John Henry Newman

The Rev. John Keble preached what proved to be a decisive sermon in St. Mary’s Church, Oxford on Sunday 14th July, 1833. Keble, who besides being a gifted parish priest held a professorship of poetry at the University and was a Fellow of Oriel College, Oxford. He vigorously condemned Parliament for its recent suppression of ten Irish bishoprics, which he saw as the unlawful interference of the holy Church by a secular body. His sermon reflected a growing unease in the Church of England where it was felt that its apostolic authority and spirituality were being eroded by a lethal combination of arid Rationalism, evangelical dissent and parliamentary interference.

This angry sermon fired off what became known as the Oxford Movement for the reform of the established Church. Though Keble initiated  the Movement, it was John Henry Newman who gave the Movement drive and force until he, himself defected to the Roman Catholic Church in 1854. Newman, born in London in 1801, was the son of John and Jemima Newman who were middle-of-the-road Anglicans, devout and Bible-loving. At school Newman professed an evangelical conversion-experience at the age of 15 – he had always believed in God but he now was convinced of God’s presence in his life.

Although his father’s banking interests collapsed resulting in straitened financial circumstances, Newman was able to enter Trinity College, Oxford, where whilst intellectually gifted, his highly strung temperament resulted in somewhat mediocre degree. However he did go on to better things and attained a fellowship of Oriel College, Oxford in 1822.

At this point Newman took holy orders and was ordained deacon of the Church of England in 1824. He later was invited to become vice-principal of a somewhat run-down theological college called Alban Hall. The actual principle of the college, a Rev. Richard Whately, together with the Rev. Edward Hawkins, who was the vicar of St. Mary’s Church, Oxford deeply influenced Newman away from evangelicalism and towards the High Church position. Later Newman was to succeed Hawkins as vicar of St. Mary’s in 1828.

Although not a university church, St. Mary’s was frequented by students in term time and it was here that Newman preached his famous sermons on Sunday afternoons at 4 p.m. They were later published as his, Parochial and Plain Sermons which were full of good stuff, even for evangelicals and became classics.

John Henry Newman was now making a strong and popular impression in Oxford and began to gather around him many firm friends. One of these friends was another fellow of Oriel College called Richard Hurrell Froude who was the son of an Archdeacon. From 1832 to 33 the young Newman together with Froude and Froude’s father went on something of a Grand Tour of the continent where Newman was bowled over by the classical glories of the place and at the same time revolted by much of what he saw of continental Catholicism. On his return whilst in Sicily, Newman fell very ill (the Froudes having gone ahead) and, had it not been for the careful nursing of his servant, would probably have died. It was, in fact, in the wake of this harrowing experience, on his return to England that Newman penned the lines of his famous hymn, Lead kindly light, lead thou me on.

Back in England Newman found himself caught up in the Oxford Movement- a group urging spiritual and apostolic reform in the Church of England. Before his trip abroad with Froude, Newman had made extensive studies of the history and writings of the Early Fathers (spiritual leaders) of the Christian church for a book he was writing on heresy in the Early church. It was these studies that helped convince Newman that the best model for the work and worship of the Christian Church was through the example and teaching of the first apostles and their immediate successors. Newman came to believe that he and his clerical contemporaries received their spiritual authority only by a historical succession, by the laying on of hands from Christ, himself, through the first apostles. Any departure from this succession, Newman and his friends held, could only spell disaster for the Church – deistic rationalism and evangelical dissent were gross aberrations of the truth once delivered to the saints.

But Newman believed that there was a middle position the Church could take in apostolical reform between the excesses of Romanism on the one hand and the inconsistencies of current Protestantism on the other. He put his ideas in a book entitled The Via Media and then expanded upon the theme through a series of  Tracts for the Times which were published between 1833 and 1841. These mainly anonymous publications gave the reform movement its other title of The Tractarian Movement. There were 90 tracts in all with Newman writing 24 of them, including the last one. Newman had hoped that these flysheets or tracts would create a rising groundswell for reform in the C. of E. without the formation of an actual committee or ginger group as a given target of opposition.

They indeed stirred up much opposition in the Church with Newman’s own bishop – the Bishop of Oxford, Dr. Richard Bagot calling upon Newman, whom he admired as a scholarly preacher, to stay silent on these matters. Newman who was always particularly sensitive to personal criticism felt that the tracts should cease but for himself he felt increasingly at odds with the Church of his birth and in spite of his earlier antipathy to many aspects of Roman Catholicism he came to the conclusion that the best model for the Church was the Roman one and that it came closest to the universal Church of the Early Fathers.

After Newman felt that he could no longer continue in the C. of E. the battle for ecclesiastical and sacramental reform was carried on by John Keble, Edward Pusey and others. For a time much bitter controversy ensued with not a little violence occurring, but eventually the conflict settled down and possibly the overall spiritual life of the Church of England was improved and enriched.

As for John Newman he was set upon a road from which there would be no return, from 1841 onwards he gradually gave up his academic and pastoral responsibilities at Oxford and began to live a semi-monastic life in the neighbouring village of Littlemore and eventually resigned the incumbency of St. Mary’s, Oxford in 1843, preaching his last sermon there in September 1843 which was significantly entitled, The Parting of Friends. On the 9th October, 1845 Newman was received into the Catholic church and in 1847 was ordained a priest, and whilst in Rome trained within the Oratory of St. Philip Neri. This was a community of secular priests who whilst pursuing academic studies also served in a parish, often a poor one, with sacramental, preaching and pastoral duties. This was a blend of holy activity which particularly appealed to Newman with his Oxford background.

On returning to England, Newman with Papal permission set up an Oratory in memory of St. Philip Neri at Edgbaston in Birmingham. He continued to preach, lecture and write on a variety of subjects, often doctrinal and apostolical, all the while defending his ‘conversion’ and trying to produce some fresh and revolutionary thinking within traditional Catholicism. For a long time his ‘conversion’ was treated with suspicion by many reactionary, ultramontanist Catholic clerics. A particular enemy was H. E. Manning, ironically another convert from Anglicanism who became the second Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster. He tried to block Newman’s nomination for a cardinal’s hat but eventually Newman was made cardinal by Pope Leo XIII in 1879.