St. John Henry Newman

1. The Oxford Movement

Newman was a famous Anglican priest and scholar at Oxford. He tried to prove that the Anglican church was the "Via Media" (Middle Way) between Protestantism and Catholicism. But the more he studied the Church Fathers (the early Christians), the more he realized they were... well, Catholic. (Awkward.)

The movement had a date and a trigger. On 14 July 1833, John Keble preached the Assize Sermon in Newman's own church, St Mary the Virgin in Oxford, on what he called National Apostasy. The occasion was a parliamentary bill suppressing ten Church of Ireland bishoprics. Keble's point was that the state had assumed the right to reorganise a branch of the Church of Christ as though it were a department of government. Newman afterwards dated the start of the movement to that sermon.

The response was a series of pamphlets, the Tracts for the Times, published from 1833 to 1841, which is why the group were called Tractarians. Newman wrote many of them, Keble and Edward Bouverie Pusey contributed, and Richard Hurrell Froude, who died young in 1836, was Newman's closest ally in the early years. The argument of the tracts was that the Church of England held its authority from apostolic succession rather than from Parliament, that the Book of Common Prayer and the Fathers should govern its worship and teaching, and that the Reformation had gone further than the ancient Church allowed.

Alongside the tracts ran the preaching. Newman's Sunday afternoon sermons at St Mary's drew undergraduates from across the university and were published as the Parochial and Plain Sermons, eight volumes of them. They are still in print, and readers who find his theological books hard usually find the sermons the way in.

His Via Media position, argued at length in the 1837 Lectures on the Prophetical Office of the Church, was that Anglicanism occupied a defensible middle position between Roman corruption and popular Protestantism. He believed it. He abandoned it because of what he found in the fourth and fifth centuries, which is the subject of the next section.

2. "To be deep in history..."

He famously wrote, "To be deep in history is to cease to be Protestant." He realized that the modern Catholic Church, with all its dogmas, was the organic development ("acorn to oak tree") of the early Church. He converted in 1845, costing him his friends and position. But he gained the truth.

The sentence comes from the introduction to the Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, and it is worth knowing what he had been reading when he arrived at it.

In the long vacation of 1839 he was working through the Monophysite controversy of the fifth century, the dispute settled at the Council of Chalcedon in 451. He describes seeing his own face in the mirror of that history: the moderate party occupying the middle ground, with the extremists on one side and Rome on the other, and the middle party turning out in the end to have been the heretics. Shortly afterwards a friend pointed him to an article by Nicholas Wiseman in the Dublin Review on the Donatist schism in North Africa, which quoted Augustine: securus judicat orbis terrarum, the judgment of the whole world is secure. The Donatists had had local antiquity and local possession on their side, and Augustine's answer was that a body separated from the communion of the whole Church cannot be right merely because it is old and local. Newman said the words kept ringing in his ears.

The problem he then had to solve was the obvious objection to becoming Catholic: the Catholic Church of 1845 plainly taught things the Church of the second century had not stated. Purgatory, the papal office as it then stood, the invocation of saints, the Marian doctrines. If those were additions, the Catholic claim failed. Newman's answer was the theory of development, and he wrote the Essay to work it out. He did not finish it. He broke off the manuscript, saying he had come to the conclusion during the writing, and asked to be received.

3. Conscience

Newman is known as the Doctor of Conscience. He taught that conscience is the "aboriginal Vicar of Christ" in the soul. We must follow it, but we also have a duty to form it with the Truth.

The passage everyone quotes comes from the Letter to the Duke of Norfolk, published in 1875. The occasion was political. After the First Vatican Council defined papal infallibility in 1870, William Ewart Gladstone, the former Prime Minister, published a pamphlet arguing that English Catholics could no longer be loyal subjects, because they had surrendered their moral and mental freedom to a foreign prince. Newman replied.

His answer was that conscience comes first because conscience is the voice of God in the soul, and that the papal office exists to serve that same divine law rather than to override it. He ends the section with a line that has been quoted ever since, and usually cut short: that if he were obliged to bring religion into an after-dinner toast, he would drink to the Pope, but to conscience first and to the Pope afterwards.

The part that gets cut is the part Newman cared about. In the same letter he attacks what he calls the counterfeit, the modern use of conscience to mean the right of self-will, of doing as one likes and calling it a principle. Conscience for Newman is a stern messenger, a law of the mind that a person did not write and cannot repeal, which accuses and rebukes him. He describes it as a messenger from God who speaks to us behind a veil, and the Catechism of the Catholic Church quotes that passage directly at paragraph 1778.

