To understand John Henry Newman it is helpful first to look at the state of the Church of England in, say, the year 1800. The Church of England was divided into about 10,000 parishes throughout the land, but two-thirds of those parishes never saw their ministers. Power of appointment lay not so much with the bishops but with the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge and with the landed gentry and aristocracy – and they paid the wages too. So an Anglican priest would be appointed to a ‘living’ – or perhaps two or three of them – receive the income, but live the life of a scholar or gentleman elsewhere. The idea of responsibility for the spiritual and pastoral care of souls had ebbed and almost died.

At St Paul’s Cathedral in London – the premier church in the land – on Easter Sunday 1800 a mere six people attended the main service. Oh, and the Bishop of Winchester had an income of £50,000 a year but never set foot in Winchester.

Cardinal Newman grew up in a happy, musical and secure homeAt that time there were not very many Roman Catholics in England, probably about 70,000, less than one per cent of the population, and they were mainly in the north.

Of course there had been attempts to reform and revitalize the Church of England, the most famous of which was led by John and Charles Wesley, but that had split off and become a separate denomination – Methodism. The attempt that was to have the most success began in the 1830s, blossomed in the 1850s, 1860s, 1870s and beyond; and its originator and inspiration was John Henry Newman.

Newman was born on 21 February 1801, the first of six children – three boys and three girls – to John Newman, a partner in a bank in the City of London, and Jemima Foudrinier whose wealth came from her family’s paper manufacturing business. Mr and Mrs Newman were Anglican, but fairly nominal, although Mrs Newman ensured that the children knew their catechism and the stories contained in the Bible. Theirs was a happy and secure home – and very musical.

At the age of seven Newman was sent to a boarding school in Ealing where he flourished and where he came under the influence of a young Anglican priest who encouraged him to read books of a Calvinist or evangelical bent. (The evangelical movement had been started by the Wesleys but its spirituality still had considerable force in the Church of England long after the separation of Methodism.)

Britain was at war in the period. Newman was four when Nelson defeated Napoleon’s navy at Trafalgar in 1805, fourteen when the Duke of Wellington routed his army at Waterloo in 1815. The economic consequences of the Napoleonic wars were such that Mr Newman’s bank went into liquidation – he turned to brewing instead. And in the autumn of 1816, over a period of a few months, young John Henry experienced what he always called his first conversion – he became absolutely convinced of the reality of God.

Newman had a great devotion to the Church FathersThe following year he went up to Oxford, enrolling as a student at Trinity College. Three years later he obtained his degree, though not as good a one as had been widely predicted. He stayed on for a year as a private tutor, then won a fellowship at the most prestigious college, Oriel. So, he was on the staff. Eventually he was ordained deacon, then priest, and at the age of twenty-seven he was appointed vicar of St Mary’s, the university church.

It was at St Mary’s that Newman began to shine in public. Every Sunday afternoon at four o’clock he preached to the students. They began to flock to him, between four and six hundred at a time. (The total student population of the university was a little over a thousand.) He spoke with such insight and understanding of them and of the ways of God that they were enthralled. But something else was happening too. Newman began to read the Fathers of the Church, the early theologians who transmitted and reflected upon the faith of the Apostles. He discovered in them doctrines that had been forgotten in the Church of England, and he began to deliver them to the students who sat at his feet.

In 1832 he finished his first major book – a history of the Arian heresy – and went off to Italy with his friend Hurrell Froude, who was suffering from tuberculosis and who had been told that the Italian climate would be good for him. When Froude went home, Newman continued down to Sicily where he was taken seriously ill, probably with typhoid fever. He was expected to die, but he knew he wouldn’t. He was convinced that God had a work for him to do in England. He recovered, set sail for home and on the way wrote the poem ‘Lead kindly light’, which perfectly expresses his mind at that time.

