Blessed John Henry Newman

in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. O God, who bestowed on the priest, blessed John Henry Newman, the grace to follow your kindly light and find peace in your church. Graciously grant that through his intercession and example, we may be led out of shadows and images into the fullness of your truth. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, forever and ever, amen.

In the fall of 1980, I was 18 and an atheist, and a very arrogant young man. And I went to Princeton University to begin my undergraduate work in large measure because it was not in the south, that is, in the Christ haunted south. I wanted to live in a culture completely secular, illuminated by the light of pure reason, that at least was the vision. During orientation week, we had a large gathering of the freshman class for the first time in Splendid Alexander Hall in the center of the Princeton campus.

It's a magnificent Romanesque auditorium. And as chance would have it, or providence, sitting right next to me, was a young man who was not one of my classmates, but a journalist who was there to cover the event. He was working for a magazine published by an alumni group of the University, Prospect Magazine published by the concerned alumni, Princeton, a conservative group of alumni who were concerned about the drift of the university in its relativism and secularism. The young man who was working for the journal was recently graduated from Hillsdale College and was a principled conservative.

So he introduced himself and said, why don't you come down sometime and visit the office and let me introduce you around? Well, I did. And one of the men that I met there was the publisher of the magazine named Robert Royal. Bob now runs a think tank in Washington, DC called the Faith and Reason Institute.

At the time, he was a doctoral student working on his PhD in comparative literature. He's a Dante scholar. And it was a fascinating, far-ranging conversation that was sort of, for me, an introduction to a much larger world than I had ever imagined in the cocoon of my supremely self-confident 18-year-old atheism. And one of the things Bob liked to do was hand me books.

Go read this. That was his way of stoking the fire. And one of the books that he handed me was called The Idea of the University, a series of lectures given in the middle of the 19th century by an English priest named John Henry Newman, of whom I had never heard. And aside from the coincidence of our last name, there was no obvious reason for him to hand me this text.

And yet, he knew that this would be the hook on which so much would later depend. So I read The Idea of the University, which was not written as a single book, but given as a series of lectures and then published later together, explaining, John Henry Newman that is, explaining, the very idea and purpose of the university, which it turns out was, of course, invented by the Catholic Church. Well, it was part of my introduction to serious Christian ideas. And I was intrigued.

So I went to a Bob again and said, who is this Newman? And is there more that I can read? And he handed me a book published in 1962, The Year of My Birth, written by an English woman named Mary Oldtreber called The Killer of the Cloud. It was the first of the two volume biography of John Henry Newman written by this woman.

She had been born in 1919 and grew up a conventional sort of Church of England by default kind of Christian. But after World War II, in which she served in the civilian service in Britain, she went to Italy and that was her introduction to Catholicism. She became a Catholic in 1850. And she was received into the Church at Oxford.

And as we'll see in a moment, the first half of Newman's life was nominated by Oxford. It was there that she was introduced to his life and work and then wrote this biography, The Pillar of the Cloud. The second volume was entitled Light in Winter. I did not read it at the time.

So that's how John Henry Newman came to my life through my friend Bob, who served as my sponsor for confirmation in the fall of 1982 when I was received into the Church. John Henry Newman was born in London in 1801. His father was a prosperous banker. His mother was a gentle lady descended from French Huguenots.

They were prosperous gentry. They were not noble. They didn't belong to the system of British nobility. But his prosperity gave them a place in society.

And John Henry had a very conventional life as a child up through his early teens when he was sent away, as most English boys of means were, to boarding school at Ealing. And when he was 15 years old in 1816 while he was a student at Ealing school, he experienced a profound religious conversion. Now, it's not that he was irreligious before. He was baptized as a baby, brought up in the Church of England, read the Bible at home.

He wrote years later, was taught to love reading the Bible by his grandmother. He had memorized the catechism in the back of the Book of Common Prayer as a boy. So he was not irreligious in any sense. But it was conventional national religion.

I'm an Englishman. There is a Church of England. This is my religion. But when he was at school, in 1816, one of his school teachers, one of the masters at Ealing school, was himself a clergyman who had undergone a personal conversion of the kind that Methodism was based upon with Wesley's heart strangely warmed, an evangelical experience of the power of God's love, the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, a personal conversion to the Lord Jesus.

However you want to put it, there was this awakening in his 15-year-old heart and mind of the personal force of the living God, which was accompanied by the acceptance of dogmatic, systematic Christian doctrine. The schoolmaster who had influenced the young Newman had become a Calvinist. One of the weaknesses of continental reformation, the Lutheran movement, and the Church of England was the absence within both of systematic theology, a way of understanding the doctrines of the incarnation and the Trinity and Christ's atoning death on the cross. Luther gave us the catechisms and the confessions the Church of England has the Book of Common Prayer, but neither provides a systematic working out of doctrine, and Calvin does.

And so 15-year-old John Henry has this emotional experience of conversion and the impress on his mind of the principle of dogma at that moment under the tutelage of John Calvin. The following year he went up to Oxford, as the English say, and he was a brilliant student. Everyone understood him to be one of the finest minds of his generation. He was to finish his undergraduate studies in 1821, and he studied so hard for his final examinations that he had a nervous breakdown in the midst of taking the final exams.