Catholic teaching follows the same shape. A person is bound to obey his conscience (Catechism 1790), and he is also bound to form it, by the word of God, the teaching of the Church, and the gifts of the Holy Spirit, because a conscience can be mistaken through ignorance a person is responsible for (Catechism 1783 to 1791). Newman is quoted in support of the first half; he wrote the second half himself.

4. Who Newman Was

He was born in London on 21 February 1801, the eldest of six children of a banker. The family was Anglican in the ordinary undemanding way of the time. In 1816, when he was fifteen, the bank failed, he was left at school over the holidays, and he underwent what he later described as a conversion under the influence of an evangelical clergyman named Walter Mayers and the writings of Thomas Scott. He dated from it a settled sense of two beings whose existence he could not doubt, himself and his Creator.

He went up to Trinity College, Oxford, at sixteen. He worked so hard for his final examinations that he broke down during them and took a poor degree in 1820, an embarrassment for a man of his ability. He recovered it in the most decisive way available by winning a fellowship at Oriel College in 1822, then the most intellectually formidable common room in England. He was ordained deacon in 1824 and priest in 1825, and became Vicar of the University Church of St Mary the Virgin in 1828.

Two other things belong to these years. As a tutor at Oriel he insisted that the tutor's role was pastoral as well as academic, quarrelled with the Provost, Edward Hawkins, and was deprived of pupils in 1830, which freed the time in which he wrote. And in 1832 and 1833 he travelled the Mediterranean with Hurrell Froude, fell dangerously ill in Sicily, and, on the voyage home, becalmed in the Strait of Bonifacio, wrote the poem beginning "Lead, kindly Light, amid the encircling gloom," which has been sung as a hymn ever since.

5. The Long Road to 1845

Newman's conversion took six years from first doubt to reception, and he spent much of that time trying to stay where he was. That is the part of his story most worth knowing, because it is the opposite of the sudden reversal his critics accused him of.

1839. The Monophysite reading, and Wiseman's article on the Donatists. He records that his confidence in the Anglican position was shaken and that he told nobody for a long time.

1841. He published Tract 90, arguing that the Thirty-Nine Articles, the Church of England's doctrinal formulae, were patient of a Catholic reading, having been framed against sixteenth-century abuses rather than against the ancient faith. The reaction was severe. The Heads of Houses at Oxford censured it, bishops issued charges against it, and the tracts came to an end. The effect was to tell him that the Church of England did not want the interpretation on which he had staked his position.

1842. He withdrew to Littlemore, the hamlet outside Oxford where he had built a church for his parishioners, and lived there in a semi-monastic household with a few companions, studying and translating.

1843. He resigned the living of St Mary's and preached his last Anglican sermon at Littlemore in September, "The Parting of Friends," which is exactly what it sounds like. He also formally retracted the criticisms he had published against Rome.

1845. He wrote the Essay on Development and, before finishing it, sent for the Passionist priest Blessed Dominic Barberi, an Italian missionary of no social standing whom Newman admired. Barberi arrived at Littlemore soaked from the journey on 8 October, and Newman knelt to ask to be received. He was received on 9 October 1845.

The cost was immediate and heavy. Fellowships and university positions in England were closed to Catholics. Friendships ended, including with Keble and Pusey for a long period, and his own sister never accepted the decision. Many in England regarded the conversion as a betrayal, and a former Anglican clergyman turned Roman priest was, in the England of 1845, a figure of considerable public suspicion.

6. The Development of Doctrine, in Detail

The Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine is Newman's most important contribution to theology, and it answers a question that both Catholics and Protestants have to face: how can a Church that claims to teach an unchanging revelation say things in the nineteenth century that nobody said in the second?

His answer is that a living idea held by a living community is understood more fully over time, in the way a seed becomes a tree, remaining the same thing throughout. The Council of Nicaea in 325 used a word, homoousios, that is not in Scripture, to defend what Scripture says. The canon of the New Testament itself was settled over centuries. Development is therefore what happens to a revelation entrusted to human beings who go on thinking about it, and it needs no explaining away.

