Newman's Unquiet Grave: The Reluctant Saint (22 page)

Catholics were taught that revelation had ceased with the death of the last Apostle, and that the Faith was unchanging. How was this to be reconciled with the manifest varia-tion in the theological beliefs recorded during the long history of the Church? I set out the difficulties with gusto: the changing attitude of Catholic Christians to the imminent return of Christ, to the creation of the world in seven days, to the Pope’s temporal sovereignty and deposing power, to the lawfulness of usury. Cardinal Newman had written a celebrated account of the development: all it offered, I complained, was metaphor in place of explanation.
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The drift of the book does indeed appeal to powerful metaphors rather than logical argument, and borders on the poetic rather than the philosophical. Newman had laboured over it as if it were a work of art. ‘Perhaps one gets over-sensitive even about style, as one gets on in life’, he informed Mrs William Froude. ‘Besides rewriting, every part has to be worked out and defined as in moulding a statue. I get on, as a person walks with a lame ankle, who does get on, and gets to his journey’s end, but not comfortably.’
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PART TWO
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CHAPTER 9
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Rome at last

‘I will not raise controversy in the Church, and it would ill become a neo Catholic to be introducing views …’

J. H. NEWMAN LETTER TO J. D. DALGAIRNS, FEAST OF ST CECILIA, 1846

The writing of
An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine
was a crucial, life-changing process in the story of Newman’s quest for the true Church. ‘As I advanced’, he would write, ‘my difficulties so cleared away that I ceased to speak of “the Roman Catholics”, and boldly called them Catholics. Before I got to the end, I resolved to be received, and the book remains in the state in which it was then, unfinished.’
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In September of 1845 Dalgairns left to enter the Catholic Church. On 2 October it was the turn of Ambrose St John. The next day Newman formally resigned his Oriel fellowship. Hawkins, the Provost of Oriel, wrote a sombre letter trust-ing that he would not sink into such Romish errors as worshipping statues.

Father Dominic Barberi, a member of the Passionist Congregation with a reputation for holiness, had received many converts into the Roman Catholic Church, and was due to visit littletons from Birmingham on 8 October. He was an Italian with poor English and no scholar or intellectual. He was a charismatic spiritual director, albeit of a different kind of charisma than Newman. Born into a peasant family near Viterbo, and orphaned at the age of six, Barberi’s path to priesthood had been difficult as a result of his illiteracy well into boyhood. On arrival on the English ‘mission’ in 1842, aged 50, he had contended with resentment from ‘old Catholics’, suspicious of Italianate-style piety, as well as local Protestant attacks. He was once stoned by boys in the street; he picked up the rocks, kissed them, and placed them in his pockets.

He was met off the coach in Oxford by Dalgairns, whom Newman had told: ‘When you see your friend, will you tell him that I wish him to receive me into the Church of Christ.’ Father Dominic was soaked, having journeyed from Birmingham for five hours on the outside of a coach in a storm. They went by chaise to littletons, arriving at the cottages after eleven o’clock. Dominic later told his confreres that he was drying himself before the fire when Newman entered: ‘The door opened – and what a spectacle it was for me to see at my feet John Henry Newman begging me to hear his confession and admit him into the bosom of the Catholic Church! And there by the fire he began his general

confession with extraordinary humility and devotion.’ The next day Father Dominic heard the rest of his confession.
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Newman had prepared for his confession all week. The following March he would write to Mrs Bowden, wife of his lately dead friend John, about the final period before his decision to be received into the Church:

Of course
I
should call them artifices of the enemy to hinder what seems inevitable. The moment before acting may be, as can easily be imagined, peculiarly dreary … I could do nothing but shut myself up in my room and lie down on my bed.
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Newman had finally come home. And yet he was going into exile, not least from Oxford. He would write in the
Apologia
those famous lines of longing and nostalgia for Oxford: ‘There used to be much snapdragon growing on the walls opposite my freshman’s rooms there [at Trinity College], and I had for years taken it as the emblem of my own perpetual residence even unto death in my University … I have never seen Oxford since, excepting its spires, as they are seen from the railway.’
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His separations would extend to family members, many old friends, colleagues, and pupils: all that he had known and could call home. As the news spread throughout the country, and even overseas, the reactions to his ‘perversion’ to Rome was received with incomprehension, anger, and disgust. Gladstone would write that Newman’s conversion ‘has never yet been estimated at anything like the full amount of its calamitous importance’.
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In the aftermath, others, Anglican clergy and lay people, would follow, but it would take time for the truly ‘calamitous’ repercussions of Newman’s rejection of the Church of England to take effect.

