The cause for the canonisation of John Henry Cardinal Newman has been furthered by the apparent recovery from spinal disease of a deacon in Boston, writes Kevin Myers.
This is a long wait for the requisite miracle from a man who died in 1890. "I had to tell [ Pope] John Paul that the English are not very good at miracles," explained Cardinal Cormac Murphy O'Connor. "It's not that we are not pious, but the English tend to think of God as a gentleman who should not be bullied." As it happens, the Vatican didn't need the Boston miracle, because the Cardinal was miraculously writing to this very newspaper, on the very same day, in a letter infused with tractarian piety.
"Madam", it began, "I note in your edition of October 17th that Dublin City Council is proposing to abolish the public right-of-way in the laneway Faith Avenue and Hope Avenue, Dublin. Could the council, in this case, be accused of a lack of charity? - Yours, etc, JOHN NEWMAN, Dublin 11." No, I'm not making this up. On October 19th, the very day of the Boston revelation, that letter appeared in The Irish Times. And remember - Dublin 11 is the home of Glasvenin cemetery. Now it could be that John Henry is a Cockney, and speaks in elaborate rhyming slang. Eleven. Glasnevin. Meaning Heaven (thought there is little evidence of rhyming slang in Apologia pro Vita Sua). So it seems that God has actually chosen to locate heaven in Dublin 11.
Until this revelation, you always thought you'd take wing to somewhere special once you got buried in Glasnevin, when in fact, the entire saved world - Michelangelo, Mother Teresa, even John Henry himself - is destined to shuffle in to join you there, and spend the rest of eternity in that divine purlieu between Phibsboro and Finglas.
I used to live around there. It was nice enough, but I never thought it was close to heaven. Which only goes to show that you don't know what you've got till you've gone. And it also puts the northside jokes in their place: everyone, regardless of rank, will have to make it past the pearly gates on the threshold of Glasnevin. It is clearly no coincidence that the Catholic church in Phibsboro is St Peter's.
So all those southsiders who have been preening themselves on their ignorance of the far side of the Liffey will spend the rest of eternity with cheerful northsiders drinking bottles of stout, smoking untipped cigarettes and ruthlessly being characters. So it seems heaven is like being trapped in a Roddy Doyle novel, with a chip-van, and horses ascending in lifts, incompetent robbers and people hilariously bawling FUQ! - and not for 190 pages, but for all time. How utterly spiffing. So where is hell? And what does it consist of? Dalkey. Bono.
However, if another clerical John, namely Magee, Bishop of Cloyne, wants to find all about hell, he should continue with his proposals to wreck St Colman's Cathedral in Cobh. It almost passes belief that, 40 years after Vatican II, with its many virtues and its equal number of infamies, any senior churchman would want to continue with the programme of architectural conformism which has had such a catastrophic consequences for Catholic building projects around the world. What you might call the V2 effect.
Subsequent church buildings have resembled tepees, igloos, sheds, garages, hangars, slaughter-houses, theatres-in-the round - anything but the cruciform constructions which defined Christian architecture for a millennium-and-a-half.
St Colman's is one of the most noble and inspiring Catholic churches in Ireland. It was designed by Sir Edward Pugin, the finest British architect of the 19th century, and - after John Henry - perhaps the greatest English Catholic of the time. He did other work in Ireland - notably Killarney Cathedral, which was a temple to magnificent, wedding-cake, neo-Gothic plasterwork. This was all but destroyed by that posturing wretch Eamon Casey, who stripped the cathedral's foundation rubble-stone of its gorgeous, irreplaceable plaster, in order to turn what was a Victorian work of art into a pastiche of a medieval abbey.
Most of us thought that, with the Catholic Church now holed up in its last redoubt, it would not attempt to alienate public opinion any further.
Quite the reverse - hence the modernist mumbo-jumbo to justify the proposed destruction of St Colman's sanctuary: "What we have at the moment is a significant spacial separation between the priest and all the people in the church." This is Californian cant. Of course, there's "a significant spacial separation" - otherwise known as "distance" - between priest and people.
The Holy Roman, Apostolic Church is a hierarchical institution, which is why the Pope doesn't live in a caravan in a halting-site outside Drogheda - and why, incidentally, Bishop John Magee goes around with a colossal decorated acorn on his head, otherwise known as a mitre.
Now if the Episcopal Cobh cove wants to cosy up to the people, aided by a few chords on his guitar, and whining some profound Bob Dylan song, well, he can do that in the Queenstown Mission Hall, strum strum strum: "The church it is a-changing". But it is not necessary to wreck Ludwig Oppenheimer's magnificent mosaic floor, or smash the altar rail, or the Episcopal side-chapel, as the Cloyne diocese intends.
The liturgical mood of today is not that of tomorrow, and the gentleman in Dublin 11 will not lightly forgive those who irreversibly violate Pugin's Irish masterwork.