It was also gratifying that the Pope expressed thanks to “Das Werk.”  This “Familia Spiritualis Opus,” or, “The Spiritual Family, the Work,” is a Family of consecrated Life of Pontifical Right, founded in Blegium in 1938 by Mother Julia Verhaeghe. Among their works is the custody of Newman’s retreat in Littlemore outside Oxford, and a center in Rome with a Newman library. This mission was encouraged by the late Cardinal Wright whose favorite spiritual lights were Newman and Joan of Arc. It would be hard to imagine two more different saints, and their beatitude today certainly is an reminder both joyful and whimsical of how comprehensive the Communion of Saints is.

Newman once said that he hoped someday to be worthy enough to shine the shoes of St. Philip Neri. Perhaps he is now offering to polish the armor of the Maid of Orleans. I am happy to have Sisters of “Das Werk” as catechists in my parish in addition to the work they do at the Permanent Mission of the Holy See to the United Nations.

After I defended  a doctoral dissertation in Rome, I joined some members of Das Werk in a “Te Deum” in their house in Rome. Six years later, after my oral examinations in Oxford,  we did the same thing in LIttlemore.  Only when by God’s grace we get to see all those “angel faces smile,” will we know more of what providence variously has done for us through the influence of Newman who, as the elderly daughter of one of his Birmingham schoolboys once told me, was called “Jack”  by them—but only out of earshot.

One guest at the royal wedding was the grandmother of Queen Elizabeth II. Even when she became queen, Mary of Teck never forgot the assassination attempt on the royal couple that day by the anarchist Mateu Morrai. Many in the procession were killed or mutilated and the bride’s gown was splattered with blood. It had a sobering effect on the wedding banquet, but the Princess Victoria lived until 1969. In fact she was a neighbor in Switzerland of a former parishioner of mine, sharing their compound with Charlie Chaplin.

A year before that wedding, my maternal grandmother set foot from England on the shores of Manhattan for the first time. There still were wooden houses along the Battery then, and suddenly the second floor window of one of them opened and a black man looked out. My grandmother had never seen anyone before who was not white, and in her confusion she burst into tears.

The Atlantic was not a pond then: it was the distance between Earth and Mars. Today in Westminster Cathedral, the processional cross was carried by a stately young black man. This whole papal trip has not been, as one commentator fatuously commented, the end of Empire. It has been the fulfillment of Empire, and the Pope has reminded an entire people that his throne and the keys he carries are more ancient than any dynasty and are “ever ancient ever new.”

Scenes in London have been like the vision of Robert Hugh Benson in “The Dawn of All.” Satan had his innings and now the Lord enters. To contrast the solemn splendor of today’s liturgy in Westminster Cathedral, with the previous papal Mass there in 1982 is to witness a measure of the vast change Benedict XVI has already wrought in the heart of the Church. The rites have become a more vivid visual and aesthetic catechesis for a culture whose thirst for the integral beauty of truth is in equal measure with its deprivation of it. I noticed the presence of my own former Ordinary, Cardinal Egan,in the procession and I hope that what the Pope is doing, and most importantly the message he is giving in beatifying Newman, will spread from London to the nations, including my own.

Yet when a grandstanding fundamentalist preacher in Florida ruminated about burning the Quran, headlines even referred to him as a “priest” as if to give the impression that he might be an agent of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. If the “London street sweepers” were members of an underground Wesleyan chapel, it would not have escaped the attention of the “Manchester Guardian.” But even the media must admit that there are not many Algerian Methodists.

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One commentator incorrectly said that Elizabeth II is the first British monarch to have entered a Catholic Church since the Reformation (she visited Westminster Cathedral and not long after made the dying Cardinal Hume a Companion of Honour). The first was George V who, with Queen Mary, in 1920 attended a Requiem Mass in Farnborough Abbey at the funeral of the exiled Empress Eugenie where she is entombed with Napoleon III and their son, the Prince Imperial, who was killed by the Zulus while fighiting in the British army. The Moderator of the Kirk of Scotland objected: “Mindful of the claims of fallen greatness…” Nevertheless, it was unsuitable in the opinion of the Presbyterians for the King and Queen to attend.

The aforementioned Eugenie was, in full, María Eugenia Ignacia Augustina de Palafox-Portocarrero de Guzmán y Kirkpatrick, 16th Countess of Teba and 15th Marquise of Ardales. Coincidentally, in Teba, near Malaga, whose countess she was, the Scots were defeated by the Muslims, which halted their progress to Jerusalem where they were intending to bury the heart of Robert the Bruce, who was portrayed by an actor in today’s St. Ninian’s Day Parade welcoming the pope. King Robert, who had been excommunicated by both popes Clement V and John XXII had made the burial of his heart in the Holy Land part of his penance, entrusting it to Sir James Douglas who died in the battle at Teba on August 25, 1330. From Teba, the knight Keith of Glaston brought the heart back to Scotland where it is kept in Melrose Abbey. There is a popular movement to ask Pope Benedict XVI to have it buried in Jerusalem.