So instead of finishing with what the British call a first at the highest level, he finished with a third, a third level degree. Under normal circumstances that would have been the end of his academic career, but all of the fellows who had been his teachers understood what had happened, that this was one of the most remarkable students that ever had who had worked himself to exhaustion and just collapsed. So he stayed for an additional year, and in, let's see, 1882 he was elected a fellow of Oriel College, Oxford. The way one became what we would call a professor at Oxford University in those days was to be selected by the fellows, that is the scholars who already constituted the teaching faculty as we would say at one of the residential colleges of Oxford.

Oriel is an ancient college from the 12th century, and Newman was elected by them to join them. So in 1822, at the age of 21, he became a professor, as we would say, at Oxford University. Then as was customary at the time, he was going to be ordained to the Ministry of the Church of England. April of 1824, he became a Deacon in the Church of England, and May of 1825, he was ordained to the priesthood for the Church of England.

So he's 24 years old, he's a professor at Oxford, and a priest in the Church of England. And his first assignment is in a parish, just a normal parish where he does normal priestly duties, baptisms and marriages and funerals and celebration of the Eucharist on Sunday. But in 1828, when he's 27, he's selected to be the Vicar of St. Mary's, which is the University Church of Oxford.

And that was one of the most significant turning points in his life because it put him in a position of enormous intellectual and spiritual influence. He would, from the pulpit of St. Mary's, the University Church, preach a series of sermons that reshaped the thinking not only of the undergraduates who were present in Oxford at the time, but of his colleagues in the leadership of that part of the Church of England, which did not consider itself Protestant. And here we come on one of the key ideas that he wrestled with for 25 years.

Is there a difference between the 16th century reformation in England that led to the separation of the Church of England from the Church of Rome? Is there a difference between that and what happened in Europe? Between Anglicanism and Lutheranism or Anglicanism and Calvinism. And it's important to note that it's in his years as an undergraduate at Oxford and leading up to his ordination that he abandons Calvinism.

He begins to see the limitations of Calvin's systematic theology. What he's left with is the idea that revealed religion requires an authoritative dogma. And then he adds to it the sacramental principle that God's grace is mediated ordinarily not through ideas, but through the sacraments, the mysteries of the New Testament, baptism, the Eucharist, and so forth. So there he is in 1828, the Vicar St.

Mary's, beginning to give these sermons, which are more like lectures to us than sermons, about the nature of religion and how it's experienced by common people and by intellectuals alike. And he begins to exercise great influence on these young undergraduates, both those who are his students in Oriel College and those who are simply present in the University Church for worship. In 1832, one of his dearest friends, a man named Harel Frühn, got sick. Have you ever been to England?

Today is like mid-August in England. It's wet, it's damp, it's cold. So when Englishmen get a cough, they want to go to Italy. The doctor was writing the prescription, go to Italy.

So what do they do? They get on a ship and sail for the Mediterranean. And this was Newman's first exposure to Italy. Now there's something in the English soul that doesn't come alive until an Englishman goes to Italy.

In fact, if you go even now to Tuscany, Tuscana, where Florence and Sienna are located two hours north of Rome, there are so many Englishmen that the local Italians call Tuscana, Quianti Shire. So Newman and Fruid go to the Mediterranean, they stop in southern France and go on to southern Italy and that's Newman's first trip from Rome. And he was horrified by what he regarded as superstition that he saw in the people, the paganism with the patina of Christianity over it. But Italian culture and architecture and food was just delightful to him and they'd awaken something in him, a yearning for something more than what he had known in England as a young man.

A second part of that journey left their ship stuck. The winds died and they were stuck for several days waiting for the wind. And while they were waiting, he composed a poem. Long before he was famous as a preacher and a theologian and philosopher, he had developed a real gift for poetry.

And he wrote this poem, which has been set to music and is beloved by many. It's a prayer. Lead, kindly light. Amid the encircling gloom, lead thou me on.

The night is dark and I'm far from home, leave 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 shoulds 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 blessed me. Sure it still will lead me on, or more and thin or crag and torrent till the night is gone. And with the mourn those angel faces smile, which I have loved long since and lost a while. The theme of darkness and light is redolent of Plato's cave.

The allegory of how the mind comes to understand the deepest truths. Newman entitled this poem, The Pillar of the Cloud. It's commonly known simply by the first words, lead, kindly light. But Newman's title for it was The Pillar of the Cloud and that's how Mary-O-Trevor came up with the title of the first of the two volumes of her biography, referring to this text.

That's 1833. That was a turning point in Newman's life for several reasons. Another fellow of Oriel College was an Anglican priest named John Kiebel. And in 1833 he preached a sermon called National Apostasy.

People and Newman and their friends, Horelle, Frewd and Edward Pusi, all of whom were brilliant intellectuals, had become convinced that conventional Anglicanism was the enemy of true Christianity. That it was pure convention based on nationality and not only did not correspond to the truth of the gospel but was an impediment to accepting the truth of the gospel. Years later Newman will identify that sermon preached by his friend Kiebel as the beginning of what we call the Oxford movement. At the time it was just another event in their lives.

But they later looked back on that. In the same year 1833 Newman published his first major work called Arians of the Fourth Century. It was an historical theological text designed to understand how the majority of Christians in the fourth century had been led astray from the truth of Catholic faith into the heresy of Arias, the Alexandrian priest who believed that there was one at a time when the sun was not. 1833, Arians of the fourth century.

1833 is also the publication of the first of what Newman would later call tracks for the times. Most of which he wrote himself or edited from text written by friends. It was a project that he started to lay out the principles of their criticism of the conventional religion of the day. 1833.

