Cardinal Herbert Vaughan––most known for his tenure as Archbishop of Westminster, England, and for founding Saint Joseph’s Missionary Society of Mill Hill––journeyed to and across the Southern United States in 1872. He aimed to document the hindrances that could and did threaten the introduction and widespread dissemination of Catholicism in African American communities throughout the once-Confederate territories.
The mission at Stone, Staffordshire was begun by Blessed Dominic Barberi who resided at nearby Aston Hall. In 1844 he opened the chapel of St. Anne, which was designed by A. W. N. Pugin.
In Munich in the 1990s, a previously unknown manuscript of an unpublished book about John Henry Newman written fifty years earlier surfaced. It was subsequently published in German (Der Geopferte, 2004) and has now been translated into English as John Henry Newman: A Life Sacrificed (Ignatius Press, 2024). The author was Ida Friederike Görres (1901–1971), a once-famous Catholic author known especially for her hagiography.
Included in the archives of the Birmingham Oratory, which were digitized in 2012, are two scrap books compiled by Newman. He labeled these his Autographic Remains. They contain letters, notes, sketches and other items related to his formative years between his 1806 and the death of his mother in 1836.
On the last Sunday of June in 1824, the sermon preached by Rev. Robert Marriott (1774–1841) in the tiny medieval Church of St. Mary’s, Cotesbach was on Genesis 2:3, on the sanctity of the Sabbath. Unless he had a curate working for him he would then have hopped in his carriage to preach in the nearby parishes of Shawell and Gilmorton, where he also had the living, and pastoral responsibilities. The sermon preached at these two parishes was also about creativity, but from a different angle.
Before becoming Catholic in 1845, Newman had ascribed to the Evangelical party and then later the High Church party of Anglicanism. It was through certain friendships penetrating his heart so deeply that he became attracted to the truths of the Catholic faith. When Pope Leo XIII made Newman a cardinal in 1879, Newman chose cor ad cor loquitur (Heart speaks unto heart) as his motto. His friends surely spoke to his heart, and his heart spoke to theirs.
