John Henry Newman

• 1. Introduction

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  John Henry Newman was an English theologian who became a cardinal and, in 2019, a saint. On the 2nd of October 2008, his grave was opened so that his remains could be moved to a tomb inside the Birmingham Oratory. There, visitors could venerate them as relics. There was nothing to move. His wooden coffin had disintegrated, and no bones were found.

  A representative of the Fathers of the Birmingham Oratory blamed the damp burial site. John Hunter, a forensic expert from the University of Birmingham, was not convinced. He tested soil samples and said the total disappearance of a body was unlikely. Conditions harsh enough to remove bone, he argued, would also have destroyed the coffin handles, and those had survived.

  A missing body is a fitting puzzle for a man who has been argued over ever since his lifetime. Newman began as an evangelical Anglican priest at Oxford and ended as a Catholic cardinal in Birmingham. A 2001 biography notes that since his death he has suffered almost as much misrepresentation as he did while alive. How did a Church of England tutor help launch a movement inside his own church and then leave it? Why did an English jury find him guilty of libel? And what did he think a university was for?

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• 2. A Banker's Son

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  Lombard Street in London was the address of Ramsbottom, Newman and Company, the bank where John Newman worked. His eldest son, John Henry, was born on the 21st of February 1801 in the City of London. He was the first of three sons and three daughters. His mother, Jemima, came from a family of Huguenot refugees founded in England by the engraver, printer and stationer Paul Fourdrinier. A younger brother, Francis William, and a younger sister, Harriet Elizabeth, would both appear in his later story. Harriet married Thomas Mozley, another prominent name in the Oxford Movement.

  At the age of seven, Newman was sent to Great Ealing School, run by George Nicholas. He took no part in the casual games and read instead. Walter Scott's novels, then still being published, were a favourite, and so was the poetry of Robert Southey. By fourteen he had met the sceptical writing of Thomas Paine and David Hume, and perhaps Voltaire.

  In March 1816, the family bank crashed, though it paid its creditors, and his father left to manage a brewery. In the same year, at fifteen, Newman converted to Evangelical Christianity. In the Apologia he later called the experience "more certain than that I have hands or feet". His classics master Walter Mayers, who had undergone his own conversion in 1814, lent him books from the English Calvinist tradition. For a time Newman held the common belief that the Pope was the antichrist.

  Newman looked back on 1816 for the rest of his life as the saving of his soul. Even so, he drifted from Calvinism. The historian Eamon Duffy describes what Newman came to see in Evangelicalism. It was, in Duffy's words, "a Trojan horse for an undogmatic religious individualism", one that ignored the Church's role in passing on revealed truth.

  His name was entered at Lincoln's Inn, but he was soon sent to Trinity College, Oxford. There he studied widely, and there he stumbled. His anxiety over the final examinations produced the opposite of what he wanted, and he broke down in front of the examiner, Thomas Vowler Short. He graduated "under the line", with lower second class honours in Classics. He had failed classification in the mathematical papers.

  He still wanted to stay in Oxford. He took private pupils and read for a fellowship at Oriel College, then known as the acknowledged centre of Oxford intellectualism. He was elected a fellow on the 12th of April 1822. A year later, Edward Bouverie Pusey was elected to a fellowship at the same college.

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• 3. Tracts for the Times

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  Richard Hurrell Froude joined the Oriel fellows in 1826. Newman described him as "one of the acutest, cleverest and deepest men" he ever met. The two shared a high view of the tutor's job as clerical and pastoral rather than secular. That view caused tension in the college. By 1832 it had led to a sharp quarrel with the provost, Edward Hawkins, over the "substantially religious nature" of a tutorship, and Newman resigned.

  In December 1832, Newman set off on a tour of southern Europe with Archdeacon Robert Froude and his son Hurrell, whose health was poor. They sailed on the mail steamship Hermes and visited Gibraltar, Malta and the Ionian Islands. Then came Sicily, Naples and Rome, where Newman met Nicholas Wiseman. Newman called Rome "the most wonderful place on Earth". Yet he called the Roman Catholic Church "polytheistic, degrading and idolatrous".

  At Leonforte in Sicily, Newman fell dangerously ill with what was either gastric or typhoid fever. He recovered convinced that God still had work for him in England. He counted it his third providential illness. In June 1833, he left Palermo for Marseille on an orange boat that was becalmed in the Strait of Bonifacio. There he wrote the verses "Lead, Kindly Light", later a popular hymn.

  Newman was back in Oxford on the 9th of July 1833. Five days later, John Keble preached an assize sermon at St Mary's called "National Apostasy". Newman afterwards regarded it as the start of the Oxford Movement. Richard William Church summed up the division of labour this way: it was "Keble who inspired, Froude who gave the impetus, and Newman who took up the work".

