John Henry Newman: A Cardinal for our Times – Edmund Campion

Edmund Campion is a Sydney priest, writer, editor, literary judge and academic. Among his published works are Rockchoppers: Growing up Catholic in Australia, Australian Catholics and A Place in the City. An avid historian, Edmund Campion completed a major work on John Henry Newman in 1980 following his discovery of unpublished documents from Lord Acton while at Cambridge University in the 1970s. Following John Henry Newman’s beatification by the Vatican in 2010, Edmund Campion addressed The Sydney Institute on Tuesday 13 September 2011 to reflect on Newman’s great faith and unique vision.

JOHN HENRY NEWMAN: A CARDINAL FOR OUR TIMES

EDMUND CAMPION

When John Henry Newman died, in August 1890, among the many, many obituaries (including one in The Bulletin in Sydney), perhaps the most remarkable was in the London Anglican weekly, The Guardian.  It was written, we now know, by the Dean of St Paul’s Cathedral, London, Richard William Church, who had been a disciple of Newman’s at Oriel College, Oxford; and then in the depressed year of 1846, had founded The Guardian, to keep Newman’s vision alive in the church he had just abandoned; and had in recent years written (but not yet published) that classic of religious historiography, The Oxford Movement 1833-1845, after consultation with Newman, who sometimes stayed with him in London, where the old man much enjoyed the company of Dean Church’s daughters, who were astonished to find that their father’s clever friend had not read a favourite book of theirs and so they sent him Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and later The Hunting of the Snark, also by Lewis Carroll.  Well, then, this is how the Dean of St Paul’s began his obituary of the Cardinal Deacon of St Giorgio in Velabro:

Cardinal Newman is dead, and we lose in him not only one of the very greatest masters of English style, not only a man of singular purity and beauty of character, not only an eminent example of personal sanctity, but the founder, we may almost say, of the Church of England as we see it.

“The founder, we may almost say, of the Church of England as we see it” – it is a startling claim. If an Anglican were writing of Newman today, I wonder would he or she borrow R W Church’s words without qualifying them somewhat.

For that matter, what would a Catholic writer say of Newman today? Perhaps, reaching for an epithet, as obituarists are wont to do, he might borrow phrases which are often heard, such as “the Father of Vatican II” or “Vatican II – Newman’s Council” or “the 20^th Century – Newman’s hour”. Perhaps such epithets claim too much (and are difficult to substantiate). Yet, as Pope Paul VI said of him, many of Newman’s central concerns continue to have contemporary relevance:  across the gap of two centuries he speaks to us in ways that still make sense.

Take as an example the narrative of his journey from being an Anglican to being a Catholic. He was brought up, he tells us in the Apologia pro vita sua “‘to take great delight in reading the Bible” and this never left him. As a young Oxford don, adding to this, he began a systematic reading of the earliest Christian writers known as the Fathers, starting with Ignatius of Antioch, that celebrant of episcopacy. He wanted to believe that the Church of England was the linear descendant of the Church of the Fathers; and you might say that what he and his friends in the Oxford Movement were trying to do, was to re-establish in England the Church of the Fathers, the Primitive Church:  fasting, feast days, liturgies, penances, celibacy, belief in miracles and devotion to the saints. Looking back on his years as an Anglican, he would write in 1871:

I was always asking myself what would the Fathers have done, what would those whose works were around my room, whose names were ever meeting my eyes, whose authority was ever influencing my judgment, what would these men have said, how would they have acted in my position?  I had made a good case on paper, but what judgment would be passed on it by Athanasius, Basil, Gregory, Hilary and Ambrose?

No wonder that when he came back into his room at Littlemore after making his submission to Rome at the feet of Father Dominic Barberi, on 9 October 1845, he took the Benedictine patristic folios down from his shelves, held them in his arms and wept over them:  “You are all mine now.”

