Bl. Cardinal Newman by John Murphy
John Henry Cardinal Newman, patron of Catholic novelists
On September 19, 2010, during his historic visit to the UK, Pope Benedict XVI will beatify John Henry Cardinal Newman (1801-1890) at Rednal in the Archdiocese of Birmingham.
Raised in a Protestant home, Newman experienced an interior conversion as a youth and committed his life to the service of God. A brilliant scholar at Oxford University, he was at the heart of the so-called “Oxford Movement” in the 1830′s and 1840′s, which tried to find a “Via Media” between Protestantism and the historical Catholicism of the English Church. Paradoxically, it was Newman’s studies in the Ancient Church Fathers with a view to supporting the Via Media that he underwent a protracted crisis of faith and conscience and a second conversion, this time leading him, in 1845, into the Roman Catholic Church.
This conversion came at great personal cost. Because of England’s long-standing anti-Catholicism, Newman was forced to leave his beloved home in Oxford University, lost many friends who could not understand this conversion. Many Protestants believed he had been a secret (perhaps Jesuit) Catholic all along, sent by Rome to undermine the Anglican Church.
Recognized as one of the greatest minds of the nineteenth century, he attended a seminary in Rome with youth half his age in order to be ordained a Catholic priest, only to discover, when he returned to England, that he was regarded with some suspicion both by the old Catholic families of his native land and by other converts out of the Oxford movement who felt Newman’s style was insufficiently aggressive vis-a-vis Protestantism. Founding a congregation of English Oratorians in Birmingham, Newman dedicated himself to apostolic labor and largely disappeared from public view.
That is, until 1864, when a well known Protestant apologist named Charles Kingsley, famous for espousing “muscular Christianity”, wrote in a magazine article,
Truth, for its own sake, had never been a virtue with the Roman clergy. Father Newman informs us that it need not, and on the whole ought not to be; that cunning is the weapon which Heaven has given to the saints wherewith to withstand the brute male force of the wicked world which marries and is given in marriage. Whether his notion be doctrinally correct or not, it is at least historically so.
Of course Newman had never said any such thing, and he wrote a letter of protest to the magazine. There began a controversial public exchange, one of the most famous in literary history, which (contrary to Kingsley’s hopes) only served to renew Newman’s influence in English life and thought. It also led Newman, who felt it was time to explain himself more fully to the British public, to publish his spiritual autobiography Apologia Pro Vita Sua, a masterpiece of English (and spiritual) prose. From then on Newman’s was an eloquent public voice for Catholicism in Britain. He was made a Cardinal by Pope Leo XIII in 1879,
Long considered one of the greatest Catholic theologians and apologists of all time (the “father of Vatican II”), Newman was also one of the great English prose stylists of the nineteenth century. Among Newman’s many great works were many hymns, an epic poem (The Dream of Gerontius) and his The Idea of a University, in which he defended the study of literature in Catholic universities at a time when many pious educators regarded works of the imagination as potentially dangerous to the faith and morals of Catholic students. Himself an avid reader of Sir Walter Scott, Newman also wrote two novels, Loss and Gain, a conversion story set in Newman’s beloved Oxford University, and Callista: A Tale of the Third Century, a historical novel set in pagan Rome. This makes Newman the first novelist ever to be beatified, and (with St. Francis de Sales, the patron of Catholic writers) the perfect patron for Catholic novelists.
Please join us in praying for the canonization of Bl. John Henry Cardinal Newman
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