As the leading educator of 19th century England he established schools, including a major university. His care for the poor led him to serve slum dwellers as well. He did so as a Catholic priest. Newman's life work blessed areas of education, ministry, and charity, the areas that serve as beneficiaries of our annual diocesan appeal. Learn more about this amazing man — his lfe and ministry — and it will be clear why he was chosen to serve as our patron.
Blessed John Henry Newman — An Overview
Atop a stagecoach on a cold, wet night in October 1845, rode two passengers through the West Midlands. Their only protection was their soaking cloaks. They clung desperately to their bench seats fearful they might be hurled onto the road.
Finally, they arrived at Littlemore, a village but a few miles outside Oxford. John Henry Newman, for some years the Anglican Vicar of St. Mary the Virgin Church in Oxford (the university church and England's most prestigious pulpit), had responsibility for overseeing the small Anglican parish there as well.
Three years earlier the village had also become the home of 'The College,' just around the corner from the church, fashioned out of some stables. Newman founded it as a retreat for himself and friends. Together, a small group of those committed to study, prayer and community life, were moving closer to the Catholic Church. Over time they sought to restore their links with the Catholic past, in both doctrine and authority.
As the night visitors were warmed by the fire Newman entered their room. He welcomed them, knelt and asked Father Dominic Barberi, "Would you hear my confession and receive me into the Roman Catholic Church?" It was for this very reason Barberi had come! He had heard that Newman, whom he considered "the pope of the Anglican Church," now desired union with Rome.
Two years prior, at age 42, Newman had resigned the two esteemed positions that he held: that of Oxford don, which had been his life-long dream, and that of Vicar of St. Mary's. His attraction to Catholicism was the reason for the withdrawals. The university authorities, and those of the country's established church as well, were intent on driving him out of Oxford. His leadership of 'the Oxford Movement' and his authorship of most of its Tracts, including the controversial Tract 90, which called for major reform and renewal within Anglicanism, set in motion a national crisis addressed even in Parliament.
Newman's conversion to Catholicism marked the end of a long, painful passage. But his conscience had demanded it. Following the light of conscience, an informed conscience guided by the Holy Spirit and the teachings of the Church, was something he had taken seriously since early life. He would write much about the role of conscience in the years that lay ahead.
The search for truth, and making an informed decision for Christ, were the two great threads that characterized his life.
The son of a prosperous London banker, he had experienced a significant conversion to evangelical piety at fifteen. At the same age he committed himself to a life of celibacy, a remarkable decision for one so young. Astounding, too, was his age on entering Oxford's Trinity College - again fifteen - a full two years before any of his fellow students.
His spiritual life had not been easy. Intellectual curiosity left him confused. As a teenager he read the atheistic writers of his day, finding them both attractive and repulsive. He was shaken.
A clergyman offered him guidance and recommended that he read Thomas Scott's The Force of Truth, which emphasized the pursuit of religious truth. This helped. Another book he absorbed was Milner's Church History, which introduced him to the ancient Christian Church, something he would come to love and embrace throughout his life.
We should not overlook the fact that this was a teenager doing this!
Newman would relentlessly pursue truth, at whatever cost. He was convinced it was the only way he could ultimately find happiness. He would look unflinchingly to history to guide him in his search for truth.
Throughout life, he would also seek God in prayer.
In 1833, while voyaging from Sicily to Italy, following a severe illness, he would compose one of his two best-remembered poems, The Pillar of the Cloud. Often sung, and known better as Lead, Kindly Light, these are words we too can pray, especially in difficult moments...
"Lead, Kindly Light,
Amid the encircling gloom,
Lead thou me on!
The night is dark,
And I am far from home -
Lead thou me on!
Keep thou my feet,
I do not ask to see
The distant scene, - one step enough for me."
Catholic and Oratorian
Catholic emancipation came to England in 1829 after decades of fierce debate. In Parliament there was growing fear of violence should these freedoms not be granted. Restrictions were lifted on both English and Irish Catholics even though in Ireland new taxes were imposed on voters, substantially decreasing the number of Catholics who could vote.
In 1850 the Catholic hierarchy was restored in England, three centuries after the catastrophic onset of the Reformation, the repudiation of the episcopate and the dissolution of the monasteries.
With new freedoms English Catholics could build churches again. Augustus W. Pugin, the celebrated architect, himself a convert to Catholicism, built many of them and they remain among Britain's most beautiful churches.
