The Pope, though invited by the Queen, is coming to Britain with the keen purpose of beatifying John Henry Newman.It will be a treat for him.
He has been a fan for 65 years, since his days at seminary.
“Newman was not a topic like any other,” the 95-year-old Alfred Läpple, Joseph Ratzinger’s former prefect of studies, remembers of those years. “He was our passion.”
Newman much resembles the Pope’s big hero, St Augustine, the fourth-century theologian. Both had a fascination with God’s place in their own life stories, which from Augustine brought the autobiographical Confessions, and from Newman the Apologia.
Twenty five years ago, Cardinal Ratzinger, as Pope Benedict was then, gave a learned paper in America on Newman. He put him in a trio of champions of conscience with another Englishman, St Thomas More, and Socrates. For them, he argued, conscience was no mere justification for doing what they liked, but an intuition of truth.
Sticking to the truth led More and Socrates to death; for Newman it meant losing friends when he became Victorian England’s most famous convert to Catholicism.
The book in which Newman made the celebrated remark about preferring to “drink to the Pope, if you please, still, to conscience first”, also contains the rule that for any pope, “the championship of the Moral Law and of conscience is his raison d’être”.
His commitment to following truth, wherever it led him, made Newman a saint; and his stature as the leading English theologian of the 19th century attracts Pope Benedict, one of the leading theologians of the past century.
To us in Britain, Newman is most widely known as the author of the hymn Praise to the Holiest in the Height, part of his dramatic poem Gerontius, later set to music by Elgar.
But in his lifetime Newman was a star, like Gladstone, say. Both were repeatedly talking-points in an age of intense newspaper-reading. Newman (1801-90) and Gladstone (1809-98) spanned every decade of the 19th century. Of the two, though, Newman has more living influence today.
His great campaign began in 1833 after closely escaping death from typhoid. He felt “God has still work for me to do” – which turned out to be no less than changing the face of the Church of England. Oxford then being to England what Qom is to the ayatollahs, the theological warfare declared by Newman there became known as the Oxford Movement.
With the brilliant scholar EB Pusey, he used pamphlets as weapons in order, in Pusey’s words, to bring “to the vivid consciousness of members of the Church of England, Catholic truths, taught of old within her”.
They achieved more than they meant, for Newman was propelled by the logic of his arguments into the Catholic Church. He set up a community very like an Oxford college, the Oratory, not in his beloved Oxford but, as circumstances dictated, Birmingham.
Nothing else he attempted in his first 20 years as a Catholic came to anything. A new university in Dublin, editing a journal, even a translation of the Bible, all shrivelled when other people let him down.
By 1863 he was depressed. “This morning, when I woke, the feeling that I was cumbering the ground came on so strongly, that I could not get myself to my shower-bath,” he noted in his journal. “What is the good of living for nothing?”
Suddenly an attack came from Charles Kingsley, the author of that weird tale The Water-Babies, then at his peak as Regius Professor of History at Cambridge. In a magazine he wrote: “Truth for its own sake has never been a virtue of the Roman clergy. Father Newman informs us that it need not, and on the whole ought not, to be.”
This was the shock that galvanised Newman, the “call”. Truth was the whole reason he was stuck in this obscure Birmingham corner and could hardly get himself into the shower. For Kingsley to deny truth in his life was to “poison the wells”.
There was no point simply stating this: he had to write the history of his own mind.
The result was the Apologia, one of the great autobiographies in the English language, and a turning point for Newman. It came out in eight instalments, written on the hoof – literally, since Newman generally stood at a desk.
The effort almost broke him. After publishing five parts, he noted that he had written, on one day, “for 22 hours running”.
He was “constantly in tears, and constantly crying out in distress” at his incisions into his memories and feelings.
Newman’s view of life as a soap opera featuring God and himself guaranteed narrative impetus, as he bounced back from constant reverses.
His style, loved by the Victorians, is not the convolution of a Gibbon, but a clear, compelling language nearer to that of Robert Louis Stevenson.
It was a bestseller, and favourable reviews included those by members the Church of England establishment.
By 1864, it was clear, and not universally welcome, that Newman and his confederates in the Oxford Movement a generation earlier had changed English religion. If there are candles on an altar in an Anglican church, and a cross there too, it is because of the Oxford Movement.
This was no question of pretty trimmings, but of what a church was for. In the 18th century, most saw it as a preaching-house. Holy Communion was said once every three months. Newman and his friends wanted life imbued by the sacraments.
In this he resembled John Wesley a century earlier, for whom frequent Communion was essential to “Methodism”, as outsiders called it. Precisely like Wesley, too, one element gave magnetism to Newman’s sermons at the University Church of St Mary in Oxford. It was not Newman’s oratory, for he read his text quietly. It was his deep appeal to the notion of the call to holiness.
The indwelling of the Holy Spirit, he assured his audience, was a contemporary reality. The Holy Spirit was “a real presence in the soul”.
The consequence was a disturbingly simple challenge. “We dwell in the full light of the Gospel, and the full grace of the Sacraments. We ought to have the holiness of the Apostles.”
Somehow, umbrellas, gaslight, silk dresses, railways, cigars, policemen, coke boilers, Guinness, postmen, trousers, guns and all the other conveniences of modern life had seemed to make apostolic holiness obsolete until Newman whispered it in the ear of a thousand university men.
In his letters, 32 volumes of which have been published, Newman’s friendship and spiritual rapport with women is also clear. But Oxford was a man’s world, a single-sex society, though that did not make it homosexual.
Indeed the word had not been invented in Newman’s liftetime. His choice to be buried in the same grave as his friend at the Birmingham Oratory, Ambrose St John, has encouraged campaigners to claim Newman as a crypto gay.
He wouldn’t have understood. Newman was an exponent of friendship, but being friends didn’t mean going to bed together.
The avalanche that Newman set off in 1830s Oxford swept him into the Catholic Church in 1845. And then, one might have imagined, he would have turned against the errors of his past. But he didn’t.
In the 1860s he republished the eight – extremely popular – volumes of his Anglican sermons, almost unchanged. He showed in practice that it was possible to be English and a Roman Catholic. That did not mean importing Italian vocabulary or second-guessing the eccentric opinions of Pius IX.
Newman was 78, only five years younger than Pope Benedict now, when, to his surprise, he was made a cardinal, putting an end to all the suspicions that his English habits of mind had provoked among Catholic prelates of a foreign outlook.
Pope Benedict is no son of the Tiber, and nor is he the attack-dog that enemies caricatured him as. He is an academic, like Newman.
Like Newman he puts holiness before popularity, which is why he has come to Birmingham to declare him a beatus, a blessed man.