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JOHN HENRY NEWMAN
John
Henry Newman was born in London on 21st February, 1801, the eldest of
six children, three boys and three girls. His father was John Newman,
a banker (the name may indicate Jewish ancestry), and his mother was Jemima
Fourdrinier, of Huguenot descent. He attended Ealing School from the age
of seven, and as a boy enjoyed reading the Bible. At the age of fifteen
he began the quest for spiritual wholeness which was to last the rest
of his life. He thought perhaps that life might be just a dream, that
he might be an angel, and even that his fellow angels were deceiving him
with the mirage of a material world. From the outset Newman was of a philosophical
disposition, and this evolved into a form of Christian mysticism with
which he could not ultimately accommodate his Anglican principles, even
after the reforms of the Oxford Movement. Tract Ninety of 1841 represents
a final attempt to show that the Anglicanism, as defined in the Thirty-nine
Articles, was consistent with Catholicism. His classic text 'Apologia
pro vita sua' of 1864 is our main source of information about his earlier
religious thinking.
Newman was not yet 16 when he went up to Trinity College,
Oxford, to read Classics and
Mathematics. Here he overworked, and despite his obvious intellect was
awarded only a third class degree in 1821. But his abilities were clear
for all to see, and the next year he was elected a fellow of Oriel, Oxford's
most prestigious college at that time, where he came in contact with Keble
and Pusey, and later with R.H. Froude. By now he had given up his ambition
of studying for the Bar, and resolved to take Holy Orders. He was ordained
in 1824, becoming curate of St. Clement's, Oxford, at the suggestion of
Pusey. In 1828 he was appointed vicar of the University Church of St Mary,
under the patronage of Oriel College. His sermons there were thought to
be among the finest of his century, and were fondly recalled by Oxonians
many decades later.
The neglected village of Littlemore was a distant part of his parish,
and Newman determined to provide it with its own 'chapel' and school.
In 1832 he resigned his tutorial post at Oriel, and the following year
made a tour of the Mediterranean with his friend Hurrell Froude, during
which he met Cardinal Wiseman at the English College in Rome - a formative
encounter. It was in Rome that he wrote many of his sacred poems Lyra
Apolostolica (published 1836). It was in 1833 that he wrote the
famous hymn 'Lead, Kindly Light', a heartfelt
plea for guidance. Manuscript texts of this hymn and a listing of the
original donors who paid for the church are kept at Littlemore. The foundation
stone of St Mary and St Nicholas' church was laid in 1835 by his mother,
Jemima, who did not live to witness the consecration on 22nd September
1836; the school opened in 1838.
Lead, kindly Light, amid th’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.
I was not ever thus, nor prayed that
Thou
Shouldst lead me on;
I loved to choose and see my path; but now
Lead Thou me on!
I loved the garish day, and, spite of fears,
Pride ruled my will. Remember not past years!
So long Thy power hath blest me, sure
it still
Will lead me on.
O’er moor and fen, o’er crag and torrent, till
The night is gone,
And with the morn those angel faces smile,
Which I have loved long since, and lost awhile!
John Henry Newman - The Pillar of the Cloud (Lead
kindly light), June 16, 1833
In
1842 Newman withdrew to Littlemore, and lived under monastic conditions
with a small band of followers, their life being one of great physical
austerity as well as anxiety and suspense. There, he assigned the task
to his disciples of writing of the lives of the English saints, while
his time was largely devoted to the completion of an Essay on the development
of Christian doctrine, by which principle he sought to reconcile himself
to the more complex creed and the practical system of the Roman Catholic
Church. In February 1843, he published, as an advertisement in the Oxford
Conservative Journal, an anonymous but otherwise formal retractation of
all the hard things he had said against Rome; in September, after the
secession of one of the inmates of the house, he preached his last Anglican
sermon at Littlemore and resigned the living of St Mary’s.
Conversion to Roman Catholicism
An interval of two years elapsed before he was formally received into
the Roman Catholic Church (9 October 1845) by Dominic Barberi, an Italian
Passionist, at the College in Littlemore. In February 1846 he left Oxford
for Oscott, where Bishop Wiseman, then vicar-apostolic of the Midland
district, resided; and in October he proceeded to Rome, where he was ordained
priest by Cardinal Giacomo Filippo Fransoni and awarded the degree of
D.D. by Pope Pius IX. At the close of 1847 Newman returned to England
as an Oratorian, and resided first at Maryvale (near Oscott); then at
St Wilfrid’s College, Cheadle; then at St Ann's, Alcester Street,
Birmingham; and finally at Edgbaston, where spacious premises were built
for the community, and where (except for four years in Ireland) he lived
a secluded life for nearly forty years.