1845 launched John Henry Newman's Catholic years.
Newman had seen great strife in his late Anglican period. Old friendships from 'the Oxford Movement' and within the Anglican Church had eroded. No longer could he communicate freely with Anglo-Catholic leaders, men like John Keble and Edward Pusey, one-time allies. Parliament thought him dangerous. For many he was persona non grata.
Though he always rejoiced in being Catholic, these years were also filled with challenges and disappointments. It is the greatest tribute to the man that he always persevered in the faith.
Newman was not blind to the human weaknesses of those in clerical office or in colleagues but they never dimmed his love for the Church. He learned well how to distinguish between what was human and what divine. From this we can all learn!
Following his reception into the Church he came under the influence of Bishop Nicholas Wiseman (later the first Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster) who encouraged him to become a Catholic priest. He prepared at Rome's Propaganda Fide seminary and was ordained on May 30, 1847.
For some time he considered entrance into one of the Church's religious orders, the Jesuits, the Dominicans or the Benedictines. While in Italy, however, he was drawn to the Oratorians, founded by the ever-jubilant St. Philip Neri in 1575. Their lifestyle was similar to that of Littlemore.
Oratorians lived permanently in a community of their choice, took only a vow of fraternal charity, continued a life of study, and served the laity in parishes. Pope Pius IX authorized the establishment of the first Oratory in England, in Birmingham, and appointed Newman its leader. His close friend, Ambrose St. John, joined him.
A year after his ordination he wrote a letter to the mother of his deceased friend and Oriel College colleague, Hurrell Froude. "...the Hand of God is most wonderfully over me that I am full of blessings and privileges, that I never have had even the temptation for an instant to feel a misgiving about the great step I took in 1845."
As an Oratorian, Newman was never idle. Irish Catholic immigrants flooded Birmingham in search of work. He heard confessions, preached and visited the sick. As superior he convened community meetings and gave spiritual talks. He wrote and lectured widely.
In 1851 he was asked to establish and serve as the first rector of the Catholic University of Ireland. In six years he made fifty-six exhausting trips from Birmingham to Dublin, across the turbulent Irish Sea, but never had the full support of the Irish bishops, who were somewhat suspicious of an English rector. Thus, the university's future was flawed from inception and eventually failed.
Nevertheless, one fruit of his work there resulted in the publication of his lectures on education. That widely read classic is The Idea of a University.
Following the restoration of the hierarchy, Cardinal Wiseman asked Newman to preach the sermon for the occasion. The masterful piece is known as 'The Second Spring,' another huge success.
In 1864 the novelist Charles Kingsley publically denounced Newman, calling him dishonest. He responded with another of his time-honored writings, Apologia Pro Vita Sua, a penetrating analysis of his conversion to Catholicism on a plane with St. Augustine's Confessions. It furthered Newman's reputation.
Other celebrated writings of this period were his Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent (1870), a complex work on the nature of faith, and A Letter to the Duke of Norfolk (1875), in which he adroitly addressed the issues of papal infallibility and the role of conscience.
Successes, Disappointments and the Red Hat
Father John Henry Newman experienced both disappointments and triumphs in his ministry. His patience was tested but his spirit generally remained buoyant. This was one reason Cardinal Wiseman, the Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster, called on him to give the sermon on the occasion of the First Provincial Synod following the restoration of the hierarchy. Now called 'The Second Spring' sermon, it was offered on July 13, 1852 and was a tour de force.
For his biblical text, Newman selected the well-known passage from the Song of Solomon, "Arise, make haste, my love, my dove, my beautiful one, and come. For the winter is now past, the rain is over and gone. The flowers have appeared in our land." (Sg. 2: 10-12)
Newman eloquently contrasted nature's seasons with those in the history of the English Catholic Church. "The English Church was, and the English Church was not, and the English Church is once again. It is the coming in of a Second Spring; it is a restoration in the moral world, such as that which yearly takes place in the physical."
He chronicled the great English saints, the martyrs, the twenty episcopal sees of its illustrious past and the will of its faithful laity and how all this was "blotted out." He paid homage to the recusants who remained true to the "Old Religion, moving silently and sorrowfully about, as memorials of what had been." And, he took such joy in the new growth of Catholicism, calling its resurrection "a different sort of wonder, in the order of grace...The world grows old, but the Church is ever young."
