Prince Charles and several British MPs will join thousands of pilgrims in St Peter’s Square on Sunday for the canonisation of Cardinal John Henry Newman, a theologian and scholar regarded as one of the most influential figures of Victorian Britain.

Newman, who was a Church of England priest before converting to Catholicism in 1845, is the first Briton to be made a saint since 1976.

“Newman is seen as the real bridge between Anglican and Catholic traditions,” Chris Patten, the former Conservative party chairman and current chancellor of Oxford University, told the Observer in Vatican City yesterday. “He was also one of the greatest writers of prose in our history. He’s a very great Englishman, and it’s admirable that he’s being canonised.”

In an article in the Times on 12 October, Prince Charles wrote that Newman’s example was needed now more than ever. “He could advocate without accusation, could disagree without disrespect and perhaps most of all could see differences as places of encounter rather than exclusion.”

Newman was beatified by Pope Benedict XV, who declared that an American deacon’s recovery from a serious spine condition was due to Newman’s intercession. Pope Francis then credited Newman with a second miracle – the healing of a pregnant American woman with a life-threatening illness – which paved the way for his canonisation.

At a conference on Newman’s life held in Vatican City, Reverend Benjamin King, associate professor of church history at Sewanee University in Tennessee, said Newman’s first trip to Italy, in 1833, had been significant. He wrote home that Rome was “the most wonderful place on Earth”, and it was after this that he felt called to the Oxford Movement, which sought to renew the Church of England by returning it to its Catholic sources. On converting to Catholicism, he instructed bishops to “listen to the laity”, King added.

Newman, born in London in 1801, was a powerful preacher whose sermons could change lives. Some 15,000 people lined the streets for his funeral in Birmingham in 1890. “He wasn’t just a thinker; he was a man of action,” said Dr Paul Shrimpton of Magdalen College, Oxford, and author of a 2014 book on Newman’s ideas, The Making of Men.

Four women will also be made saints on Sunday, including Irmã Dulce Pontes, who will be Brazil’s first female saint.