NEWMAN,
LIFE AND THOUGHT
Rev. Fr. Peter J. Elliott
ISBN-85826-106-5
A.C.T.S. No. 1666 (1974)
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Life
and Thoughts
At the end of his great work, The
Development of Christian Doctrine, John Henry Newman addressed
his readers, "And now dear reader, time is short, eternity is long. Put
not from you what you have here found; regard it not as mere matter of
present controversy; set not out resolved to refute it, and looking
about for the best way of doing so . . . " Then he continued with the
words of a man about to take the plunge of conversion to Catholicism. "
. . . seduce not yourself that it comes of disappointment, or disgust,
or restlessness, or wounded feeling, or undue sensibility or other
weakness . . . " And then he challenges his reader bluntly, ". . . wrap
not yourself round in the associations of years past; nor determine
that to be truth which you wish to be so, nor make an idol of cherished
anticipations. Time is short, eternity is long. Nunc Dimittis servum
tuum, Domine . . . " [Now You dismiss Your servant, O Lord . . . see
Luke 2:29].
So Newman passed out of the Church of England. The Passionist
missionary Bl. Dominic Barberi [Fr. Dominic of the Mother of God] came
in from a rainy night in October 1845 to be confronted with a disturbed
and excited man, forty-four years old, the sharpest mind of the Oxford
Movement, the man whose pamphlet, Tract
Ninety, had shaken England. In the kitchen at Littlemore, Newman
the scholar, the great preacher, the hero with many disciples, was
kneeling at the feet of a humble Italian priest, begging "admission
into the One Fold of Christ", to use his own words. His life seems to
have come to a climax at that point of conversion. He was in his prime.
Great works of scholarship already lay behind him, equally great works
lay ahead. In his conversion there was a dramatic break with
Anglicanism, and yet a deliberate and conscious taking into Catholicism
of all his past experience and academic achievement, except in those
instances he isolated which contradicted Catholic truth and Christian
charity.
Some have claimed that Newman's conversion marked a dismal turning
point, that ever after his scholarship and charm deteriorated. This is
not true. But it must be admitted that Catholicism cost Newman
something he referred to in his Apologia,
something he dramatized in his novel Loss
and Gain. He was cut off from Oxford. He had to sacrifice the
glory and prestige, together with the personal contacts and academic
facilities of the great university. He had to set out on a path which
led to the pastoral and missionary life of an English Catholic priest,
a life, largely hidden from public view, largely concerned with
non-academic affairs. Yet in that change, Newman found Faith, new zeal,
a new drive, for at last he had embraced the confidence and splendour
of the whole span of authentic Christian doctrine and life. So we look
back from his conversion, and we look forward into his Catholic life.
Anglican Days
Behind all Newman's theology and experience lay a basic evangelical
piety. At the age of fifteen he had undergone a spiritual conversion,
in which he became convinced that he was one of God's elect, that he
had the gift of final perseverance. Fortunately this did not lead to
priggish Puritan notions about everyone else being damned. Later, at
the age of twenty-one, he abandoned belief in predestination. But he
always retained a confident faith in his first conversion. Jesus Christ
and basic Christian doctrine became realities to this rather precocious
teenager who went up to Oxford just before he turned sixteen.
As to what befell him in England's premier university, you may read all
about it in his autobiographical work, Apologia pro vita sua. In this book
we find, for example, the author's explanation for an unusual and
unnecessary failure in examinations. A very old lady I knew, who
recently lived in Oxford, and who is a distant relative of Newman, was
very sharp indeed about his neurotic examination failure. From her
point of view, Newman's weakness was further demonstrated by his
conversion to "Rome", and she described one of the greatest Englishmen
of his time, as "the black sheep of our family". Many attempts to
analyse the personality and character of Newman have produced all sorts
of theories; extreme examples of trying to psychoanalyse a dead man,
more reasonable examples of hesitant jigsaw puzzle character analysis.