OSCOTT AND MARYVALE

At a mid-point on the Chester Road, which connects industrial conurbations north of Birmingham – Brownhills and Stoke on Trent – with the leafy town-ships of Leamington Spa and Warwick, one passes a screen of tall trees, punctuated by gothic gatehouses. Beyond lies an impressive neo-gothic building, four storeys high with many towers and gables, and cloisters. There are well-stocked libraries, lecture halls, a museum, and a chapel built by Augustus Welby Pugin filled with late Medieval decorative treasures brought over from the Continent – the ecclesiastical casualties of the French Revolution. This is Oscott College, opened in 1838 as a school and seminary; it was also the headquarters for the revival of Catholicism in England in the mid-nineteenth-century. The historian Lord Acton, who was a boy in the school in the 1840s, wrote that ‘we thought that Oscott was the centre of the world’.
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The magnificent new college

had in fact replaced a smaller house half a mile distant, known thereafter as Old Oscott.

Before the end of October 1845, Newman, newly received into the Catholic Church, visited Nicholas Wiseman, now President of Oscott College (having left the English College in Rome). Wiseman confirmed Newman and Ambrose St John in Pugin’s chapel on the Feast of All Saints, 1 November 1845. Then he offered Newman and his Oxford converts the Old Oscott house which New-man promptly renamed Maryvale. There was a chapel and some twenty rooms, and here he could make his home, a ‘littletons continued’. Yet first he must wind up his affairs at the old littletons. While pondering his future within the Catholic Church, he embarked on the task of ‘burning and packing … reading and folding – passing from a metaphysical MS to a lump of resin or an ink-glass’. It was a typically self-conscious, literary flourish of the conceptual and the tangible. He did not finish until 22 February 1846: ‘I quite tore myself away – and could not help kissing my bed, and mantelpiece, and other parts of the house.’
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Newman found his first Catholic home at Maryvale ‘dismally ugly’. He confessed that he had little idea of what it meant to be a Catholic in daily practice. The impact of his ‘going over’ focused at first on that most Catholic of doctrines and devotions, belief in the Real Presence in the consecrated wafer, preserved and venerated in the ornate cupboard or tabernacle on the altar of most Catholic churches and chapels, attended by a hanging oil lamp. ‘I am writing next room to the Chapel – It is such an incomprehensible blessing to have Christ in bodily presence in one’s house, within one’s walls, as swallows up all other privileges and destroys, or should destroy, every pain. To know that He is close by – to be able again and again through the day to go in to Him …’
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Reflecting on his visits to Catholic churches in the past, he wrote: ‘I did not know, or did not observe, the tabernacle Lamp – but now after tasting of the awful delight of worshipping God in His Temple, how unspeakably cold is the idea of a Temple without that Divine Presence! One is tempted to say what is the meaning, what is the use of it.’
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Yet all was not unsullied joy. The spiritual consolation, he wrote, ‘destroys, or should destroy, every pain’. It did not. Oscott College, where he was obliged to spend much of his day, with its ‘hosts of visitors’, he found a ‘place of dissipa-tion’. And while he had been nurturing a circle of female friends, mainly as correspondents, he deplored the ‘tribes of women’ that flocked to the college. He was soon to taste a lack of respect and consideration on the part of his new co-religionists, as well as unwarranted assurance from a constituency of converts, and old Catholics, who took it upon themselves to deliver him lectures. There was scant ‘delicacy towards my feelings’, he would complain. He recollected some years later:

How dreary my first year at Maryvale … when I was the gaze of so many eyes at Oscott, as if some wild incomprehensible beast, caught by the hunter, and a spectacle for Dr. Wiseman to exhibit to strangers, as himself being the hunter who captured it!
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Six years on he would write to his friend T. W. Allies, a married man who found it hard converting to Catholicism: ‘Your trial … is a most exceedingly great one, but those who are unmarried have their own. They are solitary and thrown among strangers more intimately and intensely than married people can be … We have been (necessarily) located as children being grown men.’
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It went hard with him, moreover, that even young Dalgairns, of the generation that had idolised him at Oxford, now considered himself on the same level and qualified to ‘lecture’ him. Meanwhile, Wiseman, the President of Oscott, whether to give him a lesson in humility, or from thoughtlessness, made him stand at his door ‘waiting for Confession amid the Oscott boys’.
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