2 November 2025

In 2009, Mary-Catherine and I visited Oxford to attend a concert where our younger son was performing. We visited the University Church of St. Mary the Virgin. It was very moving to see John Henry Newman’s pulpit which had been installed in the church the year before his induction.

When he climbed these pulpit steps to preach to a packed church, I don’t suppose that Church of England vicar ever thought he would become a cardinal, let alone a saint in the Roman Catholic Church. Many followed him up these pulpit steps without receiving such honours.

Among them was one of his twentieth century successors. He exercised a very effective ministry. In 1939, he invited a group of German Lutheran refugees to worship in St. Mary the Virgin. Some of them were of Jewish origin fleeing from Nazi persecution. It was an act of generosity and grace, a ministry of reconciliation and healing. It has been a lasting ministry for the Lutherans were still worshipping there.

In 1942, Newman’s twentieth century successor chaired a meeting in the parish hall. He and several others were very concerned about the plight of starving children in occupied Greece.  They decided to send relief to that troubled corner of a war torn world. Their actions were compassionate, effective and lasting. For it continued beyond  the war.

Unlike his honoured and sainted predecessor, Canon TR Milford will never be canonised for his humanitarian work. Nevertheless, he was a saint as St. Paul defines it. For the Oxford Committee for Famine Relief, which he chaired so effectively over eighty years ago, eventually became an enormous force for good in its more familiar guise, Oxfam.

But when we walk into an Oxfam shop, we never recall his name. It has rightly disappeared into the blessed obscurity of all the saints who say with St. Paul, ‘It is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me.’ (Galatians 2;20)