The hostile approach may be found in Faber's Oxford Apostles. A deeper and less
confident analysis runs through Meriol Trevor's great two-volume
biography, The Pillar of the Cloud,
Light in Winter.
Tentatively I will sketch some aspects of the character which developed
in Oxford - intense, academic - but not dry; genuinely devout - but not
obviously "pious"; humorous and ready to make jokes and resort to
satire, yet capable of completely serious discourse. In himself he was
pleasant company, quite handsome and well groomed, although at one
stage he lost all his hair and sported a bright red wig until it grew
again! He preferred male company, and maintained several deep and many
general friendships. His female friends seem to have come mainly from
the family circle and its associates, and he was personally committed
to celibacy at an early age. He tended to see women in the Victorian
romantic fashion, idealized noble creatures who came to one for
spiritual direction and guidance. His strict self-discipline and
self-mortification, which followed the traditional Catholic lines,
never seems to have conflicted with several proper but real particular
friendships. But no-one could ever say he was attached to earthly
things or people. "Time is short, eternity is long" - this principle of
living "sub specie aeternitatis" ['under the species of eternity']
dominated young Mr. Newman, middle-aged Fr. Newman and elderly Cardinal
Newman.
Vocation to Anglican Orders came with his devout temperament and his
own rejection of a career in Law. It is difficult to analyse his sense
of vocation, rather it seems to have been a matter of duty, of
gratitude to God for a youthful conversion. Even his later vocation to
the Catholic priesthood is difficult to analyse, apart from the piety
and spirituality of the Oratory of St. Philip Neri. As with other
converts, Manning, Benson, Knox, Vernon Johnson, the fact that they had
been Anglican clergymen with personal belief in priesthood seems to
have made Catholic Orders natural and inevitable. But as an Anglican,
Newman took on both an academic ministry, while a fellow of Oriel
college and a pastoral ministry, the curacy of the small Evangelical
parish of St. Clement's. In Oriel College Newman fell under the
influence of Richard Whately, later Protestant Archbishop of Dublin.
Whately inculcated the method of Oxford logic and a belief in the
visible Church into his young disciple. This tempered the pious
Evangelical personal religion, and the shy retiring nature of young
Newman. In Oriel common room he was influenced also by the "broad
church" school of thought, and the vicar of St. Mary's University
Church, Mr. Hawkins, who destroyed Newman's tattered evangelical
doctrines of predestination and election. At this time he was attracted
to a study of the early Fathers, the main force behind the movement
about to begin in Oxford. He also read the great, dull, yet
hard-hitting Analogy of Religion
by Bishop Bulter, a famous body of solid Anglican theology which points
consistently to the role of visible Church, visible authority and
genuine interplay between faith and reason in Christianity.
The Oxford Movement
In the late 1820's, as a full-time tutor clergyman in Oriel, Newman
entered a friendship with two key figures of the Oxford Movement, John
Keble, a traditional high-churchman and the scholarly Hurrell Froude,
also a high-churchman - and a man quite open to controlled admiration
of Catholicism. Newman's own position took on a further development,
beyond Evangelicalism, beyond Oriel liberalism. The more he read deeply
in the Fathers, the more he worked on his famous study of the Arian
heresy, The Arians of the Fourth
Century, the more he appreciated Catholic orthodoxy on basic
issues, the Incarnation, salvation, the Trinity. He came to hold to the
value of sacraments and the apostolic succession, both of which he saw
compromised by the now decadent Evangelical Church leaders. In 1832,
with his health failing, Newman went with friends to Italy and Sicily,
but admitted that his experiences of Catholic worship consciously had
little effect on him. He was a convinced Anglican, high church and
conservatively given over to a jealous pride in the rights of his
Church.
In Sicily he fell ill, and strangely convinced that he had a great work
ahead in England, he headed for home. Becalmed in a boat between
Palermo and Marseilles, Newman wrote his famous poem, now a popular
hymn. It seems to be the first clear sign of inner impatience, of a
yearning for something, for something which at the time he would have
described perhaps as eternal life in heaven, and yet the poem does not
really fit that meaning alone.
