Seeking God with Saint John Henry Newman. Ryan J. Marr
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have a lifelong impact on his witness to the Gospel, as evidenced perhaps most markedly in the way that his sermons are saturated with the language of Sacred Scripture.
As a young man, Newman enrolled at Trinity College, Oxford. His time as a student was a mixed bag: Although he thoroughly enjoyed the intellectual stimulation of university life, he did not fit in socially, largely on account of his unwillingness to participate in the drinking bouts that occupied his peers. Social ostracization at the college had its advantages, however, in that Newman had ample time to study. Unfortunately, his studiousness backfired on him in 1821, when he drove himself to the brink of a mental breakdown by overpreparing for his examinations. As a result, he fared poorly on the exams, ending up off the honors list for mathematics and in the lower division of the second class — or “under the line” — for classics. Feeling himself an embarrassment to his family, Newman feared that his hopes for a fellowship at Oxford had been lost. In April of 1822, however, he received the surprising news that he had been elected a fellow of Oriel College. Apparently, Newman’s intellectual prowess as manifested in his written work had outweighed any concerns raised by his performance on the exams.
Newman later described his earning this fellowship as “the turning point of his life,”19 but it could just as aptly be considered a key turning point in the history of the Church of England. For it was during his time as a fellow at Oriel that Newman became the de facto leader of the Oxford movement. This was an effort led by several key Oxford figures to return the Church of England to its Catholic roots, by integrating some pre-Reformation devotional and liturgical traditions into contemporary Anglican practice. The Oxford movement leaders also mounted a protest against the incursion of state authority in the decision-making of the Church. In their view, the Church as an apostolic community was accountable to God alone. Permitting the state to have any role in ecclesiastical governance was, for them, a compromise of the Church’s fundamental identity. Newman and his Oxford movement confrères disseminated their ideas through a series of pamphlets, or Tracts for the Times, which is how they came to be known as Tractarians.
For a time, the Tractarians made significant headway in bringing about the reforms they sought, but eventually Newman lost his zeal for this effort — in part because of the negative reaction to one of his published tracts (Tract 90), but even more significantly because he started to doubt his conviction that the Church of England was truly catholic and apostolic. During the 1830s, Newman had pressed the argument that Anglicanism struck a via media between the errors of Protestantism on one side, and the excesses of Romanism on the other. At this stage in his life, Newman claimed that the Church of England was apostolic because it held fast to the creedal commitments of the early Church. In his view, Protestant communities neglected key parts of the apostolic tradition, while Roman Catholicism added to it. However, certain developments in the late 1830s — including the Church of England’s decision to share a bishopric in Jerusalem with Lutherans — caused Newman to reconsider the whole question of where the one Church of Christ could be found.20 Over the next few years, his doubts accelerated, such that by 1841 Newman was on his “deathbed” regarding his membership in the Anglican Church.21
The following year, Newman withdrew with some of his closest friends to Littlemore, outside Oxford, where he and this circle of followers began to practice a form of life that closely resembled traditional monasticism. On September 25, 1843, he preached his last Anglican sermon, “The Parting of Friends,” at the quaint parish church he had designed in Littlemore. Two years later, on October 9, 1845, he was received into the Roman Catholic Church by Father Dominic Barberi, who was serving during that time as a missionary in England. Newman said his entry into the Catholic Church was “like coming into port after a rough sea.”22 Despite undergoing many personal trials in the years that followed, he never regretted his decision to swim the Tiber.
Newman’s Catholic Years
As intimated in the previous section, Newman’s time as a Roman Catholic was characterized by a series of personal difficulties and professional disappointments. Newman began seminary studies in Rome in the fall of 1846, before being ordained to the Catholic priesthood on May 30, 1847. After a period of ministry in England, he relocated to Dublin in 1854 to serve as the first rector of the newly established Catholic University of Ireland, only to resign from that position a few years later, on account of the stress that he was experiencing and also because he sensed that the Irish bishops were not fully supportive of his vision for the institution. At the end of that decade, Newman found himself increasingly under the microscope of the English hierarchy due to an article that he had written recommending that bishops consult the lay faithful on matters of doctrine. Bishop Brown of Newport even went so far as to report Newman to Roman authorities on suspicion of heresy — a charge that wasn’t completely cleared up until several years later. Newman also had to fight a frivolous lawsuit leveled against him by a corrupt ex-priest, lost his closest friend to an early death, and regularly butted heads with the primate of England — his sometime friend and fellow convert Archbishop Henry Manning.
The list could go on, and things got so bad that, for a time, many Englanders wondered whether Newman would return to the religious communion of his youth. When Newman got wind of this rumor, he squashed it forcefully, writing that he had never “had one moment’s wavering of trust in the Catholic Church since [being] received into her fold” and adding that he had still “an unclouded faith in her creed in all its articles; a supreme satisfaction in her worship, discipline, and teaching; and an eager longing and a hope against hope that the many dear friends whom I have left in Protestantism may be partakers of my happiness.”23 For Newman, the Catholic Church was first and foremost a gracious gift given by God in order to bring us salvation, but she also exists, he believed, to sustain us through the storms of life. To commit oneself to life in the Church, therefore, is part of what it means to practice trust in God’s providential care.
This abandonment to Divine Providence that Newman practiced constantly informed his thought about life in the Church and, in turn, the counsel that he gave to others regarding how to live as members of the Body of Christ. As an example, we can look at how Newman navigated the events surrounding the First Vatican Council (1869–1870), which was an exceedingly trying time for him. At this council, a certain group of bishops sought to ratify a strongly worded statement regarding the pope’s power to teach infallibly (i.e., without error) on matters of faith and morals. In their view, such a definition would reinforce the Church’s teaching authority and thus help to protect Catholics against the winds of philosophical skepticism that were sweeping across Europe in the nineteenth century.
Since becoming Catholic, Newman had believed in the pope’s infallibility as a theological opinion. Nevertheless, he thought that this group of bishops was acting recklessly by insisting on a strongly worded definition without giving due attention to the complexities of Church history and without showing sufficient concern for the consciences of those who had difficulty with the idea. In short, Newman thought the Church needed more time to work out a definition of the doctrine that clearly specified the limits of infallibility in light of certain historical instances that appeared to stand in tension with the idea — for instance, the fact that a few popes had privately held theological convictions that were later condemned by the Church.
When the bishops at Vatican I ended up approving a definition of papal infallibility, Newman said that he was pleased with its moderation. He believed that the extreme party had not gotten its way but that the Holy Spirit had again guided the Church in her deliberation over a disputed theological question. Though Newman was relieved, in the years following Vatican I numerous friends and acquaintances looked to him for counsel as they struggled to make sense of the definition and its implications. And this gets to the key point for our purposes. Rather than dismissing their concerns, Newman encouraged these individuals to turn to God when they were troubled in conscience by what they were witnessing in the Church. In an 1871 letter to Alfred Plummer, for instance, Newman wrote:
Another consideration has struck me forcibly, and that is, that, looking at early history, it would seem as if the Church moved on to the perfect truth by various successive declarations, alternately in contrary directions, and thus perfecting, completing, supplying each