The heart of Cardinal Newman

The following column was adapted from Bishop Conley’s keynote address delivered Sept. 25 to the 2009 ENDOW Catholic Women’s Conference “Living the Christian Virtues:  Growing in Truth and Strength.”

The Venerable Cardinal John Henry Newman is England’s most celebrated convert to Roman Catholicism. On April 23, the Vatican approved his beatification. His heroic virtues had already been declared in 1991, the first step in the canonization process, giving him the title “Servant of God.”  The Catholic Church has now accepted as miraculous, the cure of an American deacon’s crippling spinal disorder. At a beatification ceremony, of which the date has not yet been determined, Newman will receive the title “Blessed.”

The motto I chose for my episcopal ministry is a Latin inscription: Cor ad cor loquitur (“heart speaks to heart”). This was the same motto chosen by Newman when he was elevated to the College of Cardinals in 1879 by Pope Leo XIII.

I have always considered Cardinal Newman my spiritual mentor.  I first discovered him in my sophomore year of college in an English literature survey course. The writing style of Victorian authors can be difficult to read. Victorians tend to be very flowery and wordy, but Newman’s writing captured my heart. It was as if he were writing to me personally and speaking to my heart—cor ad cor.

Newman’s life fits neatly into a time frame that can easily be remembered. He was born in London on Feb. 21, 1801, the eldest of six children, three boys and three girls, and died Aug. 11, 1890, at the age of 89. His first 45 years were spent as an Anglican and his second nearly 45 years were spent as a Roman Catholic. He is, perhaps, most famous as the undisputed leader of the Oxford Movement in England, which took place in the 1830s and 1840s. This was a movement led mostly by Oxford dons, who were seeking to lead the Anglican Church back to its Apostolic roots, through a study of the ancient Fathers of the Church.

At the height of the movement in the late 1830s Newman began to have doubts about his own Anglican communion. Newman’s co-religionists and fellow leaders of the Oxford Movement like John Keble, Edmund Pusey and Richard Hurrell Froude, sought to demonstrate that the Church of England was a direct descendent of the Church established by the Apostles. This movement was also known as the Tractarian Movement after a series of publications called Tracts for the Times (1833-1841). The majority of these tracts were authored by Newman himself.

The most famous of all of the tracts was Tract 90, which was written by Newman in 1841. In Tract 90, Newman engaged in a detailed examination of the Church of England’s 39 Articles, which was, and still is, the Magna Carta of the Anglican Church. Tract 90 resulted in the claim that the fundamental ecclesiological identity of the Church of England was essentially Catholic rather than Protestant.

Tract 90 had such an impact on the whole movement, and all of England for that matter, that Newman was accused of giving a Roman Catholic interpretation to the 39 Articles. He was forced  immediately to give up his position as an Oxford professor at Oriel College and resign his beloved appointment as Vicar of St. Mary’s, the university chapel.

At that point Newman decided to retire to his small mission parish in Littlemore, a few miles outside of Oxford, for further prayer and reflection. A number of his undergraduate students followed him there and they lived a sort of monastic way of life of regular prayer and study.

It was at this time that Newman began writing his famous “Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine.” Newman used the idea of development of doctrine to trace certain Catholic doctrines to discover whether or not these doctrines were examples of true development of Apostolic teachings, or whether they were corruptions or innovations. He argued that, on the contrary, various Catholic doctrines not accepted by Protestants (such as devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary, purgatory, and the communion of the saints) had a developmental history analogous to doctrines accepted by Protestants (such as the Trinity or the divinity and humanity of Christ).

In September 1845, after nearly four years of writing, he finally put his pen down, without finishing the work, and sought to be received, as he wrote, into “the one true fold of the Redeemer.”

The study of the development of Christian doctrine convinced Newman that what the Protestants called Roman corruptions were genuine developments of the original deposit of faith and revelation and that the present Roman Church and the Church of the early Fathers were identical, one in the same. As soon as he became not only certain in his views of the Catholic Church but also aware of his duty in conscience to enter it, he did so, being received by the famous Italian Passionist missionary priest Father Dominic Barberi at Littlemore on Oct. 9, 1845, at the age of 45. Others began immediately to follow his example, and thus, the Oxford Movement came to its ultimate conclusion. 

Shortly after his conversion Newman went to Rome to study for the priesthood. He was ordained in 1848. He returned to England and founded the Oratorians of St. Philip Neri, established the first Catholic university in Ireland, the Oratorian school system in England, played an important role in the reestablishment the Catholic hierarchy England, wrote many more important books, treatises, publications, sermons and thousands of personal letters.

The following meditation captures the heart of the soon to be blessed, Cardinal Newman, and gives us an insight into our own hearts, as God speaks to each one of us, cor ad cor, heart to heart. 

God has created me to do Him some definite service;
He has committed some work to me
Which He has not committed to another. I have my mission—
I may never know it in this life, but I shall be told it in the next.
I am a link in a chain, a bond of connections between persons.
He has not created me for nothing. I shall do good; I shall do His work.
I shall be an angel of peace,
A preacher of truth in my own place while not intending it—
If I do but keep His commandments.
Therefore I will trust Him. Whatever, wherever I am, I can never be thrown away.
If I am in sickness, my sickness may serve Him;
If I am in sorrow, my sorrow many serve Him.
He does nothing in vain,
He knows what He is about.
He may take away my friends. He may throw me among strangers.
He many make me feel desolate, Make my spirits sink, hide my future from me—
Still He knows what He is about.

CONFERENCE CDS: To purchase CDs of any of the talks from the 2009 ENDOW Catholic Women’s Conference, visit www.endowonline.org or call 303-715-3224.