Father Dermot Fenlon, RIP: Newman and Pole

A Facebook friend sent me a link to an obituary of Father Dermot Fenlon, one of the famous "Birmingham Three" who were removed from St. John Henry Newman's Birmingham Oratory in 2010 before Newman's beatification that September by Pope Benedict XVI. There's a blog dedicated to their defense, particularly to him (which actually linked to this blog in 2011 when I posted a story about the connection between Sophie Scholl of the White Rose resistance movement against Nazism and Newman, one of Father Fenlon's contributions to Newman scholarship). 

He died on August 17, 2022. According to the homily delivered at his funeral he was

. . . Born in 1941, the son of Dermot & Mary (nee Tutty) Fenlon. His elder brother Frank predeceased him. He grew up in Booterstown, Co. Dublin. After attending Willow Park Primary School and Blackrock College, he tried his vocation, as they used to say, with the Holy Ghost Fathers (the Spiritans) but then left and opted for the study of history at UCD, where he took his B.A. and then M.A, under the direction of Professor Desmond Williams. It was around this time that he published for the first time on 17th-century Irish history in the Journal of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland.

He then went to Peterhouse, Cambridge, where his supervisor was the preeminent historian of Tudor England Geoffrey ( G.R. ) Elton (later Sir Geoffrey Elton). There he worked on Cardinal Reginald Pole (eventually the subject of his book published by Cambridge University Press). In 1969 he became a University assistant lecturer, later University Lecturer in history and a fellow of Gonville and Caius College. There he remained for 10 more years, when he published articles on Thomas More and the French historian Lucien Febvre. He enjoyed a universal reputation in Cambridge, a reputation that is untarnished to this day. A promising academic future beckoned to him, but then he abandoned it to study for the priesthood.

Father Vincent Twomey continued in his homily to described how Father Fenlon's interest in Newman led him to the Oratory in Birmingham:

During his time in Cambridge, he had developed a great interest in Cardinal John Henry Newman, who, after his conversion, became a priest in the order St Philip Neri founded, the Oratorians. This in turn led him to study St Philip Neri the great counter reformation theologian, scholar and poet. Not only did he become a world expert on the life and times of these two saints, but, it would seem, his study of them led him back to God.

In 1978 he entered the Pontifical Beda College in Rome. Ordained in 1982, he served as a priest in the East Anglia diocese. But his love of St Philip Neri and St John Henry Newman led him to enter the Birmingham Oratory in 1991 which had been founded by Newman. There he spent two decades as Newman archivist.

And Twomey also recounts the troubles at the Oratory in 2010 and Father Fenlon's exile, later years, and death. Please read the rest there.  

I've ordered a copy of Father Fenlon's book on Cardinal Pole:

Reginald Pole was one of the most complex figures in sixteenth-century history. The only Englishman to follow a career at the Roman Curia in the crucial decades of the Reformation, the victim successively of the Tudor Reformation and the Roman Inquisition, his life was marked by misunderstanding, failure and tragedy. This book is a study of his career in Italy, his involvement in the Council of Trent and his share in the vain attempt to obtain reunification with the Protestants. Dr Fenlon discusses in great detail Pole's attitudes towards the doctrine of the Protestant reformers, its influence within Italy and the development of his group of `spirituals' at Viterbo. But this is not simply a biography of Pole nor an analysis of his influence. Rather it is an examination of the crisis the Catholic Church and its adherents faced in the Reformation, the conflict exemplified in Pole's personal experience and that of the groups among which he moved, between obedience to the established ecclesiastical order and sympathy with Luther's tenets. The crisis and its resolution reflect the genesis of the Reformation and the Catholic Counter Reformation which resulted in the final confessional divisions of Christian Europe.

Although it deals mainly with that particular Italian period of Reginald Cardinal Pole's life, I am eager to read more about the last Catholic Archbishop of Canterbury, whom (and his mother) I have blogged about often. The Table of Contents and the Preface are available here and ten pages of chapter one here.

Here's the complete article about Newman and Scholl published in the National Catholic Register, describing Father Fenlon's research. I would like to be able to read this article, "Elite and Popular Religion: The Case of Newman" but it's behind a paywall and would cost as much as the book! There's also a video of Father Fenlon discussing Newman and education.

Eternal rest grant unto him, O Lord, and let Your perpetual light shine upon him. May his soul and the souls of all the faithful departed rest in peace. May Father Dermot Fenlon rest in peace. Amen.