Because that argument could justify anything, Newman supplied seven tests to distinguish genuine development from corruption. In his terms they are preservation of type, continuity of principles, power of assimilation, logical sequence, anticipation of its future, conservative action upon its past, and chronic vigour. Put plainly: does the later form still look like the earlier one, does it work on the same principles, can it absorb new material without being destroyed by it, does it follow from what went before, were there early signs of it, does it protect rather than contradict the earlier teaching, and has it lasted.

The influence of this book runs well beyond Newman's own case. It shaped how Catholic theology talks about tradition, and the Second Vatican Council's constitution on divine revelation, Dei Verbum, teaches at paragraph 8 that there is a growth in understanding of what has been handed on, through the contemplation and study of believers and the preaching of the bishops, which is Newman's thesis in conciliar language. Our page on Sacred Tradition sets out how the Church understands the handing on of revelation, and our page on the Catholic and Protestant differences covers the disputes his conversion turned on.

7. The Catholic Years, and How Hard They Were

Converts are often presented as arriving into peace. Newman's Catholic life was forty-five years long and difficult for most of them, and the difficulty is a large part of why he is worth reading.

He was ordained a Catholic priest in Rome in 1847, joined the Oratory of St Philip Neri, and founded the Birmingham Oratory in 1848, settling at Edgbaston. He chose the Oratory deliberately: a community of priests without vows, living in a city, doing parish work and schooling. He ran a school, heard confessions, and visited the poor of an industrial city through cholera outbreaks.

Dublin. From 1854 to 1858 he was the first Rector of the Catholic University of Ireland, an appointment that did not work. The Irish bishops and Newman had different ideas of what the institution was for, funding was inadequate, and he resigned. Out of the effort came the lectures published as The Idea of a University, an argument that a university exists to teach the whole range of knowledge as an integrated thing, and that theology belongs in it as a subject rather than as decoration.

The Achilli trial. In 1851 Newman repeated in a public lecture allegations about Giacinto Achilli, a former Dominican who had left the Church and was touring England as an anti-Catholic lecturer. Achilli sued for libel. The trial in 1852 went against Newman, and he was fined. His legal costs were met by public subscription from Catholics in England and abroad.

Suspicion from both sides. Protestant England distrusted him as a defector. A powerful section of English Catholic opinion, associated with Cardinal Manning and with W. G. Ward, distrusted him as insufficiently ultramontane. He thought the definition of papal infallibility in 1870 was inopportune and said so privately, and he accepted it fully once it was defined, then defended it publicly in the Letter to the Duke of Norfolk. A project to found an Oratory at Oxford was blocked. He wrote of these years that he had lived under a cloud.

The cloud lifted in 1879, when Leo XIII made him a cardinal, an unusual honour for a priest who was not a bishop. Newman took it as the Church's public statement that his life's work had been faithful, and he said so in the address he gave in Rome on receiving the red hat.

8. The Apologia and the Recovery of His Name

In 1864 the novelist and Anglican clergyman Charles Kingsley wrote in a magazine review that truth for its own sake had never been a virtue with the Roman clergy, and that Father Newman informs us it need not be. Newman pressed him for a citation. Kingsley could not produce one and would not withdraw properly.

Newman's response was to publish, in weekly parts over about two months, an account of the history of his religious opinions from boyhood to his conversion. It appeared as the Apologia Pro Vita Sua. He did not argue that Catholicism was true. He described, step by step, how a man of ordinary honesty could have moved where he moved, and let the reader judge whether the process was dishonest.

It worked, completely. The book changed English opinion about Newman and, to a degree, about Catholics, and it is now regarded as one of the great autobiographies in the language. The following year he published The Dream of Gerontius, a poem about the death and judgment of an ordinary Christian soul, which Edward Elgar set to music in 1900. In 1870 came the Grammar of Assent, on how people reasonably reach certainty in matters that cannot be proved by strict demonstration, an argument about the whole texture of real-life reasoning rather than about religion alone.

9. Canonisation, Feast Day and Devotion

Newman died at Edgbaston on 11 August 1890 and was buried at Rednal, in the same grave as his lifelong friend Ambrose St John. He had chosen his own epitaph: Ex umbris et imaginibus in veritatem, out of shadows and images into the truth.

His cause was opened in the twentieth century. Benedict XVI beatified him at Cofton Park in Birmingham on 19 September 2010, during a state visit to the United Kingdom, and it was the only beatification Benedict performed personally in his pontificate, the others having been delegated. Pope Francis canonised him in St Peter's Square on 13 October 2019. The healings accepted as miracles in the two processes were the recovery of an American deacon, Jack Sullivan, from a spinal condition, and the recovery of a woman in Chicago, Melissa Villalobos, from a life-threatening haemorrhage in pregnancy.