"Lead, Kindly Light, amid the
encircling gloom,
Lead Thou me on!
The night is dark and I am far from home -
Lead Thou me on!"
Some have suggested that he should have written, "I am far from Rome -
Lead . . . " But there was no clear call to Catholicism at this stage,
just this wistful, yet cloudy, tugging at his soul, the first glimmer
of what I would call "the vision of the City of God". It was the first
mysterious intimation of conversion.
Back in England the Oxford Movement broke out into action and Newman
was at the centre of it. The little circle of friends had a cause, a
glorious cause - the re-catholicising of Anglicanism, from within. The
cause captured Newman. His energy was devoted to it. But the cause
directed him again and again to see the difficulty of Anglicanism. How
could he reconcile the Faith and Church he found in the early Fathers
with the divided, confused and essentially Protestant Church of
England? As the Tracts for the Times
rolled off the press, why were they greeted with such bitter opposition
as well as with such enthusiasm? Newman was perturbed. He had minor
clashes involving his conscience and the local ecclesiastical
structure, for example he refused to marry a Dissenter to an Anglican.
Nevertheless he put his faith in dogma and the apostolic nature of
Anglicanism as he saw it. He expounded it to a critical but
enthusiastic audience in St. Mary's church. He put forward his position
in a work entitled The Via Media,
the middle way, not Anglicanism as it was then, or now, but the "Anglo
Catholic" position. Newman himself admitted that this had not yet
emerged. His admission reveals a sense of doubt. Would it ever emerge?
In 1839 Newman saw the Anglican position mirrored in the position of
early heretics, the Monophysites. He had to admit that Rome stood for
orthodoxy in the Patristic age. He found that his Via Media had dissolved. His only
case against the Catholic Church was to cite her alleged errors. He had
no positive theology of his own, no distinct Anglican position. His
efforts to find a Catholicism which was not Roman Catholicism led him to write Tract Ninety. In this work, which
burst like a storm on the Church of England, Newman tried to do the
impossible. He tried to take the Thirty Nine Articles of Elizabeth I's
reign, and explain away their anti-Catholic principles and details. He
was greeted with accusations of intellectual dishonesty. He was hounded
and abused. He did not realize it until later, but he had taken another
step forward. From trying to find his "Via Media," Catholicism but not
Roman Catholicism, he had moved to the point of trying to find Roman
Catholicism but not the Catholic Church.
Towards Rome
In 1841 he received what he called "three blows which broke me". Again
he discovered the parallel between the Anglican position and a
compromise heresy in the early Church, Semi-Arianism. Again he saw that
Rome then, and perhaps now, stood for orthodoxy. He had the painful
experience of seeing the Anglican bishops attack him one by one, he,
Newman, the stout defender of the apostolic order and authority of
these men. He saw the Church he believed to be Catholic at heart
willing to allow a German Lutheran prelate act for it in Jerusalem, and
Newman and his circle knew that Lutheran ordinations were invalid.
Early 1842 saw Newman living at Littlemore, near Oxford, soon to be
joined by his friends in a sort of monastic community. Already he was
moving into that half-world, a man at sea with his own opinions, drawn
in a certain direction, yet not consciously aware of any desire or
intention to take the final step.
In 1842 and 1843 Newman lived a monastic life at Littlemore, apart from
a Church he barely believed in, yet refusing to submit to the Church
which he claimed erred concerning Our Lady and the Pope. His mind was
agitated by a theory which seemed to explain the dynamic quality of
Catholicism, a theory of the development of doctrine. He was an expert
in the great theological battles of the Fifth Century. These and the
Nineteenth Century ideals of progress and development seemed to present
him with an answer to the objection that he was merely digging up a
corrupt dated religion. But these ideas only led him to make the
admission to a friend, "I am a Roman in my heart". After the Lent
retreat he took the firm step of resigning the parish of St. Mary's
University Church. On Monday, 25th September, 1843, he preached his
last sermon at Littlemore. It was a moving sermon, a farewell, quiet
and dignified, the "parting of friends". At the end of the sermon he
threw his academic hood and gown over the altar rail. This was a sign
to all present that he had virtually laicised himself.
