The most historic engagement of Pope Benedict XVI’s visit to Britain later this month is not expected to be any of his addresses or papal masses.He will be visiting Birmingham where he will beatify – the first step towards being made a saint – Cardinal John Henry Newman, the 19th Century English clergyman of both the Church of England and the Roman Catholic Church.
Newman was not, as has been suggested, the grandfather of modernism. But he certainly was a powerful intellectual influence on the Second Vatican Council, when Pope John XXIII, elected in 1958, led the way for the Catholic Church to be more receptive to new ideas.
Newman was born in London on February 21, 1801, during the Napoleonic Wars. He was one of six children, three brothers and three sisters. His father was a banker, though the bank was temporarily insolvent in 1819, during the post-Waterloo recession.
Newman helped to pay for his own education by winning a £60 scholarship.
His academic career took him to Trinity College, Oxford, where he achieved only a third-class degree, but he went on to gain a fellowship at Oriel College and was subsequently ordained as a clergyman of the Church of England.
As a young man, Newman was an Orthodox Anglican. He became the intellectual leader of the Catholic wing of the Church of England.
By 1840 it had become apparent to him, and to his family, that his real belief had shifted from Anglo-Catholic to a Roman Catholic commitment.
The letter survives in which he told his married sister of his final decision to join the Roman Catholic Church.
‘Rev. J. H. Newman to Mrs T. Mozley, Littlemore, October 8th, 1845. My dear Jemima – I must tell you what will pain you greatly, but I will make it as short as you would wish me to do.
'This night father Dominic, the Passionist, sleeps here. He does not know of my intention, but I shall ask him to receive me into what I believe to be the One Fold of the Redeemer. This will not go until all is over. Ever your affectionately, John H Newman.’
Much of the story of Newman’s life can still seem quite close to us. In 1845, Britain was in the early years of Queen Victoria’s reign; The Great Exhibition was held in the specially constructed Crystal Palace in 1851; Darwin published On The Origin Of Species in 1859.
These decades were a period of radical change. Newman’s decision to become a Roman Catholic had as great an impact on the public mind as Darwin’s doctrine
of evolution.
Like Darwin, Newman had a clear and beautiful prose style. Neither man valued the style as such; each valued the substance. Newman’s 1864 Apologia Pro Vita Sua – A Defence Of One’s Life – is one of the greatest autobiographies in English literature.
Newman was a profound and penetrating preacher. One passage often provided great comfort for the bereaved.
It comes from a sermon he preached in 1834, more than a decade before he joined Rome: ‘May He support us all the day long, till the shades 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 the last.’
Newman was also a poet of distinction. Perhaps his best known poem is the hymn Lead, Kindly Light which, again, has given special comfort to the bereaved.
One might have hoped that Newman’s transfer of allegiance would have been followed by a long period of constructive work. In fact, for many years, the Church of Rome did not know what to make of him.
He was offered a bishopric, but the offer was withdrawn. He was asked to go back to Oxford, but that was blocked; he was appointed head of a new university in Dublin, but his work there was also prevented.
It was only late in his life that the Catholic Church realised the treasure Newman was, and Oxford – a university he loved – recognised the full value of the man it had lost.
Trinity College persuaded him to become an honorary fellow. Not long after, in 1879, that good Pope Leo XIII, who had had his own problems with the government
of the Roman Catholic Church, elevated Newman to the College of Cardinals.
When Newman received the Pope’s message, he was so touched that he shed tears and exclaimed that the cloud was lifted from him for ever.
Newman was a controversialist, but he was never a party man; indeed he once said ‘it is no new thing with me to feel little sympathy with parties or extreme opinion of any kind’.
In fact, though he moved from one Church to another, his career has provided an intellectual middle way that has moved the two closer to each other.
Like Newman, if for different reasons, Pope Benedict XVI himself has been exposed to criticism. Yet he, like Leo XIII, another essentially gentle Pope, has recognised the heroic virtue of Cardinal Newman’s life.
Newman believed one has to follow one’s own conscience to establish the truth.
To some degree, the majority of devout Anglicans and English Catholics have been influenced by Newman.
He still seems most relevant to the 21st Century. He was a man of the highest intellectual capacity and the highest integrity.
If one looks for another English Catholic of his calibre, it would be Thomas More. Both men put the truth first. More had the destiny of a martyr, but Newman equally stood by his own conscience. That is what makes a hero or a saint.
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