Saint John Henry Newman

In the autumn of 1816 AD, St. John Henry Newman was fifteen and in his last half-year at his school at Ealing. One of the classical masters, the Rev. Walter Mayers, drew him into a serious faith, Calvinist in character at the time. St. John Henry Newman always counted that conversion the event of his life.

The same autumn he became convinced that God wanted him to remain unmarried. Reading a book on the prophecies, he also became sure that the Pope was the Antichrist. He went so far as to erase papal titles such as *Christi Vicarius* (*Vicar of Christ*) from a book of his.

His father, John Newman, a London banker, meant him for the law, and in 1819 AD St. John Henry Newman was entered at Lincoln's Inn. At Trinity College, Oxford, he read for an average of more than twelve hours a day for twenty weeks before his final examination. In November 1820 AD, not yet twenty, he broke down from overwork and missed the honours expected of him.

On April 12, 1822 AD, word that Oriel College had elected him a Fellow reached him while he was playing the violin in his lodgings. He answered the messenger briefly and went on playing. He always felt that day to be the turning point of his life.

In December 1832 AD St. John Henry Newman sailed for the Mediterranean with his friend Hurrell Froude and Froude's father. In April 1833 AD the Froudes turned for home, and he went back to Sicily alone. At Leonforte, in the interior of the island, he fell so ill with fever that his servant thought he was dying.

Recovering at an inn one morning in late May, he sat down on his bed and sobbed, and when his servant asked what was wrong, he could only answer that he had a work to do in England. In June, becalmed in the Strait of Bonifacio on an orange boat bound for Marseilles, he wrote the verses Lead, Kindly Light.

St. John Henry Newman had been ordained a deacon of the Church of England in 1824 AD, and since 1828 AD he had been vicar of St Mary's, the University Church at Oxford. On July 14, 1833 AD, John Keble preached a sermon at St Mary's that St. John Henry Newman always counted as the start of the Oxford Movement. Within weeks St. John Henry Newman was writing pamphlets called the Tracts for the Times, the first dated September 9, 1833 AD.

Dean R. W. Church, his old friend, judged that without St. John Henry Newman's four o'clock sermons at St Mary's the movement might never have gone on. The authorities of Christ Church arranged their chapel services so that their undergraduates could not go to hear him. He later wrote that, humanly speaking, the years up to 1841 AD were the happiest of his life.

In 1841 AD St. John Henry Newman published Tract 90, arguing that the Thirty-nine Articles of the Church of England could be read in a Catholic sense. Oxford's heads of colleges censured it, and anger spread from Oxford across the country. In 1842 AD he withdrew to the village of Littlemore, outside Oxford, to a life of prayer and fasting.

On the wet night of October 8, 1845 AD, Blessed Dominic Barberi, an Italian Passionist priest, arrived at Littlemore. St. John Henry Newman knelt at the priest's feet, asked for Blessed Dominic's blessing and made his own confession that night. On October 9, 1845 AD, Blessed Dominic received him into the Catholic Church.

In February 1846 AD St. John Henry Newman left Oxford, and he did not see it again for thirty-two years. In Rome, Cardinal Fransoni ordained him a Catholic priest on May 30, 1847 AD. He joined the Oratory of St. Philip Neri and opened its first English house on February 2, 1848 AD.

A year later the Oratorians opened their first Birmingham chapel in a former gin distillery in Alcester Street. When cholera broke out at Bilston in September 1849 AD, he went there with Father Ambrose St. John to help the parish priest. The two of them took the post of danger their bishop had meant for others.

In January 1863 AD St. John Henry Newman wrote in his journal that he felt useless. A year later the popular writer Charles Kingsley accused him by name, in a magazine article, of undervaluing truthfulness. St. John Henry Newman, his biographer Wilfrid Ward writes, saw in the attack a chance to vindicate his whole career.

His answer, the Apologia pro Vita Sua (*a defence of his life*), came out in seven parts between April 21 and June 2, 1864 AD. It was a history of his religious opinions. He finished it on May 26, the feast of St. Philip Neri, and dedicated it to his brother priests of the Birmingham Oratory.

In February 1879 AD Pope Leo XIII made known that he meant to make St. John Henry Newman a cardinal. The honour took St. John Henry Newman wholly by surprise. On May 12, 1879 AD, at seventy-eight, he was created a cardinal in Rome.

On August 18, 1887 AD St. John Henry Newman knelt before Bishop William Bernard Ullathorne, his former bishop, bowed his head and asked for the bishop's blessing. St. John Henry Newman died in his room at the Oratory in Edgbaston, Birmingham, on August 11, 1890 AD. He was buried at Rednal. In 2010 AD Pope Benedict XVI recalled that many thousands had lined the local streets as St. John Henry Newman's body was carried to burial.