Where Wiseman was supportive, his successor, Cardinal Henry Manning, himself once an Anglo-Catholic (who in 1851 converted to Catholicism), was suspicious.
Of their many disagreements, the most substantive came with the doctrine on papal infallibility at the First Vatican Council. While Newman believed in the infallibility of the pope in matters of faith and doctrine he didn't think the timing was right for its definition. Once defined by the Conciliar Fathers in 1870, however, he defended it. Still, the ultramontane Manning was not pleased.
Earlier, there were disagreements within the Oratorians. Father Frederick Faber joined the community in the 1840s, alongside Newman. Faber, while acknowledging Newman as his superior, relentlessly and prematurely pressured Newman to establish another new Oratory, this time in London. Newman eventually capitulated and this gave rise to Brompton Oratory but not without serious growing pains. Faber never possessed Newman's sensitivity and was harsh with community members. The years tested their relationship.
In spite of these conflicts and others the newly elected Pope Leo XIII named Newman a cardinal in 1879. This is exceedingly rare for one not a bishop. (In 2001 an American Jesuit, Father Avery Dulles, was named a cardinal.) The news was widely acclaimed by Catholics and Protestants and stood as a major affirmation of Newman's prodigious efforts in promoting the Church. He was even welcomed back to Oxford as a hero!
Newman accepted the pope's honor. Though he had a bad cold on this final journey to Rome he gave the celebrated Biglietto Speech. Having acknowledged with gratitude the surprise of his elevation, he restated his opposition to "liberalism in religion," a concern which more than forty years earlier had launched the Oxford Movement.
A teaching that "is gaining substance and force daily," he said, is that "one creed is as good as another." "It is inconsistent with any recognition of any religion as true. It teaches that all are to be tolerated, for all are matters of opinion." In this liberal view "revealed religion is but a sentiment and a taste," "not an objective fact, not miraculous," and "is the right of each individual to make it say just what strikes his fancy."
The new cardinal concluded by saying that "Providence would rescue and save His elect inheritance" and that the Church should see to its proper duties "in confidence and peace."
Newman was now seventy-eight. We know he thought his life was nearing its end. To some degree, even with the falls, broken ribs and growing weakness, he would continue his routine and live eleven more years.
Newman's Master Works
Great literature is sometimes dismissed or simply forgotten while an author is alive. A literary work, indeed an entire corpus, may resurface later, however, and often through the promptings and insights of another.
Hard as it is to imagine now, nonetheless true, it was G.K. Chesterton's 1906 classic, Charles Dickens: A Critical Study, which rejuvenated the creator of characters so memorable as Jacob Marley, Wilkins Micawber, 'Artful Dodger,' and Wackford Squeers. Already dead thirty-six years, Dickens was largely forgotten and unread.
Some authors have died unknown or broke or both, thinking themselves failures. Moby Dick's Herman Melville was one.
For still others the attempt to publish was never undertaken seriously. Only posthumously did the poets Emily Dickinson and Gerard Manley Hopkins spring to life.
The experience of John Henry Newman was different. An acknowledged genius in the 19th century, his popularity and importance, like a venerable wine, have only matured. Six score after his death he is read now more than ever. His position in English literature, in original thought, and in religion is established. In the 21st century a number of his works remain on college readings lists. Following his beatification on September 19th the size of his reading public will likely take another leap.
There is a simplicity and directness in Newman's writing which make him intelligible to all. Attempts to imitate all the great authors he read while a student, including the classical authors of antiquity, helped him forge his own style in which he could project humility, wonder, irony, scorn and love. He labored over his style (and over a high desk at which he wrote while standing!) and once penned his (eventual) biographer, Wilfrid Ward, "the composition of a volume is like a gestation and child-birth."
From his experience teaching at Oxford he had an innate sense of what a great place of learning should be and a series of lectures produced The Idea of A University (1853). The university he was asked to form in Dublin, under the auspices of the bishops of Ireland, was to educate Catholics for life in the real world but it was not intended to be a seminary and would not shut out ideas considered suspect. To isolate the student from ideas would be to assure his unpreparedness for the world.
"Cut out from your class books all broad manifestations of the natural man...and you have refused him the masters of human thought who would have in some sense educated him," he wrote. It was an expression of his Christian humanism. As he was set against those who tried to disprove God he was also opposed to the religious minds of those "prejudiced against the discoveries of science." The free discussion of ideas was as critical for science as it was for religion.