The same John XXII who excommunicated the Bruce, received favorably the Declaration of Arbaoth in 1320. Signed by 51 magnates and nobles, it has many expressions anticipatory of our 1776 Declaration of independence. Its reputed author, Abbot Bernard may thus be called the Thomas Jefferson of Scotland. Or, more fittingly, Thomas Jefferson was the Abbot Bernard of the United States. Arbroath had a happier connection with the papacy than did Magna Carta, which Pope Innocent III said called a “shameful and demeaning agreement forced upon the King by violence and fear.”

In 1988 I attended Cardinal Ratzinger’s famous lecture in Cambridge University. It impressed me so much that I kept the notes. In the talk he recalled how he dismayed the widow of the utopian Ernst Bloch by telling her of drugs and violence in the universities in the 1960′s. It contradicted what her husband had predicted in his “Marxist humanism.” The huge audience dumbfounded the faculty and the media said the crowd—some standing outside in the rain—indicated a temporary “fad for mediaevalism amongst undergraduates.” On Friday the pope will visit St. Mary’s University. When James VI chartered the University of Edinburgh in 1582, Scotland boasted four universities when England had two and Ireland none. The other three, St. Andrew’s, Glasgow and Aberdeen, all had papal charters. Of course they were important in the seventeenth century “Scottish Enlightenment” which was the cradle of modern science (especially medicine) and humanities and which helped shape the constitutional character of the new Untied States. It is also estimated that, in proportion to population, the Scots have won more Nobel prizes than any other race (excluding the deflated Peace Prize, but it has not been typical of the Scots to pursue peace at any price).

The pope’s response to the queen at the Palace of Holyrood House referred to two saints: Edward the Confessor, who built Westminster Abbey which the pope will visit, and St. Margaret of Scotland. Queen Elizabeth II, whose claim to the throne is through the Electress Sophia of Hanover, is also 38th in direct descent from Egbert of Wessex (775–839), the first King of England. St. Margaret was her 26th great-grandmother and St. Edward was her 27th great granduncle.

When the Pope and the Queen stand together, it will be an image of the last generation that did not mock the concept of heroic faith, hope, and love. They are the same age and lived through the Second World War which shattered the narcissist’s mirror. The self-absorbed and self-indulged baby-boomers of the media seem deeply to resent that, but their self-reflection now has lots of cracks and this will become evident in Holyrood Palace when we watch a man and a woman who have seen more of life than most people who have ever lived.

Right now we are in that crepuscule time of day when Newman’s “busy world is hushed, and the fever of life is over” and the truth starts to kick in. The largely manufactured hysteria of the last months and weeks is now squeezing into a final few hours, and the prospect is certain: if Satan has been this angry, something very good and holy is about to happen.

The cause of the apoplexy was the Archbishop’s imputation of bigotry to the newspaper. His charge was not self-indulgent whining. He did not have to go back farther than a couple of weeks for examples. First, in reporting widespread child abuse in Brooklyn’s community of Orthodox Jews, there was not the “selective outrage” which animates the paper against criminous Catholic clerics, whose numbers are in fact proportionally much smaller than other religious and professional groups .

Then there was the sensational front-page publicity of a paternity suit involving a Franciscan friar, going back twenty-five years, and getting more space than the war in Afghanistan and genocide in Sudan. Headlines also claimed that the Pope was seeking to “lure” Anglicans into his fold, when in fact he was responding to a petition. Then a columnist invoked the Inquisition, portrayed the theology of priesthood as neurotic sexism, and even mocked the Pope’s haberdashery. The Archbishop said that her prejudice, “while maybe appropriate for the Know-Nothing newspaper of the 1850’s, the Menace, has no place in a major publication today.” While a free press is free to criticize, said the Archbishop, such criticism should be “fair, rational, and accurate.”

Hostility raised to such a pitch that journalistic standards are abandoned, is provoked by an awareness that the Catholic Church continues to be the substantial voice for classical moral standards and supernatural confidence amid the noise of a disintegrating behaviorist culture. A tabloid is still a tabloid even if its editors dress in tweeds. Churchill said, “No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism.” Not to worry. Christ promised that the gates of Hell will not prevail against his Church. He did not include The New York Times, 30% of whose work force has been laid off in the last year and a half.