![]() ![]() And since Newman's death in 1890 they have remained in the same grave in Rednal, about eight miles from Cardinal Newman's house in Edgbaston, outside Birmingham.In 1854 Newman wrote: "We have bought (I trust) a burying place - under the Lickey Hills, just about eight miles off - it is a most beautiful spot. ![]() The two men loved each other deeply, had a life-long friendship, and lived together. Here is the English Catholic journalist Austen Ivereigh at "In All Things" on the relationship between Newman and St. Still, theirs was an especially intense bond. Those reactions may say more about a 21st-century American culture that is hinky about male friendships than it does about Newman. ![]() Andrew Sullivan-a gay English Catholic-"dished" on this argument here.Not surprisingly, that argument sparked more than a bit of debate, and strong counterreactions. "I wish, with all my heart, to be buried in Fr Ambrose St John's grave-and I give this as my last, my imperative will," he wrote, "This I confirm and insist on."Many today thus insisted that removing Newman's body from the grave would violate his last wishes as well as what they saw as a relationship that was more than Platonic-hence Newman was, improbably, becoming a gay icon of the twenty-first century. John, a fellow Oratorian who Newman described as the great love of his life. Was Cardinal Newman gay? Or (as the joke has it) simply divine? That was the controversy that dominated the dust-up over exhuming John Henry Newman, the great nineteenth-century English convert to Rome, in order to move his body to a more suitable location for veneration-that in anticipation of his beatification (the penultimate step to canonization) by Pope Benedict XVI next year.Newman, you see, had requested-indeed insisted, with his final breath-that he be buried in a grave at Rednal Hill cemetery outside Birmingham with Ambrose St. ![]()
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