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feature · BILSTON, Staffordshire, September 1849 AD

St. John Henry Newman joins priest carrying cholera victims on his back

Four years a Catholic, he takes on the danger his bishop meant for other priests, and finds the epidemic nearly over and himself not needed.

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Saint John Henry Newman
Black-and-white studio photograph of an elderly, grey-haired St. John Henry Newman seated in a dark coat, looking up at a taller priest in clerical collar who stands beside him with a hand on his shoulder.
St. John Henry Newman, seated, with Father Ambrose St. John, his fellow Oratorian, standing beside him, in a photograph made years after Bilston and published in 1912 AD.

BILSTON, Staffordshire, September 1849 AD — Saint John Henry Newman went to Bilston this month, where cholera had broken out, to help a parish priest who could no longer keep up with the sick. By the time he arrived the disease was already waning, and once he found he was not needed he left the town. Father Ambrose St. John, a priest of his community who had come with him, stayed on.

St. John Henry Newman has been a Catholic for four years, since he was received into the Church at Littlemore in October 1845 AD. Last year he founded the English Oratory, a community of priests following St. Philip Neri. Since February he and its priests have served a chapel in a converted gin distillery in Alcester Street, Birmingham.

When the cholera spread through Bilston, the town’s two priests were called from case to case day and night and could not reach all the sick. One of them, the parish priest, had been carrying people who collapsed without warning to the hospital on his back.

Bishop William Bernard Ullathorne wanted to send more priests to Bilston. He asked St. John Henry Newman to lend him two of the Oratorians to take the places of other priests, so that those priests could go to Bilston. Instead, St. John Henry Newman and Father Ambrose went to Bilston, taking Brother Aloysius with them, and took on the danger the bishop had meant other priests to face. The parish priest was not one of their own community and had no claim on their help.

In the town, St. John Henry Newman and Father Ambrose went into the most dangerous of the infected districts to visit the sick and the dying.

On September 19 St. John Henry Newman wrote from St. Wilfrid’s, the Oratorians’ house near Cheadle, where he had gone for a day or two because he had been overworked. He told his friend and former pupil Henry Wilberforce: “I had gone to Bilston to attend the poor cholera patients, but found the scourge nearly over, and I was not wanted, — so I came here.”

St. John Henry Newman added that Father Ambrose and another of the Oratory’s priests were still at Bilston. He passed on a report from the town: “They say that two thirds of the population would become Catholics if they had priests to take care of them.”

About this story

Catholic Saints News tells the lives of the saints as news from their own time and place. This story was written with AI from the historical record, and we read and approved it before it ran.

The Saints' words. This newspaper will never make a saint say something the historical record does not preserve.

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Image. Photographer unknown, plate from Wilfrid Ward, Life of Cardinal Newman, vol. II (1912), via Wikimedia Commons — see the original.

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