Rev. Philip M. Stark

Anniversaries are important to all of us. We observe birthdays—our own, and those of family and friends. Wedding anniversaries are cherished by married couples. Many dates have wider appeal: all Americans, for instance, know what happened on October 12, 1492, on July 4, 1776, and on November 11, 1918. Knowing and honoring these dates is part of what it means to be an American. The Church also observes anniversaries, mostly on feast days of Our Lord or the saints. There are still other days without official status, but commemorating events that had far-reaching effects. To take two examples: one May 20th, a Basque soldier was wounded in a border skirmish. That event was the turning point of his life. He recovered and went on to found the Society of Jesus and has been canonized as St. Ignatius Loyola. Where would we be without that stray cannonball on May 20, 1521? Or again: the Council of Trent was inaugurated on December 13, surely a day that marks a major turning point in the history of the Catholic Church. These dates are significant, but perhaps best described as milestones that have been buried in the shifting sands of time. It is often illuminating to uncover them again. One of my favorite such dates is October 9th, the day John Henry Newman became a Catholic.

In the 1830's, the Rev. J. H. Newman was the best known clergyman in England, certainly among the younger generation—an Oxford don widely admired for his moral integrity, his mental vigor and his great kindness and wit. His star was rising. He would no doubt have become a bishop in the Established Church or a revered and famous professor. What he did become was the focus of national controversy in the Oxford or Tractarian Movement, led by himself, the name coming from the stream of pamphlets or tracts which propagated the ideas of the group. Their chief idea was the restoration of the Church of England to a sense of its Catholic origins, on a strong dogmatic basis. The Movement gained adherents rapidly, and just as rapidly polarized English society: arrayed against the Tractarians on the one side were the High Church party, men who identified the interests of the Church and State and who were suspicious of any tendencies that smacked of Romanism; on the other, the Evangelicals, or extreme Protestants, who took a liberal, easy-going attitude toward doctrine and a puritanical attitude in morals. Between these two camps Newman tried to guide his party on a middle course. He devised a theory called the Via Media, or Middle Way. In Newman's mind, this explained how the Church of England could be Catholic, yet not in communion with Rome: it was trying to steer clear of the corruptions that had crept into Roman faith and practice over the years, and still not fall into the abyss of Protestant subjectivism, private judgment and rejection of authority—all of which, to Newman, meant religious anarchy. The principal plank of the Tractarian program was the centrality of dogma in church life: the creeds of the Church of the early Fathers.

In the midst of the Tractarian controversy, Newman was studying Arianism and writing a book on this outstanding heresy of the fourth century. He thought of the Church of antiquity as the ancestor of the Church of England, and the Church of England as heir to apostolic tradition, continuing an unbroken succession of episcopal authority from antiquity. It was his version of the old branch theory, which claims the Church Catholic subsists in three branches: the Roman, or root stock, the Eastern, and the Anglican, the latter two having split off from Roman discipline in order to maintain purity of doctrine. The Eastern and Anglican Churches could therefore be considered closer to the faith of the New Testament. It was a profound shock for Newman suddenly to see, as a result of his research, that the position of Rome was the same in his day as it was in the earliest day. Rome claimed and exercised the right to pass judgment on the orthodoxy of any theological view. In other words, Rome did not merely happen to be on the right side time after time, but the side was right because Rome was on it.

Newman's shock was profound, but his honesty was greater, and he admitted that he was troubled. His insight had struck a death-blow to the conviction on which he had built his public life, and he felt compelled to test the validity of his changing views. He withdrew to the church at Littlemore, near Oxford, putting in a curate at St. Mary's, the University Church, where he was Vicar. Since there was no rectory at Littlemore, he bought an old stable, with sturdy stone walls, and had it renovated, though it always remained very austere—just the way he liked it. There he moved and soon a number of younger disciples joined him. Wild rumors sprang up that he had organized a monastery on the Roman pattern, that he was secretly in the pay of Rome, that he was persuading young men to become Roman Catholics. This sinister image of a spider in his den Newman never took very seriously, but he did take seriously his own obligation to learn the truth. He and his little circle started reciting the Roman Office in common; they observed long fasts and periods of silence. Meanwhile, Newman prayed, read, thought—and wrote. It occurred to him that it would be helpful to write a book in which he would try to work out an explanation how the Church of Rome, as he saw it, could be continuous with the Church of antiquity. The two seemed so different, the contrast so striking between the simplicity of the apostolic community and the pomp and complexity of nineteenth-century Catholicism, He was able to prove to his own satisfaction that the Catholic Church was an unbroken development from the Church of the New Testament and the Fathers, in much the same that an oak tree grows from an acorn. If, therefore, the Catholic Church was the true Church, the Anglican and Protestant churches were in heresy and schism. This study became his great work, An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine. He never suggested that the Church could adopt new beliefs and discard old ones as the fashion of the moment dictated, nor that a later development is invariably better than an earlier stage of growth. Some Modernists after Newman's death tried to claim, to their advantage, that he had said things like that.