His feast is kept on 9 October, the day he was received into the Church in 1845 rather than the day of his death, which is unusual and fitting. He is a natural patron for converts, for students and academics, and for anyone whose faith is being worked out through study. The Birmingham Oratory maintains his rooms and his library largely as he left them.

10. What a Reader Can Take From Newman

Follow the evidence at the pace it actually moves. Six years passed between Newman's first serious doubt and his reception. He did not act on a mood, and he did not stall forever either.

Read the sources rather than the summaries. His conversion came out of reading fifth-century controversies in the original. Nobody argued him into it.

Conscience binds you, and forming it is your job. He is quoted for the first half and wrote the second. A conscience nobody has troubled to instruct is not a reliable guide, and calling self-will conscience is the counterfeit he attacked by name.

Expect the cost, and expect it to last. He lost his position, his university and several friendships in 1845, and he spent thirty more years under suspicion from both sides before Leo XIII made him a cardinal.

Answer an accusation by telling the truth about yourself. The Apologia did not refute Kingsley by argument. It simply set out the facts of a life and let readers decide.

11. Frequently Asked Questions

Who was St. John Henry Newman?

St. John Henry Newman was an English priest, theologian and cardinal who lived from 1801 to 1890. He was a Fellow of Oriel College, Oxford, Vicar of the University Church of St Mary the Virgin, and a leader of the Oxford Movement within the Church of England, before being received into the Catholic Church on 9 October 1845. He founded the Birmingham Oratory in 1848, was made a cardinal by Leo XIII in 1879, and was canonised by Pope Francis on 13 October 2019.

Why did John Henry Newman become Catholic?

The decisive cause was his study of early Church history. Reading the Monophysite controversy in 1839 he saw the Anglican middle position occupying the place held by the parties the Church had judged to be wrong, and an article by Nicholas Wiseman on the Donatists put Augustine's phrase securus judicat orbis terrarum in front of him, meaning that a local body cannot be right against the judgment of the whole Church. The obstacle he still had to remove was that Catholic teaching had visibly grown since the second century, and he wrote the Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine to work that out. He asked to be received before finishing it.

What did Newman mean by "To be deep in history is to cease to be Protestant"?

The sentence appears in the introduction to his Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine of 1845. He meant that the early Church, studied closely and at length rather than through summaries, does not look like the Protestant reconstruction of it, and that a person who reads the Fathers and the early councils thoroughly will find a Church with sacraments, bishops in apostolic succession, and a recognised authority in the see of Rome.

What is Newman's theory of the development of doctrine?

Newman argued that a revelation entrusted to a living community is understood more fully over time, the way a seed becomes a tree while remaining the same thing, so that the Church can define in a later century what it had always held without adding to revelation. To distinguish genuine development from corruption he set out seven tests: preservation of type, continuity of principles, power of assimilation, logical sequence, anticipation of its future, conservative action upon its past, and chronic vigour. The Second Vatican Council taught in Dei Verbum 8 that there is a growth in understanding of what has been handed on, which is the same thesis in conciliar language.

What did Newman say about conscience and the Pope?

In the Letter to the Duke of Norfolk of 1875, replying to Gladstone's charge that Catholics could not be loyal subjects after the definition of papal infallibility, Newman wrote that if he had to bring religion into an after-dinner toast he would drink to the Pope, but to conscience first and to the Pope afterwards. In the same letter he attacked the counterfeit version of conscience, meaning the right of self-will, and described conscience as a stern messenger from God speaking behind a veil, a passage the Catechism of the Catholic Church quotes at paragraph 1778.

When is St. John Henry Newman's feast day?

His feast is kept on 9 October, the anniversary of his reception into the Catholic Church at Littlemore in 1845, rather than on the day of his death on 11 August 1890. He is a natural patron for converts, for students and academics, and for anyone working out their faith through study.

Was Newman a cardinal, and was he ever a bishop?

Leo XIII created him a cardinal in 1879, an unusual honour for a priest who was not a bishop and one he was permitted to accept while remaining at the Birmingham Oratory. He was never consecrated a bishop. He took the honour as the Church's public statement that his life's work had been faithful, after thirty years in which he had been distrusted by Protestant England as a defector and by a powerful section of English Catholic opinion as insufficiently ultramontane.