Newman's Unquiet Grave: The Reluctant Saint (40 page)

Those who know Dr Newman’s powers and are acquainted with his career, and know to what it led him, and yet persist in the charge of insincerity and dishonesty against one who probably has made the greatest sacrifice of our generation to his convictions of truth, will be able to pick up from his own narrative much that they would not otherwise have now, to confirm and point the old familiar view cherished by dislike and narrowness.
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The novelist George Eliot was deeply affected by the
Apologia
. She saw it as the ‘revelation of a life – how different from one’s own, yet with how close a fellowship in its needs and burthens – I mean spiritual needs and burthens’.
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Later she wrote that it ‘breathed much life into me’.

The publication of the
Apologia
and its generally enthusiastic reception marked yet another turning point in Newman’s life. After many years of suspicion and even hatred on the part of Anglicans he emerged once again as a figure of respect, his reputation as a great churchman and spiritual writer restored. As for Kingsley, who died ten years later, Newman claimed to harbour no bitterness against him. Writing to Edmund Sheridan Purcell in 1881, he declared that Kingsley ‘by his passionate attack on me became one of my best friends, whom I always wished to shake hands with when living, and towards whose memory I have much tenderness’.
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The book would not, however, enjoy unalloyed praise down the years. Benjamin Jowett wrote: ‘In speculation [Newman] was habitually untruthful, and not much better in practice. His conscience had been taken out and the Church put in its place.’
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As late as 1969 a critique entitled,
Apologia Pro Charles Kingsley
, was published by the late P. J. FitzPatrick under the pseudonym G. Egner. FitzPatrick professed to be concerned because he thought the accusations levelled by Kingsley ‘were far more substantial than Newman allowed, and that Newman’s reply, taken as a reply, is inadequate’. FitzPatrick claimed that Kingsley raised genuine questions which Newman did not and could not answer. ‘What is more, his objections, for all their incompleteness and at times incoherence, do touch aspects of Newman’s thought that must be borne in mind if we are to pass an adequate judgment on him a century later.’
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FitzPatrick’s book has had a favourable if restricted following over the past forty years. He himself, however, admitted that his reading of Newman, outside

of the Kingsley polemic, was slight, a point emphasised by those Newman scholars who nevertheless recommend it as a token of balance.

Meanwhile, writing to the ultramontane W. G. Ward of Newman’s views in the
Apologia
, Herbert Vaughan declared: ‘There are views put forward which I abhor, and which fill me with pain and suspicion.’
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He was referring to New-man’s resistance to Roman devotional practice, his general sense of moderation, his recent reconciliation with old Anglican friends, his refusal to emphasise papal dogma over conscience, his lukewarm attitude to the embattled papal temporal power. Manning, without mentioning the
Apologia
by name, criticized its advo-cacy of reason in tension with dogma. In a pamphlet against Pusey, he went on to take issue with Newman’s scepticism about logical proofs for God’s existence. The publication of the
Apologia
identified Newman as an opponent of the ultramontane party within the Catholic Church in England. Newman consequently became increasingly guarded with Manning, who was to succeed Wiseman as Archbishop of Westminster in 1865, and dismissive of Monsignor George Talbot, Manning’s champion in Rome. Not long after the publication of the
Apologia
Talbot called unannounced and uninvited at the Oratory in Birmingham. Newman was not at home, and most of the other Fathers kept to their rooms. Talbot, ludicrously, asked a junior member of the community whether Newman read books. The young man replied that he knew that Newman took books from the library, but he could not say whether he actually read them. A brief correspondence followed, demonstrating Newman’s new determination

to resist Talbot’s machinations.

The day after his visit, Talbot wrote to Newman inviting him to preach a series of sermons in Rome. He attempted to persuade Newman by noting that ‘you would have a more educated Audience of Protestants than could ever be the case in England, and where they are more open to Catholic influences’. Talbot went on to argue that he would ‘derive great benefit’ from showing himself to the ‘Ecclesiastical Authorities’ in Rome. The clincher, however, was the implication that it was a request by His Holiness in person. ‘When I told the Holy Father that I intended to invite you, he highly approved of my intention … it would be a great consolation to be able to tell the Holy Father that you have accepted my invitation, and I am sure that the Blessing of the Vicar of Christ will amply repay you for going so far.’
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While such soft bullying, with its sanctimonious undertones and pontifical overtones, routinely worked wonders among the clerical courtiers, Newman was having none of it. He evidently felt doubly insulted, knowing only too well that Talbot had been maligning him, spreading rumours that he supported Garibaldi ‘and other bad things’, and implying that he needed to ‘rub up’ his Catholicism. Newman responded curtly: ‘I have received your letter, inviting me to preach next Lent in your Church at Rome, to “an audience of Protestants

more educated than could ever be the case in England”. However, Birmingham people have souls; and I have neither taste nor talent for the sort of work, which you cut out for me: and I beg to decline your offer.’ As for the Pope’s endorsement of the scheme, writing to a friend the following year, Newman had evidently rumbled the truth: the invitation ‘was suggested by Manning – the Pope had nothing to do with it – When Talbot left for England, he said among other things to the Pope, “I think of asking Dr Newman to give a set of lectures in my Church –” and the Pope of course said, “a very good thought”, as he would have said, if Mgr.T. had said “I wish to bring your Holiness some English razors”.’
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A RETURN TO OXFORD?