So he had been vigorous St. Mary's in the University Church of Oxford from 1828. Now five years later after this tour of Italy and his awakening to whatever was going on there in Rome, he begins this Tractarian movement which is another name for the Oxford movement to restore the Catholic dimensions of Christianity which are not antithetical to the true Reformation Spirit of the 16th century. This leads him in 1836 for the first time to speak of the viamidia, the middle way.

And he begins to make a principled case that Anglicanism is a middle way between the equal errors of Romanism and Protestantism. That Anglicanism, the middle way, the viamidia is in fact ancient Christianity without its medieval errors in Romanism or its Renaissance errors in Protestantism. That if Augustine or Ambrose or Chrysistom could come back in the 19th century, they would be Anglicans. This is ancient Christianity stripped of all the errors.

It's from this time forward, the late 1830s with these various men, each making their own contributions to the Oxford movement that Newman becomes one of the most famous men in England. It's hard for us to imagine, but in that time reading printed sermons was one of the most popular things in the country. The Walters of novel Scott and the sermons of John Henry Newman, this is what people would buy like hotcakes at the train station newsprint shop. So his personal influence and fame by let's say 1839 or 1840 are enormous.

And the undergraduates in Oxford stop in the street as he's passing by. It's Newman. And they crowd into the church on Sunday, St. Mary's, to hear him preach.

And he was a famously soft spoken man with no amplifier of course. So he would stand in the pulpit. The church had to be absolutely silent. Which only heightened the sense of something sublime.

Then in 1841, Newman published the 90th track for the times. So they'd been cranking these things out once a month or every six weeks, another track for the times. Track number 90 was Newman's attempt to read the articles of religion which are printed in the back of the book of common prayer as a Catholic. And now from our point of view, the whole enterprise is absurd.

But it was not the Newman. It was the inevitable logical conclusion of what had started in 1833. But it's taken eight years to get to that point. And it provokes an enormous pushback from the authorities of the Church of England and the University of Oxford.

While this has been going on, all of this intellectual work has been going on, a parallel movement has been going on in worship. How would Anglicans have dressed at the altar? How do they actually celebrate the Lord's Supper? When Newman and the others began their movement, it would have looked very much like a Methodist or Presbyterian worship service would today.

In a very short span, they had introduced vestments for the ministers, candles on the altar, not the table, the altar, the ritual forms of a celebration of the Eucharist that we take for granted. These were revolutionary things and they created enormous anger in those who thought that they were a backdoor of bringing Romanism back into the Church of England. So in 1841, when track number 90 is published, all hell breaks loose. And accusations are being made to Newman and Kiebel and Fruity and the others.

You're corrupting these young men, you're leading them astray, you're lying about your real motives. This is pure Catholicism, this is Romanism, this is the wickedness that the Reformation freed us from. And the following year, 1842, in response to the fury and the pushback to the Oxford movement. And because of his own interior doubts, Newman resigned from St.

Mary's and moved out to the village of Littlemore. Today Littlemore is a suburb completely surrounded by Oxford. In those days, it was a distinct place about three miles outside of town in a pasture. And the buildings to which he retired were basically barns, sheds that were cobbled together.

And he went there, there was a little church which was a mission of St. Mary's. He went there to take care of this little mission church and get out of the spotlight and leave his teaching and read and pray and sort out these questions for himself. But that was not to be because the young men followed him.

They wanted to live with him. They wanted to be under his tutelage. They wanted to pray with him. And Littlemore became kind of a prototype of a monastery, a community of men living together around a chapel in common prayer.

It's at this time that he preaches his sermon, saying farewell to the Church of England and to his friends. And he goes into seclusion. And for the better part of two years, he was truly in agony about what to do. He was trying to sort out the truth of Christianity, the competing claims of the 16th century reformers, Catholic authorities from antiquity.

And it takes a very long time. But finally in October of 1845, an Italian priest, remember how all this was awakened in Italy and Italians had become important to him, an Italian missionary priest named Dominic Barbary received Newman into the Catholic Church in the chapel of these cottages in Littlemore on the 9th of October. October 9 is now the date in the Roman calendar on which the Feast of Blessed John Henry Newman is kept. He's 44.

And everything he has spent his life building is gone. He's a pariah in Oxford. Half of his family won't speak to him. His friends are furious at him, Keeble, most especially.

He's lost everything. He doesn't have a job or home. And all he knows is he has to obey his conscience. He turns to a man named Nicholas Wiseman, who had been rector of the venerable English college in Rome, the place where Englishmen who were going to study for the priesthood had gone for centuries, and then gone back to England and then made martyrs.

Wiseman was by then a bishop. And Wiseman used his connections to make arrangements for Newman to go to Rome. And he moved to Rome in the fall of 1846. He's 45 years old, and he's got to start his life over.

And the men in the seminary are half his age. And he's a Italian who don't know who he is. He's the most famous theologian in England. And to them he's just some Protestant who's lost.

So he goes through a few classes at the university run by the Society for the Propagation of the Faith, Propaganda, now called the Society for the Evangelization of People, the Great Missionary Society that organizes in Rome the missionary activity to the non-Christian parts of the world. Imagine England and non-Christian part of the world, non-Catholic, yes. And there toward the end of 1847 in Rome Newman has ordained to the priesthood. While he was there he had to think about his return to England and how he was going to live as a Catholic priest.

