Saint John Henry Newman (1801-1890)
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(Franciscan Media) Saint John Henry Newman was an Anglican convert to Catholicism according to NC Register who later became a Cardinal and one of the great modern teachers of the faith. Through a diligent study of the Scriptures and Fathers of the Church, Cardinal Newman pursued the truth wherever it would lead him, his intellectual honesty and courage led him to give up the prestige he enjoyed at Oxford University in order to convert to the Catholic Church at the age of forty-four…
Born in England London, John Henry studied at Oxford’s Trinity College, was a tutor at Oriel College and for 17 years was a Vicar of the University Church St. Mary the Virgin located in the center of Oxford for over 700 years.
After 1833 John Henry Newman was a prominent member of the Oxford Movement which sought a renewal of ‘Catholic’ thought and practice within the Church of England in opposition to the Protestant tendencies of the Church.
Historical research made Newman suspect that the Roman Catholic Church was in closest continuity with the Church that Jesus established and in 1845 he was received into full communion as a Catholic. Two years subsequently, Newman was Ordained a Priest in Rome and joined the Congregation of the Oratory, founded three centuries earlier by Saint Philip Neri (Feast Day: 26 May) — Returning to England, Fr. Newman founded ‘Oratory’ Houses in Birmingham together in London and for seven years, served as a Rector of the Catholic University of Ireland.
Before Fr. Newman, Catholic theology tended to ignore history, preferring instead to draw deductions from first principles–much as plane Geometry does. After Fr. Newman, the lived experience of Believers was recognized as a key part of theological reflection.
Fr. Newman eventually would go on to write 40 books and 21,000 letters that survive. Most famous are his book length Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine 1878 — Fr. Newman accepted Vatican I’s teaching on ‘Papal Infallibility’ while noting its limits, which many people who favored that definition were reluctant to do.
When Fr. Newman was made a Cardinal in 1879 he took as a motto: “Cor ad cor loquitur” (“Heart speaks unto heart”) which as Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI points out, this “gives us an insight to his understanding of the Christian life as a call to holiness, experienced as the profound desire of the human heart to enter into intimate communion with the Heart of God.” — Cardinal Newman, “reminds us that faithfulness to prayer gradually transforms us into the divine likeness, as he wrote in one of his many fine sermons: A habit of prayer, the practice of turning to God and the unseen world in every season, in every place, in every emergency–prayer, I say,has what may be called a natural effect in spiritualizing and elevating the soul. A man, is no longer what he was before; gradually…he has embedded a new set of ideas and become(s) embedded with fresh principles.” (Parochial and Plain Sermons, IV 230-231)
Cardinal Newman passed away in August 1890 of Pneumonia — Three years after his death, a ‘Newman Club for Catholic Students’ began at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia and in time, Cardinal Newman’s name was linked to ministry centers at many public and private colleges and universities throughout the United States.
In 1991 Pope Saint John Paul II Venerated Cardinal Newman with a decree of Heroic Virtues; On the 19 September, 2010 Cardinal Newman was Beatified by Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI and Canonized in 2019