he was familiar, suffer the loss of reputation and security, is a mark of how necessary he thought it was to become a Catholic. For him, his reception into the Church was the most important event of his life, the date on which he truly entered into life. Death merely expanded the horizons of that life.

I think we do a great disservice to ecumenism if we fudge the nature of Newman's conversion and what it implied. We can, and should, honour all disciples of Christ (who are often much better Christians than we are, with much to teach us) but we must be true to what we believe. It is when we are truthful and loving that our hope of unity comes closer to realisation. The scandal of Newman's conversion and the Church's celebration of it may be a stumbling-block for some, but isn't the scandal of the Cross even more of a stumbling-block for us all?