John Henry Newman

John Henry Newman (1801-1890), English clergyman, who was leader of the Oxford movement, and cardinal after his conversion to the Roman Catholic church; outstanding religious thinker and essayist.

Born on February 21, 1801, Newman was educated at Trinity College, University of Oxford. In 1822 he obtained an Oriel College fellowship, then the highest distinction of Oxford scholarship, and thus was brought into close association with a number of the most illustrious men of the time. In 1826 Newman was appointed a tutor at Oriel and two years later became vicar of Saint Mary's, the (Anglican) church of the University of Oxford. In this position he exerted a pervasive influence on contemporary religious thought through his learned and eloquent sermons. He resigned his tutorship in 1832 and in the following year made a tour of the Mediterranean region, during which he wrote the famous hymn “Lead, Kindly Light.”

Newman returned to England in time to hear the memorable sermon “On the National Apostasy,” preached at St. Mary's by John Keble, a fellow Oxonian. This sermon defined the religious issues of the time and marked the inception of the Oxford movement, a movement within the Church of England directed against the growth of theological liberalism and advocating the return to theology and ritual of the period following the Reformation.

Newman, whose own religious thinking had for some time been along similar lines, soon became the acknowledged leader of the Oxford group, a role for which his vital personality, fervent asceticism, and persuasive eloquence preeminently qualified him. He was one of the chief contributors to the Tracts for the Times (1833-41), for which he wrote 29 papers, including the famous Tract 90, which terminated the series. That final tract provoked a storm of opposition by its claim that the Thirty-nine Articles of the Church of England, which incorporate the creed of the Reformed Church in England, are aimed primarily at the abuses and not the dogmas of Roman Catholicism. The thesis was repudiated by Anglican dignitaries, who almost universally declared against the Oxford movement.

In 1842 Newman retired from Oxford to the neighboring village of Littlemore, where he passed three years in seclusion, writing at this time a formal retraction of the adverse criticisms of the Roman Catholic church that he had made on previous occasions. He also resigned his post as vicar of St. Mary's, and on October 9, 1845, after writing his Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, which expressed the final crystallization of his ideas, he became a Roman Catholic. A year later he went to Rome, where he was ordained priest and entered the Congregation of the Oratory. On his return to England he introduced the Oratorians there.

Newman spent most of the remainder of his life in the house of the Oratory that he had established near Birmingham. From 1854 to 1858, however, he served as rector of a Roman Catholic university that the bishops of Ireland were attempting to establish in Dublin. The institution failed, but while there Newman delivered a series of lectures, subsequently revised and published as The Idea of a University Defined (1873), in which he defined the function of a university as the training of the mind rather than the diffusion of practical information. In response to a charge by the British novelist Charles Kingsley that Roman Catholicism was indifferent to the truth, Newman in 1864 published his masterpiece, Apologia pro Vita Sua (Apology for His Life), a memorable account of his spiritual development that is an acknowledged classic of both religious autobiography and English prose. He was elected an honorary fellow of Trinity College, Oxford, in 1877, and Pope Leo XIII created him a cardinal in 1879. He died August 11, 1890. Newman's other important writings include An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent (1870), a closely reasoned work on the philosophy of faith. He also wrote the novels Loss and Gain (1848) and Callista (1856); The Dream of Gerontius (1865), a monologue in verse; and Verses on Various Occasions (1874).