And the experience that he had in a little more of this kind of monastic religious life had inspired him to try to do the same thing. He did not want to go back and just be a diocesan priest in charge of a parish, which was really the only other alternative. Remember at this time no Catholic can study at the University of Oxford, because in order to be admitted to the university you've got to subscribe to the Articles of Religion, which no Catholic could do. And this was true of all of the universities in England.

There was no possibility for intellectual life in a university setting. So he looked at several alternatives, including the Dominicans, but by then at that point in history the Dominican order was nearly extinguished. Napoleon had almost destroyed it. It had not yet been restored and renewed by the French movement led by La Corder.

So that wasn't an option. And the best thing going in Rome at the time was the community known as the oratory, founded by Saint Philip Nury in the 16th century. So at the moment that Henry VIII is making a shipwreck of Catholicism in England, and John Calvin is ruling Geneva as a theocracy, Philip Nury in Rome is organizing a community of priests to live what was then the new evangelization, to re-vivify the city of Rome itself. Ignatius Loyola is just up the street while they're doing this, founding what will be the Gregorian University and the Church of the Lord Jesus, the J.

Zu. It's a great moment to be in Rome. And Philip Nury drew together a group of laity, the little oratory, and of men who became priests, and they built what was called in the 16th century, the new church, a church on a spot where there hadn't been one before, and it's hard to find a spot in Rome where there had never been a church that was not at least a thousand years old. So they find a spot, and they're never been a church there, so they put one up, and that's the new church.

Chiais in the Wova. It's still called that 400 years later if you go to Rome, la Chiais in the Wova, the new church, which to us looks like a work of antiquity, but no, not for the Romans, it's a new church. And it's that community, that way of living that Newman saw was most flexible and adaptable to the circumstances of the time for Catholics in England. So he went back, leaving Rome in late 1847.

He went back to England and was agonizing over where to go. He couldn't go to Oxford, he was excluded from Oxford. London was a possibility, but there were already things happening in London. He settled finally on Birmingham, or as the Brits call it, Birmingham, which was an industrial cesspool.

Birmingham was one of those cities that the Industrial Revolution transformed almost overnight, smokestacks and factories, and hordes of working poor, mostly Irish, mostly Catholic. So Newman and some of his friends set up shop in Birmingham and formed the Oratoria of St. Philip, they opened a school and started to perish, and in very short order, they have a thriving Catholic presence in Birmingham. Four years later, or five years later, in 1854, the bishops of Ireland are ready to start a university.

Remember, England ruled Ireland. It was impossible for an Irishman to get a university education in Ireland for the same reason that Catholics couldn't go to Oxford. They wanted to start a Catholic university in Ireland so that Ireland's young men would be able to have a university education. Who better than to get the famous Oxford Don, now a Catholic priest?

So he becomes the founding rector of the Catholic University of Ireland, which has undergone countless mutations in the 150 years since, but the successor to the institutional reality to that is University College Dublin. And as the founding rector of the Catholic University of Ireland, Newman gives the lectures that were later published as the ID of the University, which was my introduction to Newman in 1980. He serves for three years as the rector of the university, commuting between Birmingham and Ireland. But he doesn't have, how shall we put it, political skills and runs a foul of quarreling among the bishops in Ireland over how this is going to be structured institutionally.

So he just thanks them and goes back to running the community in Birmingham. All the while, he is exchanging letters with people all over England and in fact the continent as well. I forget how many volumes his published letters fill, but it's enormous and they're all kept. This is an age before telephones, let alone emails.

Everything had to be written by hand and the correspondence is extraordinary. He was a spiritual guide to hundreds of people who wrote for council, who were filled with doubt, who were on the same road he had been on. A splinter group from his oratory in Birmingham left over disputes that weren't worth our attention tonight and went to London and founded another community, also called the Oratory, and raised a huge Italianate church in London called usually just the Oratory, which is there to this day. But he lived largely hidden.

His correspondence was voluminous. He was still writing and researching and lecturing, but he had largely ceased to be a celebrity, as we would now say. Until 1864, when a church of England, Vicar named Charles Kingsley, accused Newman of being a liar, cast dispersions on his masculinity because he'd never been married and created the myth that the whole Oxford movement was a Jesuitical plot, that all those years he was laboring at the university and as a minister in the Church of England, he was really a secret Catholic and the entire thing was a ruse to seduce a generation of young Oxford men into becoming Romanists. Well Newman began to fire back with essays in two-week intervals that were published the next year as a single volume under a Latin title.

The whole text is in English. It's in the titles in Latin, apology of Pro-V to Sua, a defense of his life, meaning my life. And it is a spiritual autobiography that begins when he's 15 and has his conversion experience in school and gives an account from the time he's 15 up to that moment of the inner journey of all the things that he wrestled with in understanding historic Christianity revealed religion, the controversies of the 16th century, the truth of Catholicism, the experience of his conversion. And it's a masterpiece.

It's a piece of the truth of the English prose and of a spiritual autobiography. It made him once again a public celebrity in England. Kingsley was made to look like a fool. Newman actually suited for libel and lost, so the court process was not successful.

But in the court of public opinion, he was vindicated as a wise teacher, a true Englishman and a Christian gentleman. In 1870, he published many books over the course of his life, but some of them were truly singular. And in 1870, he published one called The Grammar of the Sint. His full title is actually an essay in aid of a grammar of a sint.

