Cardinal Newman Soon to be Beatified?

From the U.K. Telegraph:

The Vatican is close to attributing a miracle to Cardinal Newman that would pave the way for Britain’s most famous convert to Roman Catholicism to become this country’s first saint for 40 years.

Insiders in Rome believe that the Vatican will announce a decision within months, meaning that the former Anglican whose conversion shocked Victorian England could be beatified as early as next year.

The controversial theologian and writer of the hymn Lead Kindly Light, who converted in 1845 and died in 1890, would then be declared “Blessed” and be one step from canonisation, for which a second miracle would be needed.

Office of Readings

I was reading a book on Mary by then Cardinal Ratzinger and Hans Urs Von Balthasaar yesterday. A quote from St. Louis De Montfort of the Prophet Haggai that Cardinal Ratzinger quoted caught my eye–then today again in the Office of Readings:

Reflect carefully how things have gone for you. You have sown much and harvested little; you eat but never have enough, drink but never have your fill, put on clothes but do not feel warm. The wage earner gets his wages only to put them in a purse riddled with holes. So go to the hill country, fetch wood, and rebuild the House: I shall then take pleasure in it, and be glorified there, says the Lord. The Lord of Hosts says this: Reflect carefully how things have gone for you. The abundance you expected proved to be little. When you brought the harvest in, my breath spoilt it. And why? – it is the Lord of Hosts who speaks. Because while my House lies in ruins you are busy with your own, each one of you. That is why the sky has withheld the rain and the earth withheld its yield. I have called down drought on land and hills, on wheat, on new wine, on oil and on all the produce of the ground, on man and beast and all their labours.”’

I have mentioned on here before, that when I first moved to this part of the country I began to write a book “In the Ruins of Catholicism”–I visited places where saints once walked and ministered that are literally in ruins now. This also came to mind as I read the above in the Office of Readings this morning.

I think this passage and my encounter with it two days in a row is significant.