LONDON (CNS) A prominent gay rights activist has criticised plans to dig up the body of a 19th-century cardinal whose cause for sainthood is expected to soon progress to beatification. Peter Tatchell of the homosexual lobby group Outrage said the exhumation of the body of Cardinal John Henry Newman would be an "act of grave-robbing, sacrilege and desecration."
Tatchell has claimed repeatedly that the cardinal’s 30-year friendship with Father Ambrose St. John, with whom he lived, suggests he was a celibate homosexual.
He said the exhumation was "contrary to (Cardinal) Newman’s own repeatedly expressed wishes to remain buried in the same grave as the man he loved."
"They have remained buried side by side for over 100 years since (Cardinal) Newman’s death in 1890," he said in an Aug. 29 statement.
"Allowing the Catholic Church to override (Cardinal) Newman’s explicit instructions to his executors is truly shameful," he said. "The pope does not have the right to violate the cardinal’s wishes."
Permission for the exhumation was granted in early August by Britain’s Ministry of Justice.
The date of the exhumation has been kept secret but is expected to be in the fall. The body will be transferred from a cemetery on the outskirts of Birmingham, England, to a marble sarcophagus in the city’s oratory church, where it can be venerated more easily by pilgrims.
Father Paul Chavasse, provost of the Birmingham Oratory and postulator of Cardinal Newman’s cause, said he believed that the cardinal would have accepted the will of the Vatican that his body be moved elsewhere.
"As a great man of the church and devoted to the saints himself, Cardinal Newman would have been the first to insist on obeying a request of the Holy See and the last to insist that his own personal wishes be regarded as immutable," Father Chavasse said in a statement.
