Newman, John Henry

This 19th-century churchman and man of letters, who led the Oxford Movement in the Church of England in the 1830's, converted to Catholicism in 1845 and late in life became a cardinal in the Roman Catholic Church. His eloquent sermons and writings, notably Parochial and Plain Sermons (1834-42), Lectures on the Prophetical Office of the Church (1837), and University Sermons (1843), urged reforms of the Church of England after the pattern of the original "catholic," or universal, church of the first five centuries AD. By 1845 he had come to view the Roman Catholic Church as the true modern development from the original disciples of Jesus.

Newman was born in London in 1801. After undergraduate studies at Trinity College, Oxford, he was made a fellow of Oriel College in 1822, vice principal of Alban Hall in 1825, and vicar of St. Mary's, Oxford, in 1828. Under the influence of John Keble and Richard Hurrell Froude, Newman became a convinced high churchman (supporting the Anglican church's continuation of the ancient Christian tradition, particularly as regards the episcopate, priesthood, and sacraments) and with them he began what became known as the Oxford Movement.

This Movement was started at Oxford in 1833 with the object of stressing the Catholic elements in the English religious tradition and of reforming the Church of England. Newman's active contribution included his editing of the Tracts for the Times and his contributing of 24 tracts among them, as well as his books, especially the Lectures on the Prophetical Office of the Church (1837), the classic statement of the Tractarian doctrine of authority; the University Sermons (1843), similarly classical for the theory of religious belief; and above all his Parochial and Plain Sermons (1834-42), which in their published form took the principles of the movement, in their best expression, into the country at large.

In 1838 and 1839 Newman was beginning to exercise far-reaching influence in the Church of England. His stress upon the dogmatic authority of the church was felt to be a much-needed reemphasis in a new liberal age. He seemed decisively to know what he stood for and where he was going, and in the quality of his personal devotion his followers found a man who practiced what he preached. Moreover, he had the gift of writing sensitive and evocative prose.

Newman's contention that the Church of England represented true catholicity (as against Rome upon the one side and what he termed "the popular Protestants" upon the other) was based on its succession to the ancient and undivided church of the Fathers. From 1834 onward this "middle way" was beginning to be attacked on the ground that it undervalued the Reformation; and when in 1838-39 Newman and Keble published Froude's "Remains", in which the Reformation was violently denounced, moderate men began to suspect their leader. Their worst fears were confirmed in 1841 by Newman's Tract 90, which, in reconciling the Thirty-nine Articles with the teaching of the ancient and undivided church, appeared to some to assert that the articles were not incompatible with the doctrines of the Council of Trent; and Newman's extreme disciple, W.G. Ward, claimed that this was indeed the consequence. Bishop Richard Bagot of Oxford requested that the tracts be suspended; and amid the consequent denunciations Newman increasingly witdrew into isolation, his confidence in himself shattered and his belief in the catholicity of the English church weakening. He moved out of Oxford to his chapel of Littlemore, where he gathered a few of his intimate disciples and established a quasi-monastery.

Newman resigned the parish of St. Mary's, Oxford, on Sept. 18, 1843, and preached his last Anglican sermon ( The Parting of Friends ) in Littlemore Church a week later. He delayed long, troubled by the historical contrast between the early church and the modern Roman Catholic church. Meditating upon the idea of development, a word then much discussed in connection with biological evolution, he applied the law of historical development to Christian society and concluded that the early and undivided church had developed rightly into the modern Roman Catholic church and that the Protestant churches represented a break in this development, both in doctrine and in devotion. These meditations removed the obstacle, and on Oct. 9, 1845, he was received at Littlemore into the Roman Catholic church, publishing a few weeks later his Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine.

Newman went to Rome to be ordained to the priesthood and after some uncertainties founded the Oratory at Birmingham in 1848. He was suspect among the more rigorous Catholic clergy because of the quasi-liberal spirit that he seemed to have brought with him; and therefore his early career as a Roman Catholic priest was marked by a series of frustrations.

He was summoned to Ireland to be the first rector of the new Catholic university in Dublin, but the task was, under the circumstances, impossible, and its best result was his book On the Idea of a University (1852). His role as editor of the Roman Catholic monthly, The Rambler, and in working with Lord Acton to encourage critical scholarship among Catholics, rendered him further suspect and caused a breach with Henry Manning, who was soon to be the new archbishop of Westminster. One of Newman's articles ( On Consulting the Faithful in Matters of Doctrine ) was reported to Rome on suspicion of heresy. He attempted to found a Catholic hostel at Oxford but was thwarted by the opposition of Manning.

From the burden of these frustrations Newman was delivered in 1864 by an unwarranted attack from Charles Kingsley upon his moral teaching. Kingsley in effect challenged him to justify the honesty of his life as an Anglican. And though he treated Kingsley more severely than some thought justified, the resulting history of his religious opinions, Apologia pro Vita Sua (1864; "A Defense of His Life ), was read and approved far beyond the limits of the Roman Catholic church, and by its candour, interest, and the beauty of some passages, it recaptured the almost national status that he had once held.

Though the Apologia was not much liked by Manning, it assured Newman's stature in the eyes of many Catholics. In 1870 he expressed opposition to defining the doctrine of papal infallibility, though he himself accepted the doctrine. In the same year, he published his Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent (commonly known as The Grammar of Assent), which contained a further consideration of the nature of faith and an attempt to show how faith can possess certainty when it rises out of evidence that can never be more than probable. In 1879 Pope Leo XIII made him cardinal-deacon of St. George in Velabro. He died at Birmingham in 1890 and is buried at Rednal, the retirement house of the Oratory.