Cardinal Newman isn't in his tomb, and that's okay

This editoral published in the UK Times ("Please - enough of this ghoulish sideshow") is quite a handful.

First, let's separate the facts from the anti-Catholic comments (which requires a editing scalpel):

On Saturday [Church officials] confirmed that since the [Cardinal Neman] never had a lead-lined coffin, he is all gone. “Brass, wooden and cloth artefacts” were recovered, but “there were no remains of the body... in the view of medical professionals in attendance, burial in a wooden coffin in a very damp site makes this kind of total decomposition unsurprising.”

Regular AmP readers will remember that I've been covering the efforts (and resistance) to exhuming Cardinal Newman's body, an ordinary part of the Catholic Church's canonization process.

As for Libby Purves' vitriolic commentary, I could go line-by-line on it, writes hundreds of words that most people won't bother to spend the time reading, or I could jump right to the heart of the matter:

For all her pretense of erudition, Ms. Purves completely misses the point when she says:

"The Church's weird horror of fleshly things (unmarried or contracepted sex, gay love) is nastily counterpointed by its affection for cadavers."

Actually, it is the radical Christian respect of the fleshly that causes us to both hold ourselves to a high standard of sexual purity (see: the writings of St. Paul, the unbroken teaching of the Church) and to simultaneously respect the dignity of the human body even in death (see: relics, belief in bodily resurrection, adoration of the human nature hypostatically united to the divine nature in the person of Jesus Christ).

Her second major mistep, the subtitle to her article:

"The creepy attempt to exhume the remains of Cardinal Newman will drive people away from the Church"

That's certainly odd coming from someone who claims she was a "genuinely devout Catholic schoolchild" who "hated this stuff, and ... hates it more now." I'm sorry that she is repulsed by the Church's veneration of a holy person's body. I'm sorry she doesn't realize that same respect undergirds why Catholics attempt to remain pure in this life as well.

But don't say you're terrified the Church might lose members over it. Try to understand it first.

Update: BBC World News if you're intrigued by the actual story.