The beatification of John Henry Newman

While considerable media attention in this country has, understandably, been given to the canonisation in October of Australian nun Mary MacKillop, the Catholic Church is also engaged this year in the process of conferring sainthood on another 19th century figure who is better known in the wider secular world and more controversial within Catholicism itself.

The four-day papal tour to England and Scotland, due to commence on September 16, has a specific purpose. An important item on the Pope’s UK itinerary is a solemn mass on September 19 in Birmingham when the Pope is due to beatify John Henry Newman as part of the process of canonisation. That process began as long ago as 1958, and in 1991 it led to Newman being declared “Venerable” by Pope John Paul II.

Newman’s beatification is based on Vatican recognition as a miracle the healing of Jack Sullivan, a 71-year-old American severely disabled by a spinal condition, as the result of praying to Newman. A second miracle is required for sainthood.

Few candidates for sainthood can have been as heavily involved in public affairs as Newman, who during his long life was a pamphleteer, university founder, novelist, essayist, satirist, memoirist and poet. Newman was once sued for criminal libel and lost, though this verdict was widely viewed as the result of a prejudiced jury.

Even fewer potential saints are mature-aged converts. Newman, who was born in England in 1801 and died in 1890, did not become a Catholic until he was in his mid 40s, and for a long time afterwards was regarded by some in the Church hierarchy with suspicion and was even accused of heresy. Even so, Newman was sufficiently respected as a churchman to be made Cardinal in 1879 by Pope Leo XIII.

“To live is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often”, Newman once wrote. Part of the difficulty of any religious (or, for that matter, political) conversion is having the change accepted by those whose beliefs the convert has rejected and also by those whose beliefs have been newly embraced.

Before Newman was received into the Catholic Church, he was an Anglican vicar whose first published work, produced at the age of 17, was an anti-Catholic verse romance, St Bartholomew’s Eve, which he co-wrote with a fellow Oxford undergraduate.

In subsequent decades Newman’s religious views developed until he became convinced that the central Christian truth lay in Catholicism. Newman was a traditionalist who also believed in flexibility. “Growth”, Newman famously said, “is the only evidence of life”.

In one of his essays on Christian doctrine, Newman described how continuity can be achieved, in part at least, through discontinuity. The philosopher Anthony O’Hear comments that in this essay, “Newman shows that the success of a tradition is related to its ability to assimilate new data, while conserving its past principles and achievements, and also its ability to develop complex sequences of thought and practice while anticipating future development”.

Newman’s belief in the development, as opposed to corruption, of ideas that takes place within a dynamic tradition put him at odds with those in the Church hierarchy hostile to the notion of change. Newman also caused ructions by promoting the involvement of the laity in church affairs.

Though he believed in the infallibility of the Church, Newman was less enthusiastic about the moves being made in his time to define papal infallibility. The best-selling pamphlet Letter to the Duke of Norfolk contains the oft-quoted line in which Newman raises a toast to “the pope if you please - still to conscience first, and to the pope afterwards”.

According to his biographer Ian Ker, Newman “urged a balanced theology of authority and freedom, in which interaction, even conflict, of the magisterium and the theologians was depicted as creative and necessary for the life of the church”.

Another challenge to religious belief in Newman’s time came from Charles Darwin’s radical new theory of evolution. Newman sought ways to accommodate the varieties of human experience and knowledge within his philosophy rather than exclude them. He took the view that there is no incompatibility between science and religion as each was a vital branch of human knowledge. “I believe in design because I believe in God, not in a God because I see design”, he wrote.

Ian Ker writes that fundamental to Newman’s rejection of the notion that religion could simply be replaced by secular education in a pluralist society was his belief in faith “as the foundation of individual and social morality”.

When he converted from Anglicanism to Catholicism, Newman left behind a comfortable life as a country vicar and Oxford insider and worked among the poor in Birmingham.

Later Newman was invited to establish the first Catholic university in Ireland, the forerunner of such institutions as the present day University College Dublin, whose most famous alumni include the novelist James Joyce. Newman sought to extend the higher education franchise to those who were otherwise denied access by religious affiliation or poverty.

“Liberal Education makes not the Christian, not the Catholic, but the gentleman”, Newman argued. “It is well to be a gentlemen, it is well to have a cultivated intellect, a delicate taste, a candid, equitable, dispassionate mind, a noble and courteous bearing in the conduct of life.”

In addition to his work as an educationalist, Newman is cited as one of the greatest prose writers of the Victorian era, ranked as a rhetorician with Thomas Carlyle, who was a bitter opponent of Newman’s ideas. In response to attacks on his motives and character by Anglican activist Charles Kingsley, Newman in 1864 published the Apologia pro vita sua, in which he describes the process of conversion he underwent.

The book, which was a best-seller when published and is now regarded as a classic among autobiographies, is said to have moved many English readers to convert to Catholicism, and even Kingsley acknowledged its power.

The following year Newman published another of his best-known literary works, the long poem The Dream of Gerontius. A vision of the afterlife, the poem was made into an oratorio by the composer Edward Elgar. The verse “Praise to the Holiest in the height” forms part of one of the best known hymns in the English language.

In the introduction to God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, Christopher Hitchens asserts that all of the great religious thinkers of the past, including Newman, are now redundant. There are, however, few religious thinkers more influential today than John Henry Newman, at least in the English-speaking world.

Moreover the importance of Newman’s thought in the secular world is cemented by his idea of the university as inclusive rather than exclusive, and as a place where the student’s intellect is developed rather than simply a degree factory or research facility. A university, Newman believed, should be more than the some of its parts. “The educated mind”, he wrote, “may be said to be in a certain sense religious”.