Religion: Inglesi

Their soutanes gaily flapping and their smooth-shaven faces gleaming, virtually all the Catholic bishops and archbishops of the British Isles, to say nothing of hordes of British priests, journeyed last week to Vatican City. Not in years of Cook’s Tours had the Romans seen so many Inglesi at one time—in all, 7,000 pilgrims, at whose head was no less a personage than Most Rev. Arthur Hinsley, 70, the son of a Yorkshire joiner, who last month succeeded the late Francis Cardinal Bourne as Archbishop of Westminster and Primate of 2,200,000 British Catholics. What brought Archbishop Hinsley and his flock to Rome was the impending canonization of Sir Thomas More and John Cardinal Fisher, first Englishmen in years to attain to sainthood (TIME, May 13).

Because More was a lawyer, his canonization took place in St. Peter’s last Sunday on the feast of the patron of lawyers, St. Ives.* By happy coincidence it was also the feast of St. Dunstan, chancellor, Archbishop of Canterbury and politician (died 988). In the U. S., Catholics celebrated the occasion with special masses and meetings, including one in Manhattan’s St. Patrick’s Cathedral attended by many a judge and lawyer. In New Orleans, nine descendants of Sir Thomas More listened to the canonization by radio, envious of a tenth, Bernard Gonzales Carbajal, merchant and real estate operator, who took himself and wife to Rome, sat importantly in a reserved seat in St. Peter’s, heard Pope Pius XI pronounce his ancestor and Cardinal Fisher saints and solemnly invite all England to ‘”return” to the Church of Rome.

To Archbishop Kinsley, who walked into St. Peter’s directly behind the Pope and at the head of a long procession of ecclesiastics, and who later joined with other prelates in symbolically presenting the Pope bread, wine, water and cages of birds, the Holy Father’s words were weighty with command. “We desire,” said Pius XI to his 40,000 listeners, “that in your ardent prayers . . . you ask of the Lord that which is so dear to our heart, namely, that England, in the words of St. Paul, ‘meditating the happy consummation that crowned the lives’ of these two martyrs, may ‘follow them in their faith’ and return to the Father’s house ‘in unity of faith and of knowledge of the Son of God.’

“Let those who are still separated from us consider attentively the ancient glories of their church, which were at once the reflection and the increment of the glories of the Church of Rome. Let them consider, moreover, and remember that this Apostolic See has been waiting for them so long and so anxiously not as coming to a strange dwelling place but as finally returning to the paternal home.”

*Of whom it was said: Sanctus Ivo erat Brito, Advocatus et non latro, Res miranda populo—”St. Ives was a Breton, lawyer and no brigand, a thing amazing to the people.”