Two years later, in October, 1845, he was finally received into the
Catholic Church. This two-year delay is mysterious, a dismal
half-world, but it was the time in which Newman thought out the basic
argument in positive terms for becoming a Catholic, the dynamic
argument of the development of doctrine. Up till this time he had only
negative reasons for becoming a Catholic. He saw what the Church of
England was not. He still had to learn for himself what the Catholic
Church is. He still had to settle the burning spiritual desire for the
fullness of sacramental life and his close family and friend ties in
Anglicanism. He was tortured by this. He was tortured by spiritual
scruples and uncertainty. Yet, by early 1845 he was well into writing
the Essay on the Development of
Christian Doctrine, his own bridge to the Church. The essay came
to a gradual halt, virtually finished, when its author took the last
step. He became a Catholic in October, 1845, not merely because he saw
what Anglicanism was not, but because he saw what Catholicism is, the
dynamic authentic fullness of Christianity.
Newman as a Catholic
We will not linger over Newman's early career as a Catholic. His
initial doubts about being worthy for priesthood were dispelled. He
went to Rome, completed a brief course, was ordained, and entered the
famous association of secular priests, the Oratory of St. Philip Neri,
to whom he always held a firm devotion. Newman found that theology in
Rome was in a patchy, higgledy-piggledy state. He found his own theory
of development under fire as possible heresy. But he wrote much later
(1863) of "the happy days, thank God, at Propaganda".
In the Second Vatican Council we find two areas of doctrine directly
influenced by Newman.
1. the theology of doctrinal development seems to underline the
thinking of the Council.
2. the theology of the consensus of the faithful is clearly visible in Lumen Gentium, 12.
1. How does doctrine develop?
Newman is very careful here. Doctrine does not change. Development
implies continuity, not a succession of new dogmas which do not rest in
scriptural or apostolic tradition. Newman affirms that living ideas
must develop, but to test genuine development he provides seven
criteria, and these criteria Newman sees as evidence that genuine
development only takes place in the Catholic Church. He sees the
development of doctrine as something unique, related to the development
of ideas generally, but constantly protected by the unchanging
revelation in Christ. We take this for granted today. In Newman's age,
just when the evolution row was about to burst, many theologians viewed
his theology with suspicion and hostility. To them it seemed to
undermine the belief that Christ gave all truths for all time to his
apostles. Newman's case was quite formidable in the face of this
simplification of theology. He pointed back to the great theological
battles of the early Church, out of which the formulations of the
Incarnation and Trinity were defined.
His historical evidence had marked effect on many scholarly Anglican
readers, for they were committed to doctrines which had been defined
through development. Newman's logic also pointed them in the direction
of "Rome".
2. His theology o f the laity is
interesting.
It created a sharp debate in his own lifetime, and yet found its way
into Vatican II, Lumen Gentium
12. In 1859, Newman published an article in the Catholic Journal, The Rambler, "On Consulting the
Faithful in Matters of Doctrine". The title raised many pious eyebrows.
"What's this? Newman claims the laity can define dogma? What next?" We
can see the misunderstanding and stupidity of this rash reaction when
we examine what Newman said. Unfortunately it did not protect him from
sharp controversy. Newman wrote of the consensus fidelium, not a lay magisterium but the faithful as one
of the many witnesses to genuine apostolic tradition. " . . . the body
of the faithful is one of the witnesses to the fact of the tradition of
revealed doctrine, and because their consensus through Christendom is
the voice of the infallible Church." Nevertheless, he went on much
later, " . . . the gift of discerning, discriminating, defining,
promulgating, and enforcing any portion of that tradition resides
solely in the Ecclesia docens".