It will crack your head. It's a psychology, philosophy, theology. It's a review of the phenomenon of religious belief. And in attempt to explain why the act of faith is not irrational, even when the believer cannot give a rational defense of his belief.

If you really want to stretch your mind, read The Grammar of a Sint. Along the way, he published some really splendid things. There's a little monograph on the Benedictines and the Dominicans and the religious genius of Benedictine Dominic. There's a series of lectures called The Present Position of Catholics in England, where he's a pugilist.

He's like Scott Hahn of his day. Come on. I'll take everybody who wants to argue with me. And he's explaining the distinctive features of Catholicism to an English audience.

Well, the cashing out of his apology of Providus Sua, his return to public life as it were, is that in 1878, he was able for the first time since 1842 to go back to Oxford. He went to visit a friend. Almost 40 years. He couldn't go back to the place he left best, because that's what being a Catholic cost him.

As it happens, the very day he was in Oxford for the first time in almost four decades, Pope Pius IX died. Pio Nono, as he's called in Italian, was the longest serving pope in history. He dominates the 19th century. The second half of his papacy is kind of a grim moment in the Church's history for many reasons.

It was during that time that Newman, the Catholic, was held in great suspicion by many Catholics, bishops, theologians, and laypeople. So here's the irony. This man who was adored as an Anglican and then who becomes a Catholic and is despised by the Anglicans is increasingly held in suspicion by the Catholics to whom he went as insufficiently Catholic. Because he did not subscribe to the intellectual method of teaching theology in his day, which was basically memorization of formulae that cooked down the principles of St.

Thomas Aquinas into sandbites. And because he made a principled argument for liberty of conscience, autonomy of reason, even in the face of the truth of revealed religion, his work was generally regarded by the conservative element of the Catholic Church in England as at best suspect and probably crypto Protestantism. In other words, he couldn't win. The Anglican thought he was a dandable Catholic and the Catholic thought he was a dandable Protestant.

And so despite his great personal satisfaction for being a Catholic priest and the founding father of the Birmingham oratory and the founding rector of the Catholic University of Ireland, there's this suspicion hanging over him that he's not really one of us. Well, the year after that trip to Oxford on the day that Pius the night died, there's a new pope, Leo XIII, who has been a student of Newman and understands the trajectory of the man's life and work. And Leo XIII through the secretary of state informs Newman that he's going to make him a cardinal of the Holy Roman Church. And this is Leo's way of signaling to the whole Catholic world.

Yes, his work is Catholic and it is trustworthy and he is not suspect and he is to be revered by Catholics everywhere. It was customary, indeed obligatory at the time, for anyone who was made a cardinal who was not yet a bishop to be ordained to the epistemic. And usually, unless he was a diocesan bishop to live in the city of Rome, Newman wrote back to the pope and acknowledged the gracious offer asking to be dispensed from these two requirements that he would not become a bishop and he would not have to live in Rome so that he could continue living as a priest at the oratory. The pope readily granted both requests and Newman went to Rome to receive the red hat.

When he got to Rome and received the official notification, the ticket that let's him into the consistory called in Italian the Bilieto, like a movie ticket. It's a beautifully engraved thing on parchment that you present and they let you in and now you're cardinal. He received the Bilieto and gave a speech to mark the occasion, sort of a summary of his experience to that moment when he's 78 years old. And he's thinking about his life as a teacher in Oxford, as a priest in the Church of England, his conversion experience in all of the labor sense.

And in the Bilieto speech, among other things he says this, for 30, 40, 50 years, I have resisted to the best of my powers the spirit of liberalism in religion. Never did Holy Church need champions against it more sorely than now, when alas it is an error over spreading as a snare the whole earth. Liberalism in religion is the doctrine that there is no positive truth in religion, but that one creed is as good as another and this is the teaching which is gaining substance and force daily. It is inconsistent with any recognition of any religion as true.

It teaches that all are to be tolerated for all matters of opinion. Revealed religion is not a truth, but a sentiment and a taste. Not an objective fact, not miraculous, and it is the right of each individual to make it say just what strikes his fancy. In his own words, that's Newman's summary of his life's work.

You can have reveal religion or its counterfeit, liberalism and religion, which reduces all religion to a matter of personal taste and opinion. This was also his way of answering his Catholic critics back home, that he does stand with him fully and squarely. Despite the sophistication and the subtlety of the work that he has spent decades elaborating, explaining the complexity of religious belief and the liberty of conscience that each believer must have. So he goes back to England, a cardinal, and once again, as in 1839 and 40, he's the most famous man in the kingdom.

He lived mostly out of sight until his death in 1890. Age gradually left him frail, and he died on August 11, 1890. He was hailed at the time as one of the greatest Englishmen who ever lived. He was celebrated in Littin's Straighte's book, Imman and Victorians, as one of the great personalities of the time.

He was born by Anglicans and Catholics alike. Born born for us. What happened after his death? His work continued to be studied by Catholic theologians.

His early work on the Fathers of the Church was one of the first examples of what we now call resource maul, the return to the sources of theological movement in the 20th century, which prepared the way for the Second Vatican Council. His teaching on religious liberty prefigures the conciliar decree on religious liberty, Dinitatis Humane, which repudiated the confessional state and an established church. And enshrines the principle that the church never seeks to impose anything. She only proposes the truth of the gospel.

