Is a dead gay bisyhpo about to become Britian's newest saint?

Consider this report: "The precise time and details are still a closely guarded secret, but the plans are already well under way. At some stage - possibly before the end of the year - a small party of priests, gravediggers and officials from the Vatican will arrive at the small cemetery at Rednal, near Birmingham, to conduct their sombre business.

There they will make their way to a headstone bearing the Latin inscription 'Ex umbris et imaginibus in veritatem' - 'out of shadows and phantasms into the truth', which marks the resting place of the Venerable John Henry Cardinal Newman, the revered Catholic priest, thinker and writer, who died in 1890. And then they will start digging.

For in a decision that has provoked controversy in the Catholic church and beyond, Cardinal Newman is due to be exhumed and his body moved to a far grander sarcophagus inside Birmingham Oratory as part of the final preparations before the London-born priest is beatified by Pope Benedict - a process that will set him on course to become the first English saint for more than four decades.

By any reckoning, it will be a somewhat macabre process. The coffin itself will not only be disinterred, but opened so that 'relics' from Newman's body, which may be bones from his fingers or fragments of cloth from his priestly vestments, may be taken in order to distribute and display in other Catholic churches. But that's not what's provoking such outrage.

No, what offends many campaigners is that this process of exhumation will take place contrary to the explicit wishes of Newman himself, whose dying wish was to be buried in the simple grave at Rednal - alongside the body of his lifelong friend, Father Ambrose St John.

For more than three decades, the two men were inseparable - living almost as a married couple - in what many now believe to have been a homosexual relationship.

Just how close the two men were can be judged from Newman's statement shortly after Father St John's death in 1875.

He declared: 'I have always thought no bereavement was equal to that of a husband's or a wife's, but I feel it difficult to believe that anyone's sorrow can be greater than mine.'

Subsequently, the Cardinal repeated on no fewer than three occasions his firm desire to be buried with his friend.

He wrote the following just weeks before his death in the summer of 1890. 'I wish, with all my heart, to be buried in Father Ambrose St John's grave... I give this as my last, my imperative will.'"

Buried secrets: Cardinal Newman is set to become Britain's newest saint. First he must be exhumed from the grave he shares with another man - the greatest love of his life @ Daily Mail, UK -