['the teaching Church']. Newman appealed to history and to the recent
definition of the Immaculate Conception to show how the people of God
often lead the way in endorsing and preparing for definition of dogma.
He was able to cite cases from the patristic age, when sophisticated
theologians and prelates fell into heresy, but the humble faithful
clamoured for truth. He even saw this consensus as an 'instinct' in the
Church. Vatican II follows this element in Newman's doctrine and speaks
of the sensus fidei, that
gift of the Holy Spirit to God's People that is an instinct against
error and in favour of truth.
We may return to some major aspects
of Newman's life as a Catholic. In
1848 he played the leading role in establishing the priests of
the Oratory in Birmingham, where they are to this day. The Oratorians
wear a sort of double-breasted soutane, with sash and a linen collar of
the Sixteenth Century form. They have only one binding promise -
charity among the brethren. Each priest may own property, yet must live
in community, eating and praying in community, and working in parish
duties as well as using his own talents. The Oratorians are usually
priest scholars and music plays an important part in their lives.
Newman played the violin with some skill, and certainly enjoyed the
Oratorian tradition of Renaissance liturgical music. In London, the
Brompton Oratory was built in what became a very fashionable area. This
huge baroque church attracted many wealthy and cultivated converts who
enjoyed the company of the clergy there. In Birmingham, by contrast,
the Oratory ministered to a mixed congregation, largely working-class
and Irish immigrants. Newman, for all his exalted reputation, loved to
work amongst the ordinary people, and I believe his doctrine of the consensus fidelium may have
received its practical force from the faith of Bridget the seamstress
or Michael the factory hand in Birmingham.
The Dublin Fiasco
There was one large portion of Newman's Catholic life which turned into
a bitter disappointment. This was the project for a Catholic University
in Dublin. The great university in Dublin, Trinity College, was not
open for Catholics, at least officially, and according to the
hierarchy. Archbishop Cullen, of Dublin, was determined to create a
Catholic university. He invited Newman over to Dublin in 1851, and
Newman went over to discuss the scheme, although he remarked, "Curious
it will be if Oxford is imported into Ireland . . . ". He planned to
return to Ireland to give lectures on what this new Catholic university
should be, but he was involved in perhaps the most painful
embarrassment of his life, the famous Achilli case. Newman had attacked
a profligate ex-friar, Giovanni Achilli, whom the Protestant Alliance
had welcomed to England with a special hymn, "Hail, Roman Prisoner,
Hail!", fit welcome for an ex-Catholic about to begin a fiery crusade
of preaching against the Church. Newman had dared to expose bluntly,
and before a large audience, the various sexual indiscretions of the
shady ex-Dominican. Achilli and the Protestant Alliance went to Law.
Newman was sued for libel. In the midst of all this he found time to
return to Ireland and deliver what surely must be the charter of the
perfect university, his lectures, published as The Idea of a University. The
Achilli case was tried after this. Newman lost it, but won a moral
victory because of the scandal it caused concerning the methods used by
bigots and fanatics. Newman again went back to Dublin, but, already
named by Cullen as the first Rector of the university, he was
discouraged by the muddling around and failure to get much done.
Eventually the scheme became a reality, at least partly a reality.
Newman threw himself into the work. He reckoned he crossed the Irish
Sea 56 times, being divided between the Oratory in Birmingham and the
Dublin scheme. He built a university church, "a large barn . . . in the
style of a basilica with Irish marbles and copies of standard
pictures", but the scheme as a whole collapsed. Archbishop Cullen
seemed to turn on Newman, criticizing him in Roman circles for spending
too much, employing English professors, importing Oxford customs and
allowing students the outrageous liberties of hunting and dancing!
Cullen's enemies leapt into the scheme and helped bring it down. Mutual
hostilities in Ireland and England worked against it. Borne down by the
pettiness, sabotage and inconvenience, Newman resigned his rectorship.
