St. John Henry Newman and Ireland

From Dermot Quinn, associate professor of history at Seton Hall University, in First Things:

Ireland has produced many saints, and John Henry Newman is the latest. Newman was not Irish, of course, but his canonization is as much an Irish as an English event, an opportunity to reflect on the state of Catholicism in a country where he intermittently spent several years between 1851 and 1858.

Newman’s time in Dublin was unhappy and has been generally reckoned a failure. He was rector of a university that divided the Irish bishops, he thought naively that Oxford could be recreated on St. Stephen’s Green, and he fell out with his patron, Archbishop Paul Cullen. Yet he wrote that his “dear friend” Charles Russell of Maynooth had “more to do” with his conversion “than anyone else.” His university eventually flourished in other hands. He built what is still one of the loveliest churches in Dublin, and his most mature account of higher education, The Idea of a University, was delivered as a series of lectures in the Irish capital. Newman left a mark on Ireland, and Ireland on him.

Newman arrived in Ireland in the middle of one devotional revolution and is being canonized in the middle of another. In 1851, Ireland was rediscovering its Catholic faith. Now, it seems to be losing it. In 1851, the institutional foundations were being laid (Newman’s university among them) for a century and a half of evangelical triumph: churches built, parishes formed, schools opened, seminaries packed, priests ordained, missionaries dispatched, hospitals established, nuns veiled, and rulers at the ready.

Please read the rest there.

Re: Newman's comment about Father Charles Russell of Maynooth: he dedicated Loss and Gain: The Story of a Convert to him. In the Apologia pro Vita Sua, Newman commented on how Father Russell had helped him:

The last letter, which I have inserted [Note 1], is addressed to my dear friend, Dr. Russell, the present President of Maynooth. He had, perhaps, more to do with my conversion than any one else. He called upon me, in passing through Oxford in the summer of 1841, and I think I took him over some of the buildings of the University. He called again another summer, on his way from Dublin to London. I do not recollect that he said a word on the subject of religion on either occasion. He sent me at different times several letters; he was always gentle, mild, unobtrusive, uncontroversial. He let me alone. He also gave me one or two books. Veron's Rule of Faith and some Treatises of the Wallenburghs was one; a volume of St. Alfonso Liguori's Sermons was another; and to that the letter which I have last inserted [Note 2] relates.

See Section 1 of that chapter at the Newman Reader for the letter.

BTW, the Notre Dame-Newman Centre for Faith and Reason at Newman's University Church, Our Lady, Seat of Wisdom, will celebrate its founder's canonization next Sunday:

Please join us for the first of many events in the year ahead as we celebrate Ireland’s newest saint. Archbishop Diarmuid Martin will preside at our 6:15pm mass on Sunday, 20th October, with uplifting music by the Newman Vocare Ensemble and the Carolan String Quartet. Following the mass, Declan Kiberd will give a talk entitled “A Saint for Today” beginning around 7:30pm. The evening will wrap up with a festive reception in the rear of the church. All are welcome!

Six Catholics Authors and Father Ian Ker

Dermot Quinn reviews The Catholic Revival in English Literature, 1845-1961: Newman, Hopkins, Belloc, Chesterton, Greene, Waugh, by Father Ian Ker (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2003), for The Imaginative Conservative:

Assembling a sestet of writers whose dates describe an arc between the Oxford Movement and the first stirrings of the Second Vatican Council, Ker explores a rare moment when Catholics seemed to dominate a world generally inhospitable to their moral and sacramental preoccupations. These writers are a varied bunch—so miscellaneous, in fact, that it is hard to imagine them together anywhere other than in a church, and a very broad church at that. As individuals complex and contradictory, as a group they seem so eccentric that even shared Catholicism strains to contain them.

In order of treatment, Father Ker’s revivalists are Cardinal Newman, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Hilaire Belloc, G.K. Chesterton, Graham Greene, and Evelyn Waugh. Allowing for taste and personal preference, it is an impressive roster. . . . 

This is a fine book, warmly recommended, full of sharp insight and telling quotation. The reader will not concur with every judgment (which is, indeed, one of the book’s pleasures) and one or two editorial errors creep in, but these niceties apart, it is a highly accomplished piece of work. Learned, witty, and humane, it will give much pleasure to specialist and generalist alike. . . .

They had an easy intimacy with mystery, these six, as all Catholics must have who take their church seriously. With Chesterton, for instance, the intimacy was with the mystery of goodness. With Greene, on the other hand, it was with the mystery of evil. Think of Chesterton’s insight in Orthodoxy that the task of the philosopher—of every person—is to be at once at home in the world yet utterly amazed by it. One must “somehow find a way of loving the world without trusting it; somehow one must love the world without being worldly.” “We do not fit into the world,” he said, but see, rather, “the unnaturalness of everything in the light of the supernatural.”

The same apprehension of the sheer gift and goodness of being, the strange loveliness of all creation, permeates the work of Hopkins, great poet of landscape and “inscape.” But think, too, of Greene, wrestling with malevolence and losing. His derelict characters reach their private Golgothas too broken even to hope for redemption, often refusing when freely offered it at the last. Greene in his own life came to resemble them, once for instance declining an invitation from Padre Pio (now a saint) because he knew such a meeting would require him to reform his life. He called his memoirs Ways of Escape. Francis Thompson’s Hound of Heaven should have reminded him there is no escape.

Yet in a more important sense the Church is not prison but liberation. It is the way of escape—from the cell of the self, from the solipsist nightmare, from the grubbiness of materialism, from the overwhelming fact, in every age, of sin and sorrow. For Hopkins, the church was a heaven-haven. For Belloc, it was freedom from “the isolation of the soul.” For Chesterton, it was salvation from being a child of his own time. For Waugh, it was “an island of order and sweetness in an ocean of rank barbarity.” For Newman, it was emergence from darkness to light. Without God, he wrote, “we are pent up within ourselves. We need a relief to our hearts…that they may not go on feeding upon themselves; we need to escape from ourselves to something beyond.” That “something beyond” is God. It is also, mysteriously, His Church on heaven and earth. Examining six of its members, Father Ker has written a splendid book.

Read the rest here.