John Cornwell’s biography of John Henry Newman, Newman’s Unquiet Grave, appeared just in time for Pope Benedict XVI’s visit to Britain in September, during which he beatified the cardinal.[1] Early reviews seized on the allusion, in its rather catchpenny title, to the exhumation of Newman’s body (which turned out to have decomposed) in 2008, and on the possible homoerotic implications of his wish to be buried alongside a fellow-priest and close friend, Father Ambrose St. John. The strident headlines (“Was Newman Gay?”) merely testified to a failure to understand either the rule of celibacy—to which Newman vowed himself at the age of sixteen—or the nineteenth-century cult of intense masculine friendship which could, but need not, involve homosexual feeling. Cornwell himself avoids sensationalism, though making the fair point that Newman’s abhorrence of married clergymen, in his Anglican days, was peculiar. Since the book raises many other, more worthwhile, issues, I intend to say no more about that aspect of it.

“Newman’s mind,” said his contemporary J. A. Froude, “was world-wide.” He should be routinely numbered among the greatest English thinkers and writers of the nineteenth century, yet such is the indifference to Christianity in Britain today that he is all but forgotten outside the circle of professional students of theology. He resurfaced during the Pope’s visit only as a topical “celebrity.” Nonetheless, whether considered as a theologian, a philosopher, a historian, an autobiographer, a polemicist, a preacher, or simply as a stylist, he belongs to the first