It was the end of the great dream. It was the triumph of narrow-minded
and authoritarian ecclesiastics, in Ireland, England and Rome, who
henceforth regarded Newman as a dangerous "liberal", and, most
unforgivable of all, a living reproach to their stupidity.
Papal Infallibility
In the late 1860's Newman experienced another disappointment. His old
friend and fellow convert, Henry Edward Manning, had risen rapidly in
the English Church. He became Archbishop of Westminster. He was an
extreme Ultramontane. [Dictionary definition: 'Favourable to the
ABSOLUTE authority of the Pope in matters of faith AND discipline.']
Personally, he had nothing against Newman, whom he could never have
seen as a rival for power. Newman was not interested in power. But
Newman put forward two attempts to bring Catholicism back into Oxford,
right into the University itself. He wanted Catholics to be allowed to
study in Oxford and to take degrees. He wanted the Oratory to found a
mission there, to minister to undergraduates, to seek converts. Manning
blocked both these schemes, supported by the Ultramontane layman, W. G.
Ward. Catholics would be "polluted" by contact with Protestant or
secular education. It was not until after Manning's death that the
Church lifted the short-sighted ban on Catholic undergraduates.
Manning and Newman also stood in differing positions concerning the
great theological question which brewed in the late 1860's as the First
Vatican Council drew near. This was Papal Infallibility. We know of
Newman's private belief in the doctrine. He himself was a moderate
Ultramontane, and was quite capable in several sermons of the most
fervent bursts of loyalty and enthusiasm for Pius IX. Yet Manning
suspected Newman of disloyalty to Rome, not grave disloyalty, but of an
unsound liberalism. How strange, "Liberalism" was the word Newman hated
most of all. Indeed, he would disown many of his "liberal" followers
today, if he were still with us. His loyalty to Catholicism was beyond
question. Cullen in Dublin, and Bishop Ullathorne of Birmingham firmly
defended Newman's reputation, especially after the Rambler crisis reached Rome. In the
1860's Newman defended his own integrity and that of all converts in
his autobiographical, Apologia pro
Vita Sua.
Gently but firmly he had met the Anglo-Catholic challenge in Pusey's Eirenicon, a criticism of
Catholicism which yet hoped for unity. He had published his sharp
analysis, The Difficulties of
Anglicans. Yet all these obvious signs of total loyalty could
not remove the rumour and suspicion. Newman was not on the list of
those eligible, outside the episcopate, to be present at Vatican I.
Perhaps this was good, insofar as his own academic work was concerned.
In the same year as the Council he published A Grammar of Assent, a brilliant
work of English Christian philosophy. After his Development of Doctrine, this
surely ranks as his second great contribution to theology. When it is
properly rediscovered, a theologian of our own time may use it to do
what still has to be done, to unite Catholic theology with the modern
linguistic and logical schools of British philosophy. The work was not
scholastic. It was ahead of its time.
The inopportunists tried to drag Newman into their party. He had
declared, "You are going too fast at Rome . . . We do not move at
railroad pace in theological matters even in the Nineteenth Century".
Yet, his very language, reflecting his own theory of gradual
development, reminds us that it was largely the process of development
which effected the definition of infallibility. After the definition,
in spite of letters urging him to stand out, Newman accepted the dogma.
In 1874 Gladstone, bitter over Irish politics, let fly with his noisy
expostulation against the Vatican decrees, claiming they gave the Pope
political power.
Newman replied with his Letter to
the Duke of Norfolk, based on advice he had given converts who
were distressed over infallibility. It was a moderate and scholarly
work, which won praise even from Manning and his circle. Gladstone
failed to understand it, but he must have appreciated the famous remark
Newman made, "Certainly if I am obliged to bring religion into
after-dinner toasts I shall drink - to the Pope, if you please - still
to conscience first, and to the Pope afterwards". We may remember
hearing this quoted loud and long during the recent birth control
debate. Those who shouted it should have checked what Newman wrote before he made his comment. His Letter to the Duke of Norfolk is an
excellent defence of the authority, primacy and infallibility of the
Pope. Significantly, it was published later as an appendix to his Difficulties of Anglicans.
