How odd of God to decide that Desmond Connell should receive his zucchetto on the bicentenary of the birth of John Henry, Cardinal Newman. But it gives the day a meteorological cachet, since Newman liked to use the weather to illustrate his points.
Newman was born in London on February 21st, 1801. He went up, as they say, to Oxford, taking Church of England orders in 1828. After many philosophical and theological vicissitudes, he was received into the Church of Rome in 1845 and was ordained a priest.
Newman spent time in Dublin as rector of the Catholic University, writing The Idea of IT]a University, a work of incisive thought, beautifully expressed, outlining his views on the aims of education. In 1879 his long and often controversial labours for the church were recognised, and he was made a cardinal. He died in 1890.
To judge from his poem Seeds in the Air, Newman had strange ideas about the composition of the atmosphere:
Bright thoughts are roaming
Unseen in the air;
Like comets, their coming
Is sudden and rare.
They strike, and they enter,
And light up the brain,
Which thrills to its centre
With rapturous pain.
But this was not the future cardinal's only adventure into meteorological allusion. In Ap- ologia Pro Vita Sua, for example, encouraged by the multitude of believers who seemed to endorse his ideals with almost embarrassing enthusiasm, he found a hydrological metaphor by way of explanation: "They who now blame the impetuosity of the current, should rather turn their animadversions upon those who have dammed up a majestic river, till it had become a flood."
Again in Apologia, rebutting the suggestion that persuasive texts alone had prompted his conversion, he declares: "For myself, it was not logic that carried me on; one might as well say that the quicksilver in the barometer changes the weather."
Noting signs of the possible imminent appearance of the Antichrist, Newman likens them in one of his sermons to "a cloud in the sky which warns us about the weather: it is no sure proof of what is to be, but we think it prudent to keep our eye upon it."
And in yet another sermon, he puts the future of the church in England nicely in meteorological perspective: "Have we any right to take it strange, if, in this English land, the springtime of the church should turn out to be an English spring, an uncertain, anxious time of hope and fear, of joy and suffering - of bright promise and budding hopes, yet withal, of keen blasts, and cold showers, and sudden storms?"