Why did he do it? Much later, when photography was in vogue, he would hit upon the image that doing church history is like turning the pages of a family photograph album:  century by century, you can see the family face passing through the generations. And that face, he had come to realise, was not an Anglican face. Another way of putting this is to say: if Athanasius, Basil, Gregory, Hilary or Ambrose came to London, where do you think they would worship? It’s a powerful argument and it works through the imagination not primarily through the reason.

Like Pascal, Newman knew that in life matters, change happens through the imagination more than through the reason – reason yes, if you are doing science or mathematics, but not if you’re about falling in love or changing your church. (Not that those life decisions are irrational; but their motor power comes from the imagination.)  He once wrote, in a letter to The Times:

The heart is commonly reached not through the reason, but through the imagination, by means of direct impressions, by the testimony of facts and events, by history, by description.  Persons influence us, voices melt us, looks subdue us, deeds inflame us.

R W Church in his obituary would single out two things that had influenced Newman’s decision in 1845. The first was the devotional life of masses of Catholics – the crowds at a pilgrimage or a shrine reminding him of the multitudes who followed Our Lord about the hills of Galilee. Secondly, was the self-sacrifice of the vowed religious who served the poor and the sick in their schools and hospitals. Reading this recently I was reminded of something Cardinal Ratzinger once said that the only compelling argument for the Church was the saints it had made and the great art produced in its womb.

So no one argued John Henry Newman into the Church. “Catholics didn’t make us Catholics,” he once said; “Oxford made us Catholics.” Indeed, while he was wrestling with his soul, he kept away from Catholics. There is an exception to this that I want to mention. Charles Russell spent most of his priestly life at Maynooth, the national seminary of Ireland, becoming in time its Professor of Church History and then its President. He wrote many articles for the Dublin Review, and several books and is today quite forgotten. He deserves to be remembered among us.  Here is what Newman wrote of him towards the end of the Apologia:

He had, perhaps, more to do with my conversion than any one else. He called upon me, in passing through Oxford in the summer of 1841, and I think I took him over some of the buildings of the University. He called again another summer, on his way from Dublin to London. I do not recollect that he said a word on the subject of religion on either occasion. He sent me at different times several letters; he was always gentle, mild, unobtrusive, uncontroversial. He let me alone.

So when John Henry Newman moved finally, he did so on the dictates of his conscience, not in submission to anyone’s argumentation.  But there was a price to pay for following one’s conscience. Later, he would often say that losing his friends after the decision of 1845 was the thing that cost him most. Indeed, in the two years before the decision, as he tossed and turned, the prospect of his loss seems to have brought him close to a nervous breakdown. The heart, he would say, bears the scars of wounds as much as the body. You can see the continuing pain all through the volumes of his letters. And if you look at the dedication of the Apologia on its final page you will see the same thing:  his Anglican memories heavy with personal sentiment, the Catholic experience spare and straitened. An enemy once said of the Irish statesman Eamon de Valera, that all his life he wrestled with his conscience and he always won. Of John Henry Newman you might say that he wrestled with his conscience and he always lost.

So when, throughout his life, following one’s conscience became an issue, he knew from his own experience that there was a price to pay. That is why he would not hurry people into the Church: they must consider the price. His enemies thought he was perhaps dissuading people, when he was really cautioning them to be aware of consequences.

That said, he was adamant that conscience must be obeyed because it was the voice of God. So central was this to his thinking that he made the existence of conscience a proof of the existence of God. Everyone, he would say, has a conscience that tells him about right and wrong. It is not produced by society or breeding or family; it is innate, inherent, as natural as our digestion. How is it there?  Its only explanation is God, who speaks to us about our duty in our conscience.

Newman once wrote that in Christian tradition – that is, Anglicans, Wesleyans, Presbyterians and others, as well as Catholics – conscience means “the voice of God in the nature and heart of man, as distinct from the voice of Revelation”.  It means “a principle planted within us before we have had any training, although training and experience are necessary for its strength, growth, and due formulation”.  Conscience is (Newman continues) “a constituent element of the mind, as our perception of other ideas may be, as our powers of reasoning, as our sense of order and the beautiful, and our other intellectual endowments.” Conscience, he says all Christians agree, is “the internal witness of both the existence and the law of God”.