  The first real organisation came from Hugh James Rose, editor of the British Magazine. At his rectory in Hadleigh, Suffolk, on the 25th and the 26th of July, a group of High Church clergy met. Newman was not there. They resolved to fight for "the apostolical succession and the integrity of the Prayer Book". A few weeks later, apparently on his own initiative, Newman began the Tracts for the Times. The movement was later called Tractarian after them. The Rivington house in London published them through Francis Rivington.

  The tracts sought to give the Church of England a definite basis of doctrine and discipline. Newman's Sunday afternoon sermons at St Mary's backed them up, and over eight years their influence grew, especially among younger members of the university. In 1835, Pusey joined with tracts on Baptism and the Eucharist, and critics began to call the wider group "Puseyites". In 1836 the Tractarians acted together for the first time. They opposed the appointment of Renn Dickson Hampden as Regius Professor of Divinity, whose 1832 Bampton Lectures were suspected of heresy. Newman also became editor of the British Critic and lectured in a side chapel of St Mary's. He defended the via media, a middle way between Roman Catholicism and popular Protestantism.

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• 4. Road to Littlemore

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  About 1839, Newman's influence in Oxford was at its height. Then his study of monophysitism made him doubt that Anglican theology fit the principles of church authority he had come to accept. That summer he read Nicholas Wiseman's article "The Anglican Claim" in the Dublin Review. It quoted Augustine of Hippo against the Donatists: "securus judicat orbis terrarum", meaning the verdict of the world is conclusive. Newman wrote that the words struck him with a power he had never felt from any words before. The theology of the Via Media, he said, was "absolutely pulverised".

  Tract 90 appeared in 1841 and proved the last of the series. It examined the Thirty-Nine Articles in detail. It argued that their authors aimed their negations at popular errors and exaggerations, not at the authorised creed of Catholicism. Archibald Campbell Tait and three other senior tutors denounced it. They said it opened a way for men to violate their solemn engagements to the university. At the request of Richard Bagot, Bishop of Oxford, the Tracts came to an end. Newman later wrote: "I was on my death-bed, as regards my membership with the Anglican Church."

  Littlemore, south of Oxford, had been attached to the benefice of St Mary's. Newman had built a chapel and a school there in a neglected part of the parish. His mother laid the foundation stone in 1835, on a half-acre plot with £100 given by Oriel College. In 1842 he withdrew there with a small band of followers and lived in semi-monastic conditions. John Dobree Dalgairns was the first to arrive, and Ambrose St John followed in 1843. They converted stables and a granary that had served stage coaches. Newman called the place "the house of the Blessed Virgin Mary at Littlemore". Curious Oxford onlookers nicknamed it Newmanooth, after Maynooth College.

  In February 1843, Newman placed an anonymous advertisement in the Oxford Conservative Journal. It formally retracted all the hard things he had said against Roman Catholicism. On the 25th of September he preached his last Anglican sermon at Littlemore, "The parting of friends". He resigned the living of St Mary's but stayed at Littlemore for two more years.

  On the 9th of October 1845, Dominic Barberi, an Italian Passionist, received Newman into the Catholic Church at the college in Littlemore. The personal cost was large. Newman suffered broken relationships with family and friends, and opinion about him in Oxford split into camps. Scholars still debate how much the move hurt the wider Tractarian movement. Tractarian writings kept circulating, and Tractarian clergy continued to join the Church of England. In October 1846, Newman travelled to Rome, where Cardinal Giacomo Filippo Fransoni ordained him a priest.

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• 5. Trial by Jury

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  On the 29th of September 1850, Pope Pius IX issued a papal bull, Universalis Ecclesiae, re-establishing the Catholic diocesan hierarchy in England. Nicholas Wiseman became the first Archbishop of Westminster. The Times and Punch led the British press in calling it a "Papal Aggression". Prime minister John Russell condemned it in a public letter to the Bishop of Durham. A "No Popery" outcry followed, with Catholic priests pelted in the streets and Catholic churches attacked.

  Newman wanted lay people at the front of any public defence. In 1851 he booked the Birmingham Corn Exchange for a series of public lectures. He gave them a popular tone and supplied cheap off-prints to those who attended. These were his Lectures on the Present Position of Catholics in England. They began on the 30th of June, ran weekly, and were published on the 1st of September 1851. There were nine in all. Andrew Nash calls them an analysis and satire of anti-Catholic ideology, the first of their kind in English literature. Wilfrid Ward saw a grave apologist indulging a sense of rollicking fun for the first time at the age of fifty. Newman himself called it his best-written book.