Months passed. Some of Newman's community, lacking their leader's patience, went elsewhere to become Catholics, then returned to Littlemore. One of these youthful enthusiasts, John Dalgairns by name, was received by the Italian Passionist, Dominic Barberi, whom he had met and befriended some time before.

During this period of gestation, Newman reflected on the step he was preparing to take: it would seem to confirm the worst suspicions of those who, since he started writing the Tracts, had accused him of being a secret papist all along. It would mean eating in public his earlier condemnations of the Church of Rome, and discarding the Via Media as false. It would risk alienation from his family. (In fact, one of his sisters never spoke to him again. Another, with whom he was very close, refused as long as she lived to let her sons meet their famous uncle.) It would mean exposing himself to all the hostility and viciousness that a smug, self-righteous Victorian world was capable of heaping upon his head.

At last Newman was ready. This was always his way: never to move on impulse, nor even mere logical conviction. "The whole man acts," he was fond of saying. This helps explain the inner strength he always exhibited; he knew, not just in his mind, but in his whole being, that he was right.

He certainly needed all the inner strength he could summon at this time, since he had no one on whom he could lean for human comfort. He had no friends among the old Catholics, that heroic remnant surviving from the days of savage persecution, not wishing to be unduly influenced by them, nor give them false expectations of himself. And he distrusted fiery recent converts like W. G. Ward. Cardinal Wiseman in Rome was too far away to be of much help. Thus standing virtually alone, Newman became a Roman Catholic. He had already resigned as Vicar of St. Mary's, and his fellowship at Oxford, which carried with it a considerable income. He had no more official ties with the Church of England.

ON THE afternoon of October 8, 1845, Dalgairns was leaving the house at Littlemore to meet Father Dominic in Oxford, where he was passing through by stagecoach. Newman stopped the younger man at the door and very quietly said, "When you see your friend, will you tell him that I wish him to receive me into the Church of Christ." Dalgairns, stunned but overjoyed, answered simply, "Yes." The coach was late, Fr. Dominic riding outside, soaked and chilled in a driving rain. Dalgairns delivered his message; the little missionary in his thick Italian accent said, "God be praised," and they started for Littlemore. (Meanwhile, Newman had been busy writing to some thirty people, saying the same thing to each: that he was sure the Church of Rome was the Church Christ founded, and that Fr. Dominic was on his way to receive him into it—a far cry from trying to conceal or dissimulate his moves and motives.) It was almost midnight when they arrived, but Newman insisted on beginning his long general confession right away. He resumed it and finished it the next morning, when he and two others of the community were baptized. Fr. Dominic said Mass on an improvised altar in their tiny chapel and the newly baptized received their First Communion. The weather was still wet and stormy.

Newman at this time was forty-four years old, almost exactly midway through his long life. His years as a Catholic were as fraught with frustration and disappointment as his early years were happy and rewarding. One suspects that he vaguely realized it was going to be thus. Yet he did not hesitate to take the step that he knew he must take to be faithful, as he would put it, "to the light." Only when he was seventy-eight, and still a simple priest, was his immense value to the Church recognized: the new pope, Leo XIII, made him a cardinal.

Newman's writings are known throughout the world, a vast storehouse of doctrinal and inspirational treasures. He brought the Catholic Church in England into its "second spring"—his own phrase—though he disclaimed any credit for the new flowering of faith. And the Anglican Church has never been the same since the flood of conversions that followed in Newman's wake, and continue even to this day.

Father Dominic has been beatified, and a church in Littlemore built and dedicated to him—an architectural monstrosity of chrome and plastic, as ugly as its namesake's life was beautiful. Newman's former church remains, as always, quiet, serene, in the midst of its ancient graveyard, with a charming lych-gate at the entrance. The stable-monastery, down the road, is still there, preserved and open to visitors as a Newman shrine.

The Cardinal's cause has been introduced, and his admirers pray for the day when he will be elevated to the full honors of the altar. His books and his work for the Church are enduring, but his greatest monument is himself: his example of unswerving honesty, his unflinching courage and humility, the proof he gave that Catholicism attracts the greatest intellects, his passionate devotion to the truth: the truth as embodied in Him Who declared Himself the Way, the Truth and the Life, Whom John Henry Newman made it his life's business to worship and serve. This powerful devotion led him from a career of unlimited potential—wealth, position, and honor—into the arms of the Catholic Church, where he knew misunderstanding, neglect, humiliation, hostility, and ridicule, both from his former friends and also, to a great extent, from his new co-religionists. All this we remember as we commemorate the most important single step in that dramatic pilgrimage, the step which took place on that stormy October 9th.