His life story is one of the pilgrim soul searching for and discovering GodOn his return to Oxford he sat down and wrote a four-page letter to the clergy of the Church of England, reminding them that they had been commissioned by God and that they had to answer to him and not to the State. He had the letter printed and began to distribute it. He called it a Tract for the Times. He wrote a couple more the same day. He had struck a spark: the flame took and began to spread. Others joined him. Oxford became the hub and then the engine of a reform movement within the Church. Newman rose in stature and influence, and all the time he was imbibing more and more from the Fathers of the Church, so some people began to say that he was becoming a Roman Catholic, intent on destroying the Church of England.

When he published Tract 90 in 1841 the crisis came to a head. He argued that, since the Thirty-nine Articles of the Church of England were issued by Elizabeth I as a compromise between Protestants and Catholics, a catholic interpretation of them was possible, which is what he proceeded to do. The balloon went up. He was censured, left Oxford and retired with a group of friends to Littlemore, three miles away, to a life of prayer and fasting – and very deep thinking.

Newman’s dilemma was this: the Church of England is not exactly the same as the Church of the first centuries; but the Church of Rome is not exactly the same as the Church of the first centuries either. But then, aren’t developments to be expected? But which are genuine developments and which are corruptions? Just as a baby grows into a child and then an adolescent and then an adult, but maintains its personal identity all the way through, so the Church must develop but maintain its identity. He started to write a book on the development of Christian doctrine and as he finished it realized that he had to become Roman Catholic. He was received into the Church by an Italian Passionist, Fr Dominic Barberi, on 9 October 1845.

The Church of England lost a great controversialist, a magnificent theologian, a most elegant writer of clarity and depth, but the movement he started carried on without him. The dedication of the Anglican clergy to the spiritual and pastoral care of souls continued to grow, churches re-opened and new ones were built, especially in the new industrial cities.

Oxford is in the Roman Catholic diocese of Birmingham, so Newman settled into old Oscott before being sent to Rome to re-train for the Roman Catholic priesthood. While he was there, he met the Oratory of St Philip Neri, a community of priests serving the laity. After his ordination he returned home and established the Oratory in Birmingham. He continued to lecture and to write, and he founded a boarding school for boys at the side of the Oratory church, then a Catholic University in Dublin. Apart from a notorious trial at which he was found guilty of libel for telling the truth about a scandalous, laicized priest, the world largely forgot about him.

Then, in 1863, Charles Kingsley effectively accused him of being a liar and of using lying as an instrument of his ministry. A correspondence ensued, but Newman realized that the only way forward for him was to give an honest account of the development of his own mind. In six weeks he wrote his autobiography, titling it Apologia pro Vita Sua – defence through his life (story). It is a literary masterpiece, a spiritual classic, devoid of all vanity, resentment or self-pity, the chronicle of a pilgrim-soul discovering God and putting himself at his service.His reputation was restored.

More books followed. Then, when Leo XIII became Pope, there was another interesting development. One of the boys who had been at Newman’s Oratory School grew up to inherit his father’s title: he became the Duke of Norfolk. He went to Rome and met the Pope, telling him about Newman and asking him to recognize Newman’s contribution to the Church. Pope Leo already knew about Newman, but the conversation stimulated him, so he made Newman a cardinal. Newman, at the age of seventy-eight, travelled to Rome to receive his red hat. There he made an acceptance speech which summarizes his ministry.

A caution first: Newman was a great promoter of a liberal education, i.e. the opening and nourishing of the mind in its search for truth, but he was totally opposed to liberalism in religion. He said, ‘For thirty, forty, fifty years I have resisted to the best of my powers the spirit of Liberalism in religion. … Liberalism in religion is the doctrine that there is no positive truth in religion, but that one creed is as good as another ...’

He then shows how the liberals reduce religion to sentiment, confine it to private opinion, and replace it with a thoroughly secular education, culture and political order.

Newman spent the rest of his old age in Birmingham. His collected works number thirty-eight volumes. They continue to sell. Over 30,000 of his letters survive. He has gone to God. He died on 11 August 1890.