St. John Henry Newman in Rome, 1846-1847

St. John Henry Newman's feast day is on October 9, the anniversary of his reception in to the Catholic Church by Blessed Dominic Barberi, the Passionist missionary to England. After his general Confession, reception, and first Holy Communion, he was Confirmed by Dr. Nicholas Wiseman, the Vicar Apostolic of the Midlands Region of England and Titular Bishop of Milopotamos (there weren't any Catholic dioceses in England yet) on November 1, All Saints Day. He took the Confirmation name of Mary. St. John Henry Mary Newman (like St. Anthony Mary Claret!).

Then he left Littlemore for Maryvale, Old Oscott at the invitation of Dr. Wiseman in 1846 on February 22; in September, he left England to study for the priesthood in Rome with one of his followers, Ambrose St. John. They spent five weeks in Milan and thus did not arrive in Rome until November.

Msgr. Jeffrey Steenson, the first Ordinary of the Personal Ordinariate of the Chair of St. Peter, writes for the Coming Home Network about Newman's experiences in Rome:

The Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith, the center of the Holy See’s missionary endeavors, received them and gave them rooms at the Collegio Propaganda near the Spanish Steps. There, Newman and St. John would become ordinary seminarians. But who was going to educate the most perspicacious theologian of his time? It is perhaps comforting to hear his friend St. John report that the lectures were boring and somewhat lacking as pedagogical models, and so Newman would often fall to sleep in class. (Thankfully this does not appear to have been held against Newman in the cause for sainthood!)

Newman was left largely to himself, to continue his brilliant studies of the Church Fathers. Rome’s theologians had some doubts about his recently-published Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine. Newman’s argument, that Catholic dogma was not, as it were, handed down from Mount Sinai but unfolded in a divinely-guided process of historical development in the life of the Church, was initially a very disconcerting idea for Catholic theologians hard-pressed to defend a tradition under siege from nearly every quarter. They naturally wondered about how sound this new convert really was.

So Newman, newly arrived from a different ecclesial world, was not well understood, and given his somewhat melancholic temperament, we are left with the distinct impression that his 1846-1847 academic year in Rome was certainly not about “making merry” over the return of a prodigal son of the Church (Lk 15:24). Newman, once the consummate insider of Anglican Oxford, is now an awkward and disoriented guest struggling to learn the customs of the house.

Regarding the Roman reception Newman's Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, I don't mean to contradict Monsignor Steenson, but I think he is reflecting Owen Chadwick's view of Newman and his Essay. C. Michael Shea offers a different view:

Newman’s Early Roman Catholic Legacy forces us to substantially revise the commonly received view that, on the issue of doctrinal development, Newman was an unheeded prophetic voice crying in a desiccated Roman wilderness.

Shea’s book corrects the mistaken impression that Newman’s Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine (1845) fell upon deaf ears in the Catholic world, only to be rediscovered in the mid-twentieth century and then all but canonized at Vatican II. While Newman’s theology did indeed bear abundant twentieth-century fruit (see Ian Kerr’s [sic] 2014 book on the subject and Andrew Meszaro’s excellent article arguing that Dei verbum 8, via Yves Congar, has Newmanian roots), it bore fruit in his own day as well. What makes Shea’s book more than just an intriguing historical reappraisal is that he all but proves that Newman’s impact on the Jesuit Giovanni Perrone (1794–1876), the foremost theologian of the “Roman School” at midcentury (and a close advisor to Pope Pius IX), was an implicit but significant factor in the preparations for the promulgation of the dogma of Mary’s Immaculate Conception in 1854. . . .

Shea’s thesis puts to the rest the persistent impression which arose from certain influential studies that Newman, while generally admired, was an unheeded prophet. In Shea’s convincing narrative, Owen Chadwick’s From Bossuet to Newman (1957) – while eminently readable like all of Chadwick’s work – shoulders a fair amount of the blame for this particular misappraisal. Chadwick contrasted a reigning Catholic “fixisme” which totally rejected doctrinal development (epitomized by the great Gallican, Bishop Bossuet) with the startling and new theory of Newman. According to Chadwick, Newman was considered – at least on this issue – as at best eccentric, and at worst doctrinally suspect. Shea shows that Chadwick far overestimated the impact and importance of the American convert Orestes Brownson’s polemic against Newman, and he contends that Chadwick misread the evidence regarding Newman’s encounters with Perrone, Pius IX, and others during Newman’s preparation for ordination in Rome. (One also wonders if Chadwick over-emphasized the incompatibility of the Gallican theological method with the idea of doctrinal development, since Shea points out that Henri Maret, one of the staunchest Gallican opponents of papal infallibility at Vatican I, actually affirmed development in his classic anti-infallibilist text).

Please read the rest of Shaun Blanchard's review of Shea's book in Faith & Culture: The Journal of the Augustine Institute.