A secret message for a priest riding in the rain

LITTLEMORE, near Oxford, October 9, 1845 AD — John Dobree Dalgairns was one of the young men who lived with Saint John Henry Newman at Littlemore, near Oxford. At about three in the afternoon on October 8, Dalgairns took his hat and stick to walk across the fields into Oxford, to the place 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.

St. John Henry Newman was forty-four. He had been a clergyman of the Church of England for more than twenty years. At Littlemore he lived with a few younger men, in prayer and fasting. Slowly he came to see that his own Church was in the wrong and the Church of Rome was in the right. On October 3 he gave up his post at Oriel College in Oxford.

His friends wanted him to stay, or at least to wait. Henry Wilberforce, a friend who had once been his pupil, begged him not to be received in Advent or at Christmas. Henry Wilberforce hoped that waiting might still keep him in the Church of England. Hearing that, St. John Henry Newman decided to move sooner, not later.

A guest who didn’t know

The friend on the coach was Blessed Dominic Barberi, an Italian priest of the Passionist order. St. John Henry Newman had met him only once, for a few minutes, the year before. Father Dominic was on his way to a meeting of his order in Belgium. He was stopping one night at Littlemore as Dalgairns’s guest.

On October 7 St. John Henry Newman wrote to Henry Wilberforce about the visit: “He does not know of my intentions, but I shall ask of him admission into the One true Fold of the Redeemer.” Until the afternoon of October 8, he had told no one in the house except his closest companion, Ambrose St. John.

Five hours on top of a coach

The coach reached Oxford at about ten that night. Father Dominic had been riding on top of it through five hours of rain. As Father Dominic climbed down, Dalgairns gave him the message. “God be praised,” Father Dominic said.

The two men drove out to Littlemore in a carriage. They didn’t speak again until they arrived, at about eleven. Father Dominic sat down by the fire to dry his clothes. Later he 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.”

That night St. John Henry Newman made a general confession, telling the sins of his whole life. When it was over, he was worn out. Ambrose St. John and Richard Stanton, another of the young men in the house, had to help him out of the oratory.

On the morning of October 9, Stanton and Frederick Bowles, another of the young men, made their confessions to Father Dominic too. 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. It was the first Mass ever said there. St. John Henry Newman made his first Communion. The next day Father Dominic went on his way to Belgium.

St. John Henry Newman’s reception left his closest friends with a choice: follow him, or stay in their own Church.

In 1833 AD John Keble had preached a sermon that St. John Henry Newman always counted as the start of the Oxford Movement. At midnight on October 11, at Hursley, where he was vicar, Keble finished a letter to St. John Henry Newman. Keble wrote that he could hardly bear to part with him. Then Keble 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.”