Liberal education, for which he was the great proponent, was to make gentlemen. "It is well to have a cultivated intellect, a delicate taste, a candid, equitable, dispassionate mind..."
If there is a single book which consolidates his intellectual and writing abilities it is Apologia Pro Vita Sua (1864). The immediate reason for its composition was an attack upon him by Charles Kingsley, who questioned the sincerity of his faith. The book went well beyond a personal defense and became a sumptuous exposition of his conversion to Catholicism.
"I have been in perfect peace and contentment. I never have had one doubt. I was not conscious to myself, on my conversion, of any difference of thought or of temper from what I had before. I was not conscious of former faith in the fundamental truths of revelation, or of more self-command; I had not more fervour; but it was like coming into port after a rough sea; and my happiness on that score remains to this day without interruption."
A Grammar of Assent (1870) is a work of philosophy, psychology and literature, created to deal with the relationship of faith and reason. Perhaps his most challenging book, Newman held that belief is incapable of proof. Nevertheless, it is entirely rational. He introduces to theology the concept of our 'illative sense,' the accumulation of "probabilities...too fine to avail separately, too subtle and circuitous to be convertible into syllogisms." The "living mind" of an individual determines how one believes.
Novelist, Poet and Man of Prayer
In addition to his major theological works, John Henry Newman was also a novelist and minor poet.
Father Ian Ker, Catholic pastor and Oxford don, suggests acquainting oneself with Newman "by reading one of his novels." He should know. He has authored more than twenty books on Newman. (Ker's biography of G.K. Chesterton is to be published by Oxford University Press in April and will treat Chesterton's 1930 visit to the College of the Holy Cross.)
Callista (1855) and Loss and Gain (1848) are the great Newman novels.
Callista deals with how Catholics should endure persecution. The heroine is caught in the clash between pagan orthodoxy and Christianity in the Church of the 3rd century. Her sufferings, torture and martyrdom are vividly on display, especially for the Victorian period. The happy ending focuses on her entry into heaven.
Loss and Gain centers on the fictional Charles Reding, a young hero, whose career is followed through the Anglican establishment of Oxford. He wrestles with the tenets of Anglicanism and his religious beliefs are disturbed. He writes, "I cannot make out their doctrine about faith, about the sacraments, about predestination, about the Church, about the inspiration of Scripture."
Returning to Oxford after an absence, Reding excoriates the leaders of the Colleges, at that time clergy all. "Here are the ministers of Christ with large incomes, living in finely furnished houses, with wives and families, and stately butlers and servants in livery, giving dinners all in the best style, condescending and gracious, waving their hands and mincing their words as if they were the cream of the earth, but without saying anything to make them clergymen but a black coat and a white tie."
Reding's religious convictions lead him into the Catholic Church, converted by a Passionist priest. There is much argument and introspection and humor in this largely autobiographical novel.
It is often said that Sir Edward Elgar's greatest composition was his musical setting of Newman's magnificient poem, The Dream of Gerontius, a staple of British choral repertoire. Elgar, who died in 1934, hailed from England's Worcester.
Dream is the story of Gerontius' progress from death bed to purgatory. At first he thinks he might sink "into that shapeless, scopeless, blank abyss, that utter nothingness, of which I came." Through the sacraments as well as the prayer of friends he passes into the state of grace. Some of its lyrics survive in a well-known English hymn:
Praise to the Holiest in the height,
And in the depth be praise;
In all His words most wonderful;
Most sure in all His ways!
Newman's prayer life was simple. Like every Christian he found prayer to be a challenge. But he knew he must persist. He often used rather ordinary prayers, printed on the backs of cards, much as anyone might pick up a holy card and pray from it.
Some weeks ago I offered Mass at the small altar in his bedroom at the Birmingham Oratory and I used his chalice. Not five feet wide the chapel was fashioned by friends when he became a cardinal. His room remains exactly as it was on the day he died in 1890. On the wall adjacent the altar are pinned a number of aging memorial cards printed for his friends. These he often used to pray from, as heart spoke to heart.
But Newman penned beautiful and majestic prayers as well. A favorite is one in which he implored God's support. The words have been prayed at many a funeral.
May He support us all the day long,
till the shadows lengthen,
and the evening comes,
and the busy world is hushed,
and the fever of life is over,
and our work is done.
Then in His mercy,
may He give us a safe lodging,
and a holy rest, and peace at last.
Such grace!
Blessed John Henry Newman, pray for us!