Faced with making a decision about a particular course of action, Newman says he would see “what theologians could do for me; what the bishops and clergy around me;  what my confessor;  what friends whom I revered…”  and if, after all that, he found he couldn’t take their view of the matter, “then I must rule myself by my own judgement and my own conscience”.

Whenever I recall this teaching of Newman, I see people nodding their heads. Yes, yes, they seem to say, we know that, this is Church teaching as we have known it all our lives – certainly since that Vatican II Declaration on Religious Liberty (Dignitatis Humanae).  It was not always so. The first Catholic bishop Newman knew, Cardinal Wiseman, once wrote,

The Church does indeed often want your zealous co-operation, your social influence, your learned or ready pen, your skilful pencil, your brilliant talents, your weighty name, your abundant means. But the direction, the rule belongs to us.  We will call you forth when the Church of God wants your aid; we will always gladly see you working with us, but we cannot permit you to lead where religious interests are concerned.

Not much room for individual conscience or personal responsibility there. In Cardinal Wiseman’s clericalist model of a Church, the laity had only to follow their leaders; it was “my way or the highway”. “What is the province of the laity?” the Pope’s friend Monsignor Talbot wrote to Archbishop Manning, “To hunt, to shoot, to entertain. These matters they understand, but to meddle in ecclesiastical matters they have no right at all.”

What a contrast was John Henry Newman. The Oxford Movement had been a collaborative effort between clergy and laity; and Newman hoped to see something similar in his new church. When, in the early 1850s, the Irish bishops invited him over to start a university, he thought his providential moment had come. Perhaps this was the great mission God had intended for him in his Catholic years, a Catholic university for the English-speaking world. A university, he knew was not a seminary, not a teachers’ college, not a school of nursing: it was to produce men of the world for the world,  Catholic laymen who were equipped to pursue their own vocations.

Alas, alas, it was not to be: the Irish bishops, led by Cardinal Cullen (whose nephews, as bishops, brought his clericalist vision to Australia), wanted a subservient, docile laity in a priest-ridden church. By 1858, Newman had had enough; he resigned; and never in his long life went back to Ireland. The Idea of a University, his programatic lectures, were allowed to stay in print (400 copies of the first edition came to Australia, influencing our neonatal universities and remaining on the shelves to tease anyone brave enough to engage in tertiary education today).

But after his experience of Ireland and as he got to know English Catholic bishops, he came to see that a Catholic university in the nineteenth century would be an impossibility – the Bishops, whose experience of higher education was mainly in Roman seminaries, would not allow a true university to happen. By 1872 he was writing, “I should not propose a Catholic university for I think our rulers [i.e. the Bishops] would not give us a real one.”

Newman turned to other things. His experience of undergraduates in Dublin revealed deficiencies in Catholic schools; and now Catholic parents, particularly converts, wanted to send their boys to Oxford or Cambridge, and who would prepare them? They petitioned Newman to start a school: might it not be a Catholic Eton, without the physical thuggery of English public schools nor the spying and tale-bearing of Catholic colleges? So, at the behest of the laity, he commenced the Oratory School. The noticeable feature of its culture was that it stayed a lay project: he insisted that the laity remained engaged in the school, refusing to fill in when they were slow to respond to needs.

Well, as you may know, sending Catholic boys to open universities such as Oxford and Cambridge would be banned while Cardinal Manning was alive. Manning and the Vatican kept Catholics out of the universities to maintain control over their minds. An educated laity, open to the liberal currents of national culture, would threaten clerical control.  “The Archbishop considers only an ignorant laity to be manageable,” wrote Newman.

