Newman's faith

Two postcard portraits of the recently-beatified John Henry Newman have graced my office for years. One is a miniature painted by Sir William Charles Ross in 1845, the year of Newman’s reception into the Catholic Church. The second, by Emmeline Dean, gives us the aged cardinal, a year before his death in 1890, in cardinalatial house cassock and walking stick.

Between those two portraits lies a spiritual and intellectual pilgrimage within Catholicism that, combined with Newman’s pre-Catholic journey from evangelicalism to high-church Anglicanism and the Oxford Movement, remains one of the most compelling such tales of modern times—a path the Church has now officially recognized one marked by heroic virtue, miraculously attested.

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