St. John Henry Newman kneels before a rain-soaked friar to become Catholic

LITTLEMORE, near Oxford, October 9, 1845 AD — Saint John Henry Newman, a clergyman of the Church of England for more than twenty years and the leader of the Oxford Movement, was received into the Catholic Church on the evening of October 9 in the small oratory of his house at Littlemore. Two of the young men who lived with him, Frederick Bowles and Richard Stanton, were received with him. The priest was Blessed Dominic Barberi, an Italian Passionist whom St. John Henry Newman had met once before, for a few minutes, in June of the year before. Six days earlier St. John Henry Newman had resigned the fellowship at Oriel College that he had held since 1822 AD. His reception left his closest friends to choose between him and their Church.

St. John Henry Newman was forty-four. His doubts had begun six years before, in 1839 AD, while he was studying the Monophysite controversy, a fifth-century quarrel between Rome and the Monophysite churches of the East. In it he saw the Church of England standing where the Eastern churches had stood against Rome, and he wrote later: “I saw my face in that mirror, and I was a Monophysite.” That September a friend pointed him to words of St. Augustine quoted in an article by Dr. Nicholas Wiseman: Securus judicat orbis terrarum (the judgment of the whole world is sure). St. John Henry Newman later wrote that after his friend had gone, the words “kept ringing in my ears.” He took them to mean that the settled judgment of the whole Church was final against any part of it that broke away.

In 1842 AD St. John Henry Newman moved out of Oxford to Littlemore, a village that belonged to St. Mary’s, the Oxford parish where he was vicar until 1843 AD. He lived there with a few younger men in prayer and fasting. St. John Henry Newman wrote afterwards of those years: “On the one hand I came gradually to see that the Anglican Church was formally in the wrong, on the other that the Church of Rome was formally in the right; then, that no valid reasons could be assigned for continuing in the Anglican, and again that no valid objections could be taken to joining the Roman.” All through 1845 AD he worked on a book about how Christian doctrine develops. Before he reached the end he decided to be received, and he left the book unfinished.

His friends wanted him to stay, or at least to wait. Henry Wilberforce, a friend and former pupil, begged him not to be received in Advent or at Christmas, in the hope that delay might still keep him in the Church of England. St. John Henry Newman took the advice as a reason to move sooner.

Two of his Littlemore companions became Catholics before him, both while they were away from Littlemore. At the end of September John Dobree Dalgairns was received by Father Dominic at Aston Hall, the Passionists’ house in Staffordshire. On October 2 Ambrose St. John, his closest companion, made his profession of the Catholic faith.

On October 3, the day he resigned from Oriel, St. John Henry Newman told his friend Edward Pusey that anything might happen to him now, any day. On October 5 he stayed indoors all day preparing for his general confession, a confession of the sins of his whole life.

On October 7 he wrote to Henry Wilberforce that Father Dominic was travelling from Aston to a meeting of his order in Belgium. On the way Father Dominic was to stop a night at Littlemore as Dalgairns’s guest. St. John Henry Newman wrote that Father Dominic had expected for thirty years to be sent to England, and called him “a simple quaint man, an Italian; but a very sharp clever man too in his way.” “He does not know of my intentions, but I shall ask of him admission into the One true Fold of the Redeemer,” St. John Henry Newman wrote in the same letter.

On October 8 he wrote to his sister, Jemima Mozley: “This night Father Dominic, the Passionist, sleeps here.” He had still told no one in the house except Ambrose St. John what he meant to do.

At about three that afternoon Dalgairns took his hat and stick to walk across the fields into Oxford, to the Angel, where the coach stopped. As Dalgairns picked up the stick, St. John Henry Newman asked him in a very low, quiet voice: “When you see your friend, will you tell him that I wish him to receive me into the Church of Christ?” Dalgairns said yes, and nothing more.

The coach reached Oxford about ten at night. Father Dominic had been riding on top of it through five hours of rain. Dalgairns gave him the message as he climbed down. “God be praised,” Father Dominic said. The two men drove out from Oxford in a carriage and did not speak again until they reached Littlemore, about eleven.

Father Dominic sat down by the fire to dry his clothes, and later described what happened next: “Mr. Newman entered the room, and, throwing himself at my feet, asked my blessing, and begged me to hear his confession, and receive him into the Church.” St. John Henry Newman made his general confession that night. When it was over he was so exhausted that Ambrose St. John and Stanton had to help him out of the oratory.

At half past five on the morning of October 9 he wrote again to his sister. “There is One who knows how much it has lain upon my heart to pain you,” St. John Henry Newman told her. Later in the morning Bowles and Stanton made their confessions to Father Dominic. That evening the three men made their profession of faith in the oratory, one after another. Father Dominic wrote that they did it with such fervour that he was “almost out of myself for joy.” St. John Henry Newman’s diary for the day reads: “admitted into the Catholic Church with Bowles and Stanton.”

On the morning of October 10 Father Dominic said Mass in the oratory, the first ever said there, and St. John Henry Newman made his first Communion. Father Dominic gave Communion that morning to Ambrose St. John, Bowles, Stanton and Dalgairns as well. On October 11 Father Dominic went on his way to Belgium.

At midnight on October 11, at Hursley, where he was vicar, John Keble sat down to finish a letter to St. John Henry Newman that he had begun a week before. Keble had preached the sermon in 1833 AD that St. John Henry Newman always counted as the start of the Oxford Movement. Keble wrote: “I find that the thunderbolt has actually fallen upon us, and you have actually taken the step which we greatly feared.” He told St. John Henry Newman that he could hardly bear to part with him, and went on: “And yet I cannot go along with you.” Keble signed the letter “with somewhat of a feeling as if the spring had been taken out of my year.”