Newman's Unquiet Grave: The Reluctant Saint (47 page)

In England, the reaction was delayed, muted, and to an extent both literary as well as political. Four years after the great definition of papal infallibility, Prime Minister William Gladstone was defeated after his failure in 1873 to introduce an Irish University Bill into the House of Commons aimed at better provision of tertiary education in Ireland. The Bill was a repeat of the Queen’s University scheme in the early 1850s, an attempt to secularise the Irish universities in order

to make them more acceptable to Catholics. The Irish bishops were against it, and the Catholic members of Parliament voted accordingly. Gladstone blamed the failure of the Bill (which forced him out office) on the influence of the papal infallibility dogma which, he believed, bound politicians religiously to the Pope’s orders irrespective of their secular policies.

In November 1874 Gladstone published a pamphlet entitled
The Vatican Decrees in their bearing on Civil Allegiance
. He accused the Catholic Church of betraying its claim to be
semper eadem
, ever the same, being unhistorical, and adopting principles that could only lead to violence; converts to Catholicism risked surrendering their moral and political freedoms to become slaves of papal whim. The pamphlet sold 150,000 copies in the first year. The allegations find an echo today in the objections levelled against religion as dividing the loyalties of believers from their duties towards the state, and their capacity to play a part in democratic societies.

LETTER TO THE DUKE OF NORFOLK

It fell to Newman to reply to Gladstone’s attack, but instead of responding directly he wrote to the Duke of Norfolk, England’s leading Catholic layman and something of a national figure. They knew each other well, for the duke had been a pupil at the Oratory School. Written towards the end of 1874, the text was published as
A Letter addressed to the Duke of Norfolk on account of Mr Gladstone’s Recent Expostulation
. Newman took the opportunity to hit out at the infallibilist extremists – Manning and W. G. Ward. For it was their extremism that had provoked Gladstone, a reasonable and indeed religious man:

I own to a deep feeling, that Catholics may in good measure thank themselves, and no one else, for having alienated from them so religious a mind. There are those among us, as it must be confessed, who for years past have conducted themselves as if no responsibility attached to wild words and overbearing deeds; who have stated truths in the most paradoxical form, and stretched principles till they were close upon snapping; and who at length, having done their best to set the house on fire, leave to others the task of putting out the flame.
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Approaching his 74th birthday, Newman’s polemical prose was in superb form. This was just the preface, and he would return to the theme in the letter’s summation. The Catholic extremists were guilty of ‘violence and cruelty’ in print, and of ‘rash language’. They had unsettled those who were ‘weak in faith’ and dissuaded ‘inquirers’ to the Catholic faith. They had shocked the ‘Protestant mind’. Having commented on the questions of the papacy and history, and the importance of understanding that there was to be no new doctrine, no new

revelation, after the death of the last Apostle, Newman launched into the real stuff of Gladstone’s allegations: divided loyalty between religion and the state. Both one’s religion and one’s nation-state have a claim on the individual, and both would attempt to curb an individual’s liberty, he began. Yet the Pope had far less effective power over the citizens of England, and he interfered far less in practice than the state. Indeed it was not possible for either religion or state to impose itself upon, or interfere with, an individual’s conscience.

This was now his central theme: the sovereignty of conscience, which ‘is the voice of God, whereas it is fashionable on all hands now to consider it in one way or another a creation of man’. Conscience, he goes on, is not a recipe to behave as one is inclined – which is more like dispensing with conscience altogether. Conscience is ‘the voice of God in the nature and heart of man … it is a messenger from Him, who, both in nature and in grace, speaks to us behind a veil, and teaches and rules us by His representatives. Conscience is the aboriginal Vicar of Christ, a prophet in its informations, a monarch in its peremp-toriness, a priest in its blessings and anathemas.’
¹¹
For a Catholic, however, conscience also involves the Pope’s authority, which is founded on Revelation to make good the deficiencies of the conscience of nature: ‘the championship of the Moral Law and of conscience is his [the Pope’s]
raison d’être
.’
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Both Newman and Gladstone were conscious that Catholics might not discriminate between dogma and encyclicals like
Quanta Cura
and its notorious off-shoot, the
Syllabus of Errors
. Newman had a rather different point to make about the latter, however. In denouncing the ‘sentiment that he ought to come to terms with “progress, liberalism, and the new civilization” ’, the Pope, after all, was expressing a conservatism no less passionate than had Newman and Gladstone in their youth. But one had to understand the long-term historical background as well as the tendency of local officials to stir things up for the right audience:

Now, the Rock of St. Peter on its summit enjoys a pure and serene atmosphere, but there is a great deal of Roman
malaria
at the foot of it. While the Holy Father was in great earnestness and charity addressing the Catholic world by his Cardinal Minister, there were circles of light-minded men in his city who were laying bets with each other whether the Syllabus would ‘make a row in Europe’ or not … it was very easy to kindle a flame in the mass of English and other visitors at Rome which with a very little nursing was soon strong enough to take care of itself.
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The passage explodes with striking metaphors – the clean upper air, with the malarial swamps beneath; the ‘light-headed’ gamblers, and what we might call spin-doctors today, kindling and ‘nursing’ a conflagration.