The same mindset had blocked a free press for English Catholics. This story is perhaps known to you too. In 1858 the young Sir John Acton returned to England from his studies abroad – studies that would lead at the end of his life to his appointment as Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge, the first Catholic to hold a chair there in 300 years (a fact suspiciously omitted from Archbishop Couve de Murville’s book on Catholic Cambridge).  Now, in 1858, Acton teamed up with a sharp convert clergyman, Richard Simpson (he would write the standard life of St Edmund Campion), and together they would run a magazine called The Rambler. (Years later, Acton would write to a scholarly bishop, an Anglican, “the go-ahead work is found in periodicals” – still true, wouldn’t you say?)

Acton and Simpson set to with youthful vigour that was noticed by men like Matthew Arnold and Mr Gladstone. What they wrote, however, and the way they wrote it was unpalatable to the bishops – The Rambler for instance discussed educational questions, which the bishops considered closed to lay discussion. So the bishops moved towards public censure. Reading The Rambler sometimes set Newman’s teeth on edge, but to keep the magazine open as “a safety valve”, as he said, he now agreed to take over the editorship. Writing about the educational question, he observed that of course the hierarchy was interested in hearing from lay people, whose children, after all, were the ones in school.

To clinch the point, he remarked, by the way, that recently the laity had been consulted in the definition of a dogma, the dogma of the Immaculate Conception, in 1854.  Consult lay Catholics about a dogma – was this a heresy?  It certainly gave offence to watching heresy-hunters.  To cover his tracks, Newman now produced a long article, “On Consulting the Faithful in Matters of Doctrine”.  In the history of theology this is a landmark, a foundational document in modern ecclesiology that leads straight to Vatican II teaching on the Church (just as his other writings lead straight to Vatican II on freedom of conscience). But in 1859 it horrified the heresy-hunters; and Newman lost the editorship, retiring into gloom and despondency; and in time Acton changed The Rambler into The Home and Foreign Review until it too fell, in 1864, the year of the anti-liberal Syllabus of Errors.

It’s a sad story, but it gives us one good cameo. When William Bernard Ullathorne, Bishop of Birmingham, visited Newman to persuade him out of the editorship, he remarked, “Well, after all, who are the laity?” to which Newman replied, “The Church would look foolish without them.”

This cameo of Newman’s pointed reply to Ullathorne is one I treasure. Another comes from a letter from Acton to Simpson. In the early days of the magazine, when its first troubles were brewing, Acton went to Birmingham to see Newman. On that cold December afternoon, they sat for three hours over the fire while Acton poured out his troubles, Newman rocking back and forth, Acton said, “like an old woman with the toothache” and surprising the young baronet with his sympathy for their cause.  He complained about the ignorance of their would-be theologians, said Acton, and the “natural inclination of men in power to tyrannise”.

Now there’s an idea Acton squirrelled away in his memory: years later he would polish it into a pungent phrase: “Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men.”  Newman kept using the words “tyrants” and “tyrannise” in these years as the decade darkened down towards its denouement in the Vatican I Infallibility decree.

In his sixties, Newman often thought about his own death. (He would, in fact, live until his ninetieth year.) After the debacle of The Rambler he stopped writing for publication.  Under a cloud in Rome and out of favour at home, he decided to remain silent. He still wrote – ah, yes: Newman without a pen in his hand is unimaginable. What he wrote were letters – as many as 20 in a day. Now collected into 32 thick volumes (the last three of them edited by an Australian Marist Brother, Brother Frank McGrath) Newman’s letters are the primary source for the story of his life: “A man’s life lies in his letters,” he wrote more than once. He shared with Acton the view that the only authentic biographies were collections of letters strung together with a minimum of explanatory matter – a view that, in an age of emails and text messages and phone calls, has not stood the test of time. (I speak as the biographer of Ted Kennedy of Redfern, who was never off the telephone and who wrote only public letters meant for public consumption.)