Many theologians regard him as the first father of the Second Vatican Council, because his work paved the way for that event in the 1960s. Newman was beatified on September the 19th, 2010, by Pope Benedict the 16th. Benedict had been a student of Newman's all of his adult life and took great delight in personally beatifying Newman. When Benedict became the pope, he stopped at the custom that John Paul had observed for a quarter of a century of personally presiding at both the addifications and canonizations.

One is beatified, declared by Atus. That is, one is said to note that the church knows the certitude that this person sees God in the face after the certification of one miracle, and is canonized after the certification of the second miracle. The principle difference is not where more certain that this person is in heaven. It's that a Beatatus, one of the Beati, can be venerated locally and a canonized saint is extended to the universal church.

So Benedict said when he became pope, he would no longer preside at beatifications only at canonizations, and cardinals would do the beatifying and he would do the canonizing to sort of heighten this distinction. Well he disregarded his own policy in the case of John Henry Newman. It was an outdoor mass near Birmingham, and in the night before the mass, there was a vigil outside, and the pope said this in his homily. This has been at the 16th and 2010.

Newman, by his own account, traced the course of his whole life back to a powerful experience of conversion which he had had as a young man. There was an immediate experience of the truth of God's word, of the objective reality of Christian revelation as handed down in the church. This experience at once religious and intellectual would inspire his vocation to the administer of the gospel, his discernment of the source of the authoritative teaching of the church of God, and his zeal for the renewal of ecclesial life and fidelity to the apostolic tradition. At the end of his life Newman would describe his life's work as a struggle against the growing tendency to view religion as a purely private and subjective matter, a question of personal opinion.

Here is the first lesson we can learn from his life. In our day, when an intellectual and moral relativism threatens to say the very foundation of our society, Newman reminds us that as men and women made in the image and likeness of God, we were created to know the truth, to find in that truth our ultimate freedom, and the fulfillment of our deepest human aspirations. In a word, we are meant to know Christ, who is himself the way the truth and the life. That is why, Don Henry Newman, long before he was Beatus, became the patron of university chaplaincies established by the Catholic Church, ironically not in England but in the United States.

Many Catholic who went to a university, a secular university in the earlier mid-20th century remembers the Newman Club. That was the name given to Catholic chaplaincies for university students after John Henry Newman. Because of his understanding of the phenomenon of disbelief and belief, his experience of conversion and of well-considered faith of the apostolic tradition, he became the model for a well-educated Christian. And now he is Beatus.

Remember that my first introduction to Newman after his own idea of the university was Mary El-Treber in a holy week of 1991, 20 years after my conversion. No, I'm sorry, at that time, 10 years after. I went to England, I was living in Italy, I was a seminarian, and I went to England with two classmates. And we had a splendid week, it was just marvelous.

We flew from Rome to London, and we rented a car and drove all over the south of England. Palm Sunday we were in Canterbury Cathedral. We drove to Salisbury and Glastonbury and Bath. And we went to visit Oxford, and one of the students from the oratory was a classmate of ours in Rome, and we went to visit him at the oratory.

We went to Birmingham. I have photographs of me in Newman's private room, holding his bravery at his grave. On Holy Thursday we were going to go to London. We were overnight knocks for leaving for London.

We were going to have Mass of the Lord's Supper at Westminster Cathedral in London. But before we met, I said to our friend at the oratory, you know, I'd really like to go to Littlemore, where he lived in 1842 to 1845. It has been preserved and is a residence for a group of consecrated women from Germany. Remember it's Ratzinger who beatified him.

Newman had exercised enormous influence in Germany and Italy through his writing. This group of women belonged to a community called the Work, that's a varic. And they lived there, and it's a center of study and prayer, and one of the priests from the oratory goes out to celebrate Mass for them in the chapel, which was the chapel, the room in which Newman was became a Catholic. He celebrated the Eucharist in his last days as an Anglican priest.

So they call ahead, and the women know that we're coming, these three Americans, and we come screeching up in our Mustang. When we rented the car, it was a convertible Ford Mustang. And I went racing around England, bumping up on the curb every time we went into a round about on the wrong side of the road. We hired a car, that's right.

And so we get to Littlemore, and the main room has been turned into a little museum where memorabilia is on display, including his violin. He'd love to play violin. And who is there? Just coincidence.

Or Providence, but Mary-El-Trevor, who was then an old woman. She lived till the year 2000. Well, I was just deeply moved by this. I took her hand and kissed it.

I said, Miss Trevor, I owe my faith under heaven to John Henry Newman, and I owe my introduction to John Henry to you. And she began to cry. We had one of those moments. It was just lovely.

We saw the buildings, and then the superior of the community said, it's time for mid-day prayer. Would you join us before you leave? So we went into this little chapel where Newman became a Catholic. And when we got in there, the superior turned to the end, said, would you lead the prayer?

And it was just literally hours, right out of the brief. So we had mid-day office. And everybody left with me. I had not spoken even to my classmates about the doubts in my heart about my vocation.

I was really not certain I could do the whole celibacy thing. And it was causing me great interior distress. Newman himself had intuited in that critical year when he was in school at the age of 15 that he would be a lifelong celibate. He believed that God had called him to make that sacrifice for the sake of the kingdom.

And then of course, the course of his life and his influence in bringing me to the Lord Jesus. So I'm sitting there in the chapel by myself, really not sure why I'm slinging. But filled with doubt, we're going down to London. The Mass of the Lord suffers.