  Giacinto Achilli, born in 1803, was an ex-Dominican friar who spoke at anti-Catholic public meetings. In 1841 the Roman Inquisition had suspended his priestly faculties for sexual misconduct. He left the Dominican house in 1842 and became a Protestant. In 1850 the Evangelical Alliance brought him to England as a victim of Rome. That July, Wiseman published a detailed exposé of him in the Dublin Review. After taking legal advice, Newman felt free to repeat those facts in his fifth lecture. A jury would later decide that passage was libel.

  The libel charge was officially laid in November. English law required Newman to prove every single charge. The documents Wiseman had used were mislaid, and Newman found them only when it was too late to stop the trial. His defence committee had to find the victims and bring them to England, and Maria Giberne travelled to Italy to return with them. When Achilli heard that witnesses were coming, he arranged for the trial to be delayed. All this fell on a man who had been invited to be founding rector of a Catholic university in Dublin. He was also composing the lectures that would become The Idea of a University.

  The trial opened on the 21st of June 1852 and lasted three days. Achilli denied everything, despite the evidence of the victims and witnesses. The jury believed him and found Newman guilty. The Times said "a great blow has been given to the administration of justice in this country". Newman did not receive the prison sentence many expected. Judge John Taylor Coleridge fined him £100 and lectured him on his moral deterioration since becoming a Catholic. Coleridge later wrote to Keble that he hailed the libel as false, "believing it is in great part true".

  Newman's costs as defendant came to about £14,000. A fund organised by his defence committee, with gifts from Catholics at home and abroad, covered them. About £2,000 was left over, and it bought a small property at Rednal on the Lickey Hills, with a chapel and a cemetery. In later editions Newman cut the libellous passage from the fifth lecture. In its place he put a Latin line, "posterorum judicium sit", meaning let posterity be the judge.

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• 6. A University for Catholics

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  In 1854, the Irish Catholic bishops asked Newman to come to Dublin as rector of the newly established Catholic University of Ireland, now University College Dublin. While there he founded the Literary and Historical Society. After four years he retired. His aim was a Catholic university at a time when the major Catholic universities of continental Europe had recently been secularised. Most universities in the English-speaking world were Protestant. A university needed research and publication free from church censorship to earn respect. It also had to respect Catholic teaching to be safe for Catholic youth. Newman steered a middle way that honoured both the rights of knowledge and the rights of revelation.

  His book of lectures, The Idea of a University, explained his philosophy. In it he said the university's function was intellectual culture. It "educates the intellect to reason well in all matters, to reach out towards truth, and to grasp it".

  Bishop Paul Cullen did not share the enthusiasm. In 1854 he wrote to the Vatican's Sacred Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith, now called the Dicastery for Evangelization. He complained that the young men were allowed out at all hours and to smoke, and that no fixed time for study existed. His verdict was blunt: "Father Newman does not give enough attention to details." The university met too much opposition to prosper, though the book had wide influence.

  In 1858 Newman proposed a branch house of the Oratory at Oxford. Henry Edward Manning and others opposed it. They feared a Catholic body at the heart of Oxford would lure Catholic families to send their sons there instead of to the newly formed Catholic universities. The scheme was dropped. Catholics began attending Oxford from the 1860s, and in 1888 their club was renamed the Oxford University Newman Society. The Oxford Oratory itself was founded more than a century later, in 1993.

  Newman did succeed with a school. In 1859, in connection with the Birmingham Oratory, he established the Oratory School for the sons of gentlemen. It followed lines similar to English public schools and flourished as a boys' boarding school. It was one of several dubbed "The Catholic Eton".

  His influence also crossed the Atlantic. William Augustus Muhlenberg, a staunch Protestant and a pioneer of American education, sometimes read Newman's sermons to boys at his model schools on Long Island. He distanced himself when Newman became a Catholic in 1845. Yet the influence ran deep in his former pupils, including John Barrett Kerfoot, who founded Saint James School of Maryland.

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• 7. Apologia and Assent

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  In the January 1864 issue of Macmillan's Magazine, Charles Kingsley reviewed James Anthony Froude's History of England. Along the way he wrote that "Truth, for its own sake, had never been a virtue with the Roman clergy." He added that Father Newman had told readers it need not be. Edward Lowth Badeley, Newman's close legal adviser since the Achilli trial, urged him to answer forcefully. Newman first published a pamphlet in 1864, Mr Kingsley and Dr Newman. It has been called unsurpassed in English for the vigour of its satire, though Newman later admitted in a letter to Sir William Cope that his anger had been largely feigned.

  Kingsley's reply, a lengthy pamphlet called What then does Dr Newman mean?, did him no favours. One historian described it as "one of the most momentous rhetorical and polemical failures of the Victorian age".