In the midst of the excitement occasioned by the
Apologia
, Newman was offered a five-acre site in North Oxford. At the same time, Bishop Ullathorne suggested that Newman should found a Catholic parish in Oxford to meet the needs of Catholics within the University. Newman thus set about raising the money to build a church and an oratory with the additional possibility of founding a hall of residence under his supervision for Catholic undergraduates.

The scheme, which might one day have given Oxford a fully fledged Catholic college (although that was not Newman’s original intention), was instantly opposed in Rome and Westminster. Cardinal Wiseman, who was dying (and listened to the plan ‘half querulously’), accused Newman of ‘insolence’. Manning wrote to the Vatican claiming that the Cardinal was ‘entirely opposed to any contact between the faithful in England and the heretical intellectual culture of the country’.
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The view coincided with his own, and betrayed his ill-concealed distrust of the Catholic laity and Newman. Newman wrote to Thomas Allies, that the opposition even to a university church for Catholics in Oxford, illustrated ‘the same dreadful jealousy of the laity, which has ruined things in Dublin, is now at the bottom of this unwillingness to let our youths go to Oxford … Propaganda and our leading Bishops fear the natural influence of the laity: which would be their greatest, or (humanly speaking) is rather their only, defence against the world.’
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A meeting of the English Catholic bishops under the ailing and distant supervision of Wiseman was inconclusive about the scheme, so the case was passed back to the Vatican and Cardinal Barnabò in Rome. Newman was in despair both on account of the timidity of the bishops and the Roman clique. ‘We are certainly under a tyranny’, he wrote to a friend ‘one or two persons such as Manning seem to do everything.’
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Newman was not prepared to countenance a situation where he might have to abandon a project halfway through. On Pusey’s instigation he sold the plot to the university in January 1865. Three months later the bishops expressed

their final opposition to the building of a Catholic college at Oxford, or at Cambridge; although that had not been Newman’s intention. Newman, moreover, thought he had reasons to believe that the Pope himself was behind the veto constituting a stumbling block.

Then Wiseman died and Manning succeeded him, a triumph for which Talbot claimed a large measure of responsibility. Newman was crestfallen. As he remarked to Allies, ‘If you write to inspire me with confidence in the Archbishop,
laterem lavas
’.
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In other words, you might just as well wash a brick. Writing to a woman friend, Newman confided that Manning ‘has a great power of winning men, when he chooses’.
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To another he declared Manning ‘so mysterious, that I don’t know how one can ever have confidence in him’.
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Newman nevertheless attended the consecration on the understanding that he was present as a friend and not as a clerical dignitary. He also wanted Manning to understand that he would refuse a bishopric if one were proffered. Newman had got wind of Manning’s plan to have him made a bishop in order to muzzle him.

NEWMAN ‘MOST DANGEROUS MAN IN ENGLAND’

The extent of the antagonism towards Newman now became manifest following the publication of an essay of Pusey’s aimed at defining what separated Catholicism and Anglicanism. Pusey entitled it the
Eirenicon
, the gesture of peace. According to Pusey, what kept the Churches apart was the ultramontane surge of Manning and Ward, and the Mariolatry of Faber. Newman published his response in
A Letter to the Rev E. B. Pusey, D.D., on his recent Eirenicon
. ‘You discharge your olive branch’, he wrote, ‘as if from a catapult.’
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He vigorously defended Catholic devotion to the Virgin Mary, then went on to insist that Ward and Faber were not representative of Catholicism. On the question of Manning, he declared that it was hardly his place to defend a bishop of the Church.

He nevertheless took a decided position against the saccharine Italianate devotions that so many Anglicans, and Old Catholics, despised. He himself had felt a sense of ‘grief and almost anger’ at the excesses quoted by Pusey. Such devotions were not suited to the English tradition, he argued, and were likely to alienate potential converts. Newman’s
Letter
drew support from a wide constituency of Catholics in England, including Bishop Ullathorne. Ward, however, author of the notorious quip that he would relish a new papal Bull every morning with his
Times
at breakfast, was furious, more on account of Newman’s reticence on papal authority and temporal power than anything he actually said against it. Monsignor Talbot delivered a poisonous attack on Newman, assuring Manning that ‘every Englishman is naturally anti-Roman … to be Roman is to an Englishman an effort. Dr Newman is more English than the English. His spirit must be crushed.’
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In response, and as if to endorse Ward’s resentment at Newman’s reticence on the score of the papacy, Manning replied that Newman had become a leader of those who ‘hold low views about the Holy See’, and who are

cold and silent, to say no more, about the Temporal Power, national, English, critical of Catholic devotions, and always on the lower side. I see no danger of a Cisalpine Club rising again, but I see much danger of an English Catholicism, of which Newman is the highest type. It is the old Anglican, patristic, literary, Oxford tone transplanted into the Church. It takes the line of deprecating exaggerations, foreign devotions, Ultramontanism, antinational sympathies. In one word, it is worldly Catholicism, and it will have the worldly on its side, and will deceive many.
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