THOUSANDS of Catholics from England and Wales are expected to travel to Rome for the canonisation of John Henry Newman this weekend, when he will become the first English saint of modern times.

Over the past fifty years, hundreds of St Mark’s West Essex Catholic School students have been members of the form class Newman, named after the famous Cardinal.

John Henry Newman was born in London 1801.

He studied at Trinity College, Oxford, going on to become an Anglican priest and a leading theologian. Newman was a founder of the Oxford Movement, set up to revitalise the Church of England, before his controversial conversion to Catholicism in 1845.

Newman went on to establish a congregation called the Birmingham Oratory and was appointed the first rector of the institution that would become University College Dublin. Late in Newman’s life, Pope Leo XIII made him a cardinal. Newman died in Birmingham in 1890. His remains lie in a closed sarcophagus at the Oratory.

“Newman is very well known in the Church as a theologian, a teacher and an educationalist,” said Father Francis Gavin, from the Birmingham Oratory. “But he was also a priest and a pastor. He visited the sick, the imprisoned, and those human qualities of care and friendship are as relevant now as they were in his own time.”