Newman’s letters take us behind the scenes, as it were, of the great public dramas of his life. They tell us what he was really thinking, really feeling:  there is the letter to Emily Bowles, marked MOST PRIVATE, criticising the Roman authorities; his snub to Monsignor Talbot, who wanted him to preach to a more select congregation in Rome than he could find in Birmingham (“Birmingham people have souls”); his fierce complaint against the scheming Henry Edward Manning; his letter to Gerard Manley Hopkins siding with the Irish against the English occupation; his protest against Catholic conservatives at the time of Vatican I (“an aggressive insolent faction”); and his exemplary rebuke of his sometime disciple, John Walter, proprietor of The Times, for his anti-Catholic bigotry.

Other letters tell you about the private, domestic Newman – worrying about the butcher’s bills; troubled incessantly with toothache; attending a children’s party; putting in a shower bath and using it five times a week; sending nonsense verse to a girl who baked him a cake, and another letter to a girl who made him some pen-wipers; writing hymns while shaving in the morning; laughing in bed about an Anthony Trollope novel, then waking up and laughing again; and a constant nightmare that he was back in Oxford, about to preach a university sermon with nothing prepared.

So the letters are a window into the quotidian John Henry Newman going about his duties in the Oratory parish in Birmingham, as well as a record of his pastoral care of the many people from all over the place who consulted him in the stressful years of the Syllabus of Errors and the Infallibility decree. He said Mass, he heard confessions, he visited his parishioners … and he preached. Newman’s Anglican sermons have always attracted attention: undergraduates packed into St Mary’s church at Oxford to hear them, remembering them all their lives and quoting them.

Dean Church said that while men were reading and discussing the Tracts for the Times, they were learning the living meaning of their faith in those sermons. The wisest of church historians, Owen Chadwick, in his little book on Newman (the best short book on him, in my estimation) says that the Anglican sermons were “the most important publication, not only of his Protestant days, but of his life”. (There’s a challenging judgment for you. Discuss, as an examination paper on Newman might say.)

At Oxford, Newman read his sermons, that is, he wrote them out and simply read them to an attentive congregation. Which is why we have eight volumes of the Parochial and Plain Sermons, as he called them when he published them all together. When he became a Catholic, he observed that Catholic priests did not read from a prepared text, so he adopted their practice; which is why, apart from some special-occasion preaching such as The Second Spring (at the first synod of the restored Catholic hierarchy, in 1852), we have none of his Birmingham parish sermons. What he did in Birmingham was to mount the pulpit with Bible in hand and speak directly to the people, turning the pages of the Bible and reading texts to them. People remembered how reverently he read Our Lord’s words. Afterwards he would go to his room and write down his line of thought, as he had developed it in the pulpit. At Sunday High Mass, he took his turn with the other Fathers of the Oratory in giving the sermon. It was their custom to limit the duration of a sermon; so a boy from the school would sit with a watch and a bell, and when time was up he would ring the bell, even if the preacher were J H Newman.  And Newman would stop. One of the great preachers of nineteenth century England rung off by a schoolboy! Amazing!

Even after he became a Cardinal, in 1879, he continued to preach at parish Masses as his turn came round. But within a few years, as he moved into his eighties, he began to complain that he sometimes forgot what he was going to say. So he dug out the manuscripts of his Oxford sermons (he still had them) and took them into the pulpit and read them to a new audience. I think this is evidence of Newman’s remarkable continuity of mind. A century earlier, Dr Johnson had asserted that a man who goes from Protestantism to Popery loses nothing; he adds to what he already has.  This was true of Newman: his mind, before 1845 and after 1845, remained the same; but it went on growing as it reached out and assimilated new material.

It was, however, the same mind – which is why, from the 1860s he brought back into print the books he had written as a young Anglican, such as the sermons.  The core of his preaching was the foundational doctrine of all who claim the name of Christians – that Jesus Christ was both God and Man, the Incarnation – proclaimed in such a way that it was real, here-and-now relevant and personally demanding for each one of his hearers.