The Last Years
Manning became a cardinal through the gratitude of Pius IX in 1875.
Newman was pleased at the honour, and it seems that the two old men
lost that antipathy towards one another which, on inspection, has been
exaggerated a great deal by hearsay and bad history. But Newman had to
wait until Pius IX died in February of 1878 before his work was
honoured. Early in 1879, after false reports that he had refused the
honour, Newman was made a cardinal by the new Pope, Leo XIII. "The
cloud is lifted from me for ever," he remarked to his brethren. In
triumph, the old man made the journey to Rome to receive his red hat.
His cardinal's motto was "Cor ad Cor Loquitur," "Heart Speaks to
Heart." ['The Heart of Jesus to the Heart of man Speaks'] On the day he
received his red hat he delivered a stirring speech against liberalism
in theology.
He lived on for another eleven years, lonely years, for one by one his
close friends died. Memories linger around the Oratory in Birmingham of
these last years, of the aged cardinal climbing up to the library,
holding onto a rope attached to the stairs, of the cardinal saying Mass
in his own oratory, set in a corner of his crowded study, a Mass where
the intentions for the dead were always present in the faded
photographs which lined the walls, the faces of the Oxford Movement.
When he grew old, and after he died, some claimed he regretted becoming
a Catholic. There is no truth in this, rather it rests on a fictional
poem composed by an imaginative high church Anglican. The poem
described the old man returning to the village of Littlemore, and
weeping over his memories, "exchanging Oxford's mirage for the gleam of
Rome". Conversion did cost him real suffering, primarily in terms of
friends and pastoral relationships. In 1862 he himself entered print on
allegations of his disillusionment with a violent letter to the "Globe" newspaper. "I have not had
one moment's wavering of trust in the Catholic Church ever since I was
received into her fold . . . " He later went on in a more hostile tone,
" . . . I do hereby profess ex animo
[from the soul] with an absolute internal assent and consent,
that Protestantism is the dreariest of possible religions; . . . return
to the Church of England! No! 'The net is broken and we are delivered'.
[Newman was quoting Psalm 124:7 (Psalm 123 in the Vulgate) ] I should
be a consummate fool (to use a mild term) if in my old age I left the
[Newman quotes Exodus 3:8] 'land flowing with milk and honey' for the
city of confusion and the house of bondage." We must remember that this
was the pre-ecumenical age.
At conversion he had learnt the hard lessons he set out at the end of
his essay on development. He continued to learn these lessons within
the Church. " . . . wrap not yourself round in the associations of
years past, nor determine that to be truth which you wish to be so, nor
make an idol of cherished anticipations . . . " The anticipations so
often came to nothing. The cardinal's hat was perhaps after all an
earthly consolation prize. But the greatest English Catholic of his
century was schooled in the school of Christ. His interior life was the
firm basis for all his actions, his strivings, his success and failure.
He loved his Mass. He visited the Blessed Sacrament with devotion. He
had a warm and natural devotion to Our Lady, characteristic of his time
in that it centred on that sublime mystery, her Immaculate Conception.
His Meditations and Devotions
are still there for our benefit, and they have freshness, a modern
honesty, a noble prose style which lifts them into our own time, well
above the mountains of sugary Victorian piety which face the paper
shredder each year.
Cardinal Newman died late in the evening of August 11th, 1890. He was
buried, with tributes from the whole of England, in a simple grave
together with the graves of other Oratorian clergy, at their retreat
house, Rednal, near Birmingham. It is simply a mound of earth, and
grass, with a wooden Cross, just like all the others near it. For his
memorial tablet at the Oratory, Newman left us just one phrase. It sums
up his life, his yearnings, his thinking, his anguish, his conversion,
his disappointments, his achievement - all in one phrase, "Ex umbris et
imaginibus in Veritatem". - "Out of shadows and appearances into Truth."
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