John Henry Newman

John Henry Newman was born in London on 21 February 1801, the eldest of six children of the banker John Newman and Jemima Fourdrinier, whose family was of Huguenot origin. He was raised in a moderately evangelical Anglican household and educated at Ealing School before entering Trinity College, Oxford, in 1816. In 1822 he was elected a fellow of Oriel College, then the intellectual centre of the university. Ordained deacon in the Church of England in 1824 and priest in 1825, he served as curate of St Clement’s, Oxford, and from 1828 as vicar of the university church of St Mary the Virgin, where his afternoon sermons drew wide attention. With John Keble, Edward Bouverie Pusey and others he became a principal leader of the Oxford Movement, whose Tracts for the Times sought to recover the apostolic and catholic character of the Church of England and to resist what the Tractarians regarded as erastian and liberal encroachments upon it.

The publication of Tract 90 in 1841, arguing that the Thirty-Nine Articles could be read in a sense compatible with historic Catholic teaching, provoked a strong reaction in the university and the established church. Newman resigned the living of St Mary’s in 1843 and withdrew to Littlemore, where he lived with a small community in a semi-monastic rule. On 9 October 1845 he was received into the Roman Catholic Church by the Passionist priest Dominic Barberi. He was ordained a Catholic priest in Rome in 1847. At the encouragement of Pope Pius IX he introduced the Congregation of the Oratory of Saint Philip Neri into England, establishing the Birmingham Oratory (from 1849, later at Edgbaston) and later associated with the foundation of the London Oratory. In the 1850s he was appointed first rector of the Catholic University of Ireland in Dublin; the institutional results were limited, but the lectures he delivered there were later published as The Idea of a University, a lasting statement on liberal education and the place of theology among the sciences.

Newman spent most of the rest of his life at the Birmingham Oratory, writing, preaching, and directing the community. His Apologia pro Vita Sua (1864), written in answer to Charles Kingsley’s public attack on his honesty, is both a spiritual autobiography and a classic of English prose. An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine (1845) offered a theory of how Christian teaching can grow while remaining identical in type; An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent (1870) examined the nature of religious belief and certitude. Other works include historical and theological essays, sermons, and the poem The Dream of Gerontius. For many years he was viewed with suspicion by some ultramontane Catholics in England. In 1879 Pope Leo XIII created him a cardinal deacon, with the title of San Giorgio in Velabro, an honour widely understood as a public vindication of his integrity and of his service to the Church.

Newman died at the Birmingham Oratory on 11 August 1890. He was buried at Rednal, in the small cemetery of the Oratory’s country house, in the same grave as his friend Ambrose St John, according to his own wish. The cause for his canonization proceeded in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Pope Benedict XVI beatified him in Birmingham on 19 September 2010; Pope Francis canonized him in Rome on 13 October 2019. The Catholic Church observes his feast on 9 October, the anniversary of his reception into the Church. His teaching on the development of doctrine, the role of the laity, conscience, and the relation of faith and reason has had a deep and continuing influence on modern Catholic theology and is often associated with themes later taken up at the Second Vatican Council.