It's the day on which the priest was celebrated, the chrism Mass. Is this what I meant to do with my life? And in the silence, there was as though a hand rested on my shoulder. And in my mind, not with my ears, but in my mind, I heard the words, you're on the right road.

It was that simple, a fraction of a second. I'm not given to religious experience. It's all in here for me. But when I came out a few minutes later, one of my classmates saw my face and said, what happened in there?

Blessed John Henry happened in there, a friend on the way, a man who knew about doubt and vocational crises and the struggle to believe in the face of obstacles both interior and exterior. You're on the right road. So there's Newman at the beginning and the end of my story. And now a gift to the whole church, blessed John Henry of Oxford.

When will he be canonized? God alone knows. Sadly, he's not in the American liturgical calendar on October 9th. He is in England.

I have suggested to a variety of people with some influence in these matters that he should be on the American calendar because of his influence in our university chaplaincies. We'll see. In any event, his life and his work which filled the 19th century stand as a perpetual witness to the truth of the gospel, to the truth of the Catholic faith, to the possibility of conversion against all odds, to the reward of faithful servants who sacrifice everything for the Pearl of Great Price. May Paul's there and ask for your questions or comments.

Tritoninie, which is what got him into such great trouble and caused the explosion that blew the Oxford Movement off its rails, was his argument that it was possible to read the 39 articles of religion as a Catholic. The 39 articles which were added to the Book of Common Prayer were an attempt in the 16th century to nail down the specifics of English Protestantism. And here was Newman arguing that these are not Protestant articles of faith at all and that it is possible for a Catholic, not a Roman, but a Catholic, an Anglo-Catholic, to read these in a Catholic way and affirm the apostolic tradition of the ancient faith in a Catholic way at the same time, a reformed way, the Viimadia. Remember, this was the project.

Neither the errors of Rome nor the errors of the Continental Reformation but pure undisturbed true Christianity of the English variety. The ancient church in England and the bishops of the Church of England didn't see it that way. Of course, we're Protestants. It's the gist of their reply.

For that. The Brompton oratory. I couldn't come up with the word. Yes.

The Brompton oratory is this gigantic pile of stone. It's alienate. Once you go into it, you forget that you're in Kensington. You're in the most fashionable place in London.

Instead, when you're inside, you'll swear you're in Italy. The art and the architecture is all Italian. It's Baroque Italian at the most extreme. And that's how the founding fathers of the oratory in London wanted it to be.

It was in your face. It was a statement of Baroque Catholicism at its most exuberant to proper English people. And it was deliberately provocative. No.

That's where the similarities end because he was holy and I'm not. That's true. That's true. I would be shown to the door.

No. The book was first. The book was first. The intellectual foundation was laid before the personal crisis.

What Gary's referring to is a part of my conversion story. There were many pieces that fit together. The intellectual preparation was this introduction to Newman and other Catholic authors, reading Augustine and Aquinas in a course that I was taking, recognizing that there was far more depth to Christian ideas than I had known as a boy in the Carolinas. The latter pieces were personal.

The end of a relationship with a woman I hoped would be my wife, the death of one of my sweet mates in the summer between freshman and sophomore year. These things eventually came together as a single stream. At the time I didn't perceive them as connected. There was this disconnect between what I was reading and thinking and arguing about and what my life was.

And later they came together but no, they were separate at the beginning. Well it's close, John Barbery. D-A-R-B-E-R-I. There's the difference.

That's right. If you want to read a single biography of Newman, the most important contemporary work is by Ian Carr, K-E-R. He was a Catholic priest and an Oxford Don. And it's a brilliant summary of Newman's life and work.

Mary O'Trepur's biography published in 1962 is still a really splendid introduction. The Pillar of the Cloud is volume one, light in Winter is volume two. It's a little more pious and devotional than cars, which is sort of scientific and professional history, but both give you an authentic glimpse of the man. It has been suggested that one of the reasons it took so long to be out of fine Newman is that there was a hesitation that had less to do with his intellectual work and his writing than with his personality.

It was often suggested that he was overly delicate and pernickety and a prickly pair of personality and that he took every little snub to heart and got huffy about it. That's all false. That's not the man. That's part of what Litt and Strachey described in his portrait of Newman in imminent Victorians.

But Strachey was a mess. Strachey was a confused, self-loathing homosexual who was a mess, a brilliant man, part of the Bloobes Berry set, but a mess. Strachey didn't know Newman personally and his portrait of Newman, metaphorically, created this image of the over refined cleric, which simply doesn't correspond to the man. The Newman's character emerges in his own writing and in the testimony of the people who didn't know him.

He was an extraordinary man who lived through difficult challenges and responded as we might respond ourselves to disappointments and setbacks and the false accusations of enemies. He wasn't going to take an insult lying down. All of that was finally sort of through during the process that led up to his beatification. The judgment of the church was he lived the Christian life with heroic virtue.

I suspect that after his canonization he will be enrolled among the doctors of the church. That is among the theologians and teachers of Christianity who received the highest approbation that the church can offer, holding this person up as an exemplar and an official teacher of the gospel. John Henry Newman. Unless there's anything else we'll end with a prayer.

Yes. Did he have any influence concerning what's going on bringing Engwigens in today? Yes and no. No in the sense that there's no dotted line connecting Newman's conversion in 1845 from the Church of England to the Catholic Church to what's going on.