  Newman then wrote the Apologia Pro Vita Sua, a religious autobiography, which appeared in seven weekly parts starting on the 21st of April 1864. An appendix followed two weeks after the seventh part. He had begun preparing memoranda in 1862 to vindicate his career. Kingsley's general charge against the Catholic clergy was answered in the seventh part, and his specific accusations in the appendix. The tone changed the popular view of its author, because it explained the convictions that had led him into the Catholic Church. In the book he wrote that "there are but two alternatives, the way to Rome, and the way to Atheism". The revised book form came out in 1865.

  In 1870, Newman published the Grammar of Assent, a closely reasoned defence of religious belief. Its arguments differed somewhat from those commonly used by Catholic theologians of the day. That was also the year of the First Vatican Council, which ran from 1869 to 1870. Newman was uneasy about formally defining papal infallibility, thinking the moment "inopportune". In a private letter to his bishop, William Bernard Ullathorne, he denounced an "insolent and aggressive faction" pushing the matter forward. The letter was surreptitiously published.

  Newman personally believed in the doctrine. His fear was that a broad definition would be misunderstood. When it was finally defined, he gave no sign of disapproval and urged what he called the "principle of minimising", which kept few papal declarations within its scope. Later he wrote a letter nominally addressed to the Duke of Norfolk, answering Gladstone's charge that the Roman church had repudiated modern thought and ancient history. In it he said he had always believed the doctrine and had feared only its effect on potential converts.

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• 8. Heart Speaks to Heart

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  On the 12th of May 1879, Pope Leo XIII created Newman a cardinal in a consistory, assigning him the Deaconry of San Giorgio al Velabro. The path there was not obvious. In 1878, Oriel had made him an honorary fellow, and he revisited Oxford after thirty-two years, on the same day Pope Pius IX died. Pius had mistrusted him. Leo, encouraged by the Duke of Norfolk and other English Catholic laymen, was willing despite the fact that Newman was neither a bishop nor a resident of Rome. Manning stayed silent when the Pope asked about it, while Ullathorne let Rome know the honour would be welcome. Newman took the February offer as a vindication. He made two requests: that he not be consecrated a bishop, as was usual then, and that he remain in Birmingham.

  Lytton Strachey, who was ten when Newman died, later painted a different picture in Eminent Victorians. He accused Manning of secretly telling the press that Newman would refuse the cardinalate. Geoffrey Faber, whose own account was far from reverent, called Strachey's portrait a distasteful caricature. James Anthony Froude knew Newman at Oxford and saw him as a heroic figure. He wrote that for hundreds of young men, "Credo in Newmannum" was the symbol of faith.

  The letters tell of a livelier man than the legend of a sensitive recluse. Newman took the train as soon as rail lines were laid and wrote amusing letters about his journeys. He was an indefatigable walker, and as a young don he often went riding with Hurrell Froude. His parishioners at the Oratory were mainly factory workers, Irish immigrants and tradespeople, and their recorded memories show real affection for him. He also wept openly, at his mother's grave and at the funerals of old friends such as Henry Wilberforce.

  Ambrose St John, born in 1815, shared Newman's communal life for thirty-two years from 1843. When St John died in 1875, Newman wrote that he had always thought no bereavement equal to a husband's or a wife's, and that he could hardly believe any sorrow greater than his own. Maria Giberne, a gifted amateur artist, painted many portraits of Newman and several of the pictures in the Birmingham Oratory. In a sermon on the Feast of St John the Evangelist, Newman argued that the best preparation for loving the world is to cultivate intimate friendship with those close at hand. Juan R. Vélez suggests he may someday earn the title Doctor amicitiae, Doctor of the Church on Friendship.

  Some writers have asked whether these bonds were more than friendship. Faber's 1933 book Oxford Apostles leaned that way, but most scholars of the Oxford Movement dismiss or doubt it. Alan Bray, in his 2003 book The Friend, saw the bond with St John as entirely spiritual. Bray noted that friends were often buried together then, and that Newman's burial drew no comment at the time.

  Newman's health began to fail in the latter half of 1886. He celebrated Mass for the last time on Christmas Day 1889. He died of pneumonia at the Birmingham Oratory on the 11th of August 1890. Eight days later, he was buried at Rednal Hill in the grave of Ambrose St John, as he had directed: "my last, my imperative will". The pall bore his cardinal's motto, Cor ad cor loquitur, "Heart speaks to heart". The joint memorial stone carries another line he chose, Ex umbris et imaginibus in veritatem, "Out of shadows and phantasms into the truth". William Barry traced the first motto to Francis de Sales and the second to Plato's allegory of the cave. His estate was probated on the 27th of February 1891 at £4,206.

  Cardinal Marc Ouellet once said Newman deserved to be ranked as a Doctor of the Church alongside Athanasius and Augustine. On the 1st of November 2025 in Rome, Pope Leo XIV proclaimed him exactly that. Newman was also named co-patron of Catholic education, joining Thomas Aquinas.

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