But then, the question arises. What happens when there is a conflict between the Pope’s utterances and one’s individual conscience? The same question might

well be asked today in the context of papal decrees on contraception. Newman is adamant that if, after prayer and due consultation, a Catholic believes that an order from the Pope is immoral, he or she is bound to disobey. Citing the Fourth Lateran Council, he quotes: ‘He who acts against his conscience loses his soul.’ Then he allowed himself this famous concluding remark:

Certainly, if I am obliged to bring religion into after-dinner toasts, (which indeed does not seem quite the thing) I shall drink – to the Pope, if you please, – still, to Conscience first, and to the Pope afterwards.
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Newman’s
Letter
was received with enthusiasm in England by both Anglicans and Catholics, and especially by Archbishop Cullen, who was now a Cardinal in Ireland. Gladstone responded generously, mentioning its ‘integrity’, ‘acuteness’, and ‘kindliness of tone’. Gladstone replied that he was not so much attacking Catholics, but ‘Vaticanismus’. In Rome, however, the reception of the
Letter
was mixed. Cardinal Barnabò’s successor at Propaganda, Cardinal Franchi, informed Manning that while the first half of the letter was a triumph, the second part contained ideas that could give scandal. Manning responded in a way that belies any assumption that he was constitutionally ill-disposed towards Newman. He counselled that it would be best to leave well alone; that no public action should be taken against him. ‘The heart of the revered Fr Newman is as right and as Catholic as it is possible to be … [he] has never hitherto so openly defended the prerogatives and infallible magisterium of the Roman Pontiff, although he has always believed and proclaimed these truths …’ In any case, any condemnation would prompt controversy, ‘now by the grace of God extinguished’.
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PART THREE
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CHAPTER 17
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Death of Ambrose St John

‘As far as this world was concerned I was his first and his last. He has not intermitted this love for an hour up to his last …’

NEWMAN ON THE DEATH OF ST JOHN, 1875

While Newman was writing his letter to the Duke of Norfolk, a 100,000 word book on the dogma of infallibility was published in German by Bishop Joseph Fessler, Secretary General of the Vatican Council, entitled
The True and False Infallibility of the Popes
. Newman felt that he could not complete the letter without checking Fessler’s views to ensure his own orthodoxy in the eyes of Rome. He was up against a deadline and had no German; so, according to his practice of many years, he asked his companion Ambrose to translate the text as a matter of urgency.

Ambrose worked day and night on the translation while juggling with other responsibilities at the Birmingham Oratory, its school, and beyond. That summer he was holding instruction classes in Catholicism, giving lectures around Birmingham, producing a school play. He was also in charge of the financial and domestic running of the Oratory and its community. Then there were his pastoral duties, Mass, prayer gatherings, and confessions. On a single day in the previous month, St John had spent six hours hearing confessions: a fact known to Newman. That same month St John had purchased a property called Ravenhurst Farm where he was setting up a chapel in the house and organising the levelling of playing fields for the Oratory school boys. He was also attempting to help a number of relations who were dependent on him. St John got through this helter-skelter life by an ebullient and decisive nature. Yet Newman recollected only later, after it was too late, that St John had been behaving in a peculiar manner since the Spring, and had ‘surprised and annoyed him’ on occasion by interrupting his work, detaining him in conversation. St John had been suffering nightmares. He dreamt that Newman was being persecuted by the Vatican; that his books and writings had been put on the Index of forbidden books. The story of St John’s illness provides an unusual insight into Newman’s empathetic

character and his devotion to his companion.

On an unusually hot day in May 1875, still burdened with the Fessler translation chore, St John drove Newman in the community’s pony and trap to the

Oratorian summer house at Rednal to enjoy some cool air. The following morning, after Mass, Newman found St John strangely nervous. St John nevertheless drove Newman on to the Ravenhurst Farm, leaving him and the trap there, and setting off on foot for Harborne, a district of Birmingham where the Passionist order had established a new community and chapel. It was a five mile walk. ‘The sun was scorching’, wrote Newman later, ‘and he was pressed for time … But, alas, he resolved to walk in spite of what I said. And he did walk; he hurried on a very hot day; and something occurred to frighten him.’
¹
On a lonely stretch of road, at a point where a murder had recently been committed, St John encountered a man loitering suspiciously and was terrified into a state of shock, thinking him to be the murderer in wait.