Yes, in the sense that he's the trailblazer. He's the principal architect of the idea that it's possible to be a Catholic and an Anglican at the same time. And then having built this beautiful edifice he brought the whole thing down. He destroyed it himself to demonstrate there is no vianidia.

There's not a middle way between Catholic and Protestant. There's only the true Catholic faith and all the false pretenders of which Anglicanism is won. He made that very clear. There was no soft pedaling the notion that every Christian community which separates itself from the church governed by the successor of Peter, the Pope and the bishops of the world in communion with him that every Christian community who separates itself from that church is departing from the church that the Lord Jesus founded and governs through his vicar on earth, the Bishop of Rome.

So the first half of his life was leading up to this beautiful edifice of the vianidia. And the second half of his life was destroying it and making sure that it was stamped out for all time. The unfortunate thing is generations of Engwigens read Newman up to 1842 and then stop. They're so entranced by the vision of the vianidia.

And so adamant in insisting that they're Catholics, not Romans, but Catholics, that they forget that's the prologue. Now go to the rest. One of my own family is a bishop in the continuing Anglican movement, this tiny little sliver of Anglicanism left after the fracturing of the Episcopal Church for the last 40 years. My first cousin is a bishop in one of these movements.

He's never read the apology of Proveda Sula. He won't read it because he knows what's going to happen if he does. The whole thing comes crashing down. Newman described it later in his life as unreal.

It was a church that he built in his mind. It was not a real existing church. It was an illusion. It was a glittering illusion.

It was beautiful and powerful and it unleashed great creativity both in England and the United States. For example, it led to the re-establishing of religious life in the Church of England. And then it came to the United States. For example, outside of Boone, North Carolina, there's a little place called, as they say it up there, Valley Cruces, the Valley of the Cross.

The religious community called the Fathers of the Holy Cross, founded in the Oxford movement, came down to North Carolina to the Far Mountains to set up monastic life at the invitation of the Episcopal Bishop of North Carolina during all that, a man named Levi's Solomon Ives. He was a larger-than-life figure who was greatly influenced by Newman. Well, Newman's trajectory drives after him. Levi's Solomon Ives and his wife went on the grand tour of the continent in the fashion of mid-19th century.

You have to go for three months and you take Seamertrunk's filled with all of your stuff and you go by ship and then by carriage and train and you go to all the fashionable places in Europe. And all of that was a cover for their final destination, which was Rome. And he asked for an audience with Pius IX and he took off his Pectoral Cross and his Episcopal Ring and he laid them at the feet of Pius IX and asked to become a Catholic. This was Newman's example.

And Pius said, sure, fine. But there was no possibility in that day for a former Anglican clergyman to be ordained to the priesthood. So Ives and his wife came back to the United States and established the first version of what became Catholic Charities in New York City. At which point, as in the case of Newman, all of these very fine establishment of Episcopal clergyman said, see, we told you this whole Anglo-Catholic thing is crypto-Romanism and that's what it leads to and we want no part of it.

Meanwhile, these monks are out there in the Valley Cruces living like Catholic monks in the Episcopal Church. So there was this flowering but ambiguous and the counter signs. All of that kind of went to sleep on both sides of the Atlantic except for a few places in large cities on the east coast or the industrial Midwest. There was a little parish in Boston and New York and Philadelphia and Washington and Chicago and Milwaukee that was the Anglo-Catholic Episcopal Church.

And if you went there in the late 19th century or rather early 20th century, even to this day to that little place, what you'd see looks like Baroque Catholicism in Elizabeth and English. Imagine the Solomon high-tridentine mass written by Shakespeare and that flourished for a little while and now it's all bankrupt, it's all empty and collapsing. So Anglican or Mchete-Bus, now to come back to your question, Anglican or Mchete-Bus, not coincidentally, was a structure, the document was created, the structure for these Anglicans was given by Benedict, the German pope who beatified John Henry Newman. He was creating a space for these small groups of Anglicans and they are very small who wanted to become Catholics and preserve some of their Anglican heritage.

So in that sense, yes, it's a bridge, it's a bridge, they are Catholic. They are Catholic. The difference in this case is that the Bishop of Rome says that this is what you may do. The Bishop of Rome says this is authentic, that's the touchstone.

No, these former Anglicans who are now Catholics are completely Catholic. They are as much a part of the Catholic Church as we are. They use a liturgy that's slightly different, so do the Maronites, so do the millions of Ukrainian Greek Catholics, so do Melchites. There are 19 or 21 separate ritual churches in the Catholic Church other than the Latin Church and they're all authentically Catholic.

Anglican or Mchete-Bus was a gracious gesture of hospitality on the part of the Bishop of Rome to say to these Anglicans who have been yearning for full communion with the Catholic Church to come in, not as isolated individuals, but as groups. Come with your Bishop, come with your pastor, come as a group, retain your identity as a parish or now as an ordinary, a quasi-diocese and not be absorbed, if you will, as though you are simply discreet individuals without these bonds between you. How long it will last anybody knows? I suspect not more than a generation or two as a bridge to make it possible for these people to return to full communion with as much ease as they can.

I think it was a gesture of great magnanimity on the part of Benedict. I'm going to conclude with a prayer written by Blessed John Henry. May he support us all the day to the shades lengthen and the evening comes and the busy world is hushed and the fever of life is over and our work is done. Then in his mercy may he give us a safe lodging and a holy rest and peace at the last, glory be to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit.

As it was in the beginning is now and ever shall be, world without end, amen. In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Thank you, friends, and good night.