Throughout this lecture, I have made glancing references to Newman’s difficulties with those with authority in the Church. There was Cardinal Wiseman, who wrote an article on a paedophile friar, Fra Giovanni Achilli of Malta, which Newman used in a mordant lecture that led him to be charged with criminal libel. Would Wiseman help him with his defence? Certainly, certainly. But the letters Wiseman wrote to continental authorities were too weak to be of use; and the documents he had promised never turned up;  and Newman lost the case. Then there was the scheme for a new English translation of the Bible with Newman as its principal. It was proposed by the Bishops; and so Newman set to gathering a library and choosing his collaborators; until the American bishops got to hear of it and wrote to Wiseman suggesting that Newman work with them on a translation they were doing. Wiseman sent their letter on to Newman and never mentioned it again. So the Newman translation died of inanition and was buried in the Cardinal’s silence. Worse. At the time of the Consulting the Faithful article in The Rambler, when Newman was under investigation in Rome, his letter of explanation was lost by Wisemen and never presented to Rome. Newman learnt not to trust Cardinal Wiseman.

Then there was Cardinal Cullen in Dublin who kept his own counsel, wrapping himself in silence, neither replying to Newman’s letters about the university, nor speaking with him about it. The Cardinal wanted a servant, not a collaborator. As for Newman’s relations with Henry Edward Manning, they are sufficiently well known, to need much exploration here. Manning came to see Newman, with his trust in the laity and his schemes for their advancement, as “the most dangerous man in England” (the phrase is Talbot’s, with whom Manning agreed.)

Manning’s nephew in the Birmingham Oratory, Henry Ignatius Dudley Ryder – Manning’s wife and Ryder’s mother had been sisters – hit upon a brilliant military metaphor when he saw his uncle the Cardinal as a forceful major-general deploying God’s army and hence being punitive against anyone who did not fall in with his battle plans, as Newman certainly didn’t.

By the mid 1860, the two best known converts from the Oxford Movement were enemies. I cannot trust the Archbishop, Newman wrote, he would have to go through the fires of Purgatory before I trust him again. Well, as Dom Cuthbert Butler of Downside Abbey once remarked, church history is often a story of quarrels between good men. And speaking of Downside men, let us not forget William Bernard Ullathorne, who began his hierarchical career here in Sydney and ended it as Bishop of Birmingham. Newman, who got on well with him, nevertheless came to say that justice, truth or kindness would have no chance with him, if Pope or Propaganda spoke otherwise.

Newman, being Newman, tried to win some meaning out of his experience of episcopal power. He never allowed his difficulties to dilute his duty of obedience: “God forbid that I should liken them to the ‘Scribes and Pharisees’ – but still I obey them, as Scribes and Pharisees were to be obeyed as God’s representatives, not from devotion to them.”

Still, he was human and in his private journal, to which he committed his most intimate thoughts, he wrote, in 1867: “The iron has entered my soul. I mean that confidence in any superiors whatever never can blossom again within me.” His harsh experience, he had written in an early entry in the private journal, “has made me feel that in the Blessed Sacrament is my great consolation, and that while I have Him who lives in the Church, the separate members of the Church, my Superiors, though they may claim my obedience, have no claim on my admiration, and offer nothing for my inward trust.”

So this is the iron theology of power that Newman wrought in the furnace of actual church life: the often cruel reality of authority is a special tax God places on Catholics for having the benefits of that authority, such as the Mass and Sacraments.  As he wrote:

Where you have power, you will have the abuse of power – and the more absolute, the stronger, the more sacred the power, the greater and more certain will be its abuse. “The treasure”, we know,  “is in earthly vessels”. While men are men, spiritual power will have terrible abuses. It is the price we pay for its benefits.

Years ago, in Acton’s papers at Cambridge, I came across a note for a lecture he was preparing on Erasmus. Acton wrote of Erasmus, “He did not despair of the Church.”

The same could be said of John Henry Newman: he did not despair of the Church. And now we can say that the Church has not despaired of John Henry Newman. It has set him on the path to canonisation.