The Oratory School was associated with this establishment
and flourished as a well-known boy's boarding school, long renowned for
its strong academic achievement, leading to its dubbing as 'The Catholic
Eton'. Before the house at Edgbaston was occupied, Newman had established
the London Oratory, with Father Frederick William Faber as its superior.
At the London Oratory (in King William Street, Strand) he delivered a
course of lectures (on "The Present Position of Catholics in England")
in the fifth of which he protested against the anti-Catholic utterances
of Giacinto Achilli, an ex-Dominican friar, whom he accused in detail
of numerous acts of immorality.
Last Days
From
the latter half of 1886 Newman's health began to fail, and he celebrated
Mass for the last time on Christmas day 1889. On 11 August 1890, he died
of pneumonia at the Birmingham Oratory. Eight days later, Cardinal Newman's
body was buried in the cemetery at Rednal Hill, Birmingham, at the country
house of the Oratory.
In accordance with his expressed wishes, Newman was buried
in the grave of his lifelong friend, Ambrose St. John. Previously, they
had shared a house. The pall over the coffin bore his cardinal's motto
Cor ad cor loquitur ("Heart speaks
to heart"). Inseparable in death as in life, a joint memorial stone
was erected for the two men; the inscription bore words Newman had chosen:
Ex umbris et imaginibus in veritatem ("Out
of shadows and phantasms into the truth").
Newman's Character
He was considered to be a man of magnetic personality, with
an intense belief in the significance of his own career; and his character
had strengths as well as weaknesses. As a poet he had inspiration and
genuine power. Some of his short and earlier poems are described by R.
H. Hutton as "unequalled for grandeur of outline, purity of taste
and radiance of total effect"; while his latest and longest, The
Dream of Gerontius, attempts to represent the unseen world along the same
lines as Dante. His prose style, especially in his Catholic days, is fresh
and vigorous, and is attractive to many who do not sympathise with his
conclusions, from the apparent candour with which difficulties are admitted
and grappled, while in his private correspondence there is a charm that
places it in the forefront of that branch of English literature. James
Joyce as reported in Richard Ellmann's Biography, "James Joyce"
(1959), declares in a letter that no one could write prose that can be
compared to Newman.
He was highly sensitive, self-conscious and impetuous. He
had many of the gifts that go to make a first-rate journalist, for, "with
all his love for and his profound study of antiquity, there was something
about him that was conspicuously modern." Nevertheless, he had little
knowledge of the scientific and critical writing composed between 1850–1890.
There are a few passages in his writings in which he appears to sympathise
with a broader theology, admitting that there was "something true
and divinely revealed in every religion" Arians of the Fourth Century,
1.3 [14] He held that "freedom from symbols and articles is abstractedly
the highest state of Christian communion," but was "the peculiar
privilege of the primitive Church." (Ibid, 1.2 [15]
Even in 1877 he allowed that "in a religion that embraces
large and separate classes of adherents there always is of necessity to
a certain extent an exoteric and an esoteric doctrine." (Prophetical
Office, preface to third edition)[16] These admissions, together with
his thoughts on doctrinal development and assertion of the supremacy of
conscience, led some critics to hold that, in spite of all his protestations,
Newman was at heart a liberal. Newman explained to his own satisfaction
the teachings of Catholicism, even holding the Pope to be infallible when
declaring someone to be a saint; and while expressing his preference for
English as compared with Italian devotional forms, he was one of the first
to introduce Italian devotions into England. The motto that he adopted
for use as a cardinal Cor ad cor loquitur (Heart speaks to heart), and
that which he directed to be engraved on his memorial tablet at Edgbaston
Ex umbris et imaginibus in veritatem (Out of shadows and phantasm into
truth) disclose as much as can be disclosed of a life which, both to contemporaries
and to later students, was seen as devout and inquiring, affectionate
and yet self-restrained.
His Cause
In 1991, Newman was proclaimed venerable after a thorough examination
of his life and work by the Sacred Congregation for the Causes of Saints.[1]
One miracle was investigated and confirmed by the Vatican, so he will
be beatified on 19 September 2010. A second miracle would then be necessary
for his canonization.
In 2008, as a part of the process of investigation, Newman's
grave was opened to exhume his body, but his wooden coffin was found to
have disintegrated and his body completely decayed.[13]
Text taken from: Littlemore Church Website
http://www.littlemorechurch.org/littlemore-newman.html
and various other sources.
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