The Dies Natalis of Blessed John Henry Newman

John Henry Cardinal Newman died on August 11, 1890.  It was his "Dies Natalis", his birth into everlasting life.

The Times of London reported his death on August 12: 

We have to record, with feelings of the most sincere regret, the death of His Eminence Cardinal Newman. He died last evening at the Oratory, Edgbaston, in his 90th year, after less than three days' illness. The Cardinal has for many years manifested the feebleness of advanced age, although he has fully retained his mental faculties, and has rallied in a wonderful manner from more than one severe illness. . . . 

"The medical attendants have issued the following account of their patient's last illness. "The Oratory, August 11, 1890. His Eminence Cardinal Newman was seized with inflammation of the right lung at 2 o'clock a.m. on Sunday, August 10. He very rapidly became worse until this evening at 8:45, when he expired. His Eminence expressed himself as feeling quite well an hour before this attack occurred.—G. Vernon Blunt, M.D.; C. H. Jenner Hogg, M.R.C.S.E." The private prayers of the congregation were asked for the Cardinal at the Oratory Church on Sunday, and in the evening there were numerous and anxious inquiries respecting him. He will be buried at the little country retreat of the Oratorians, at Rednall, where there is a private cemetery and chapel. The body will be exposed in the Oratory Church from noon today until it is removed for burial. The date of the funeral is not yet fixed.

Of course, he was buried in Oratorian cemetery in Rednal with Ambrose St. John his great friend and aide in establishing the English Oratorian Congregations. Now his shrine is in the Birmingham Oratory. You might remember that when they exhumed his body in preparation for the shrine, the grave was nearly empty: there are no first class relics. 

Since St. Clare of Assisi's feast day is August 11 when Newman was beatified in 2010 the date of his conversion, October 9 (1845) was chosen as his feast day.

Ex umbris et imaginibus in veritatem--Out of shadows and imagination into truth! 

Two days before he died his niece Grace Longford, the only child of his estranged sister Harriett visited him. Newman had not seen her since she was three years old. More about his death here.

Cor ad Cor Loquitor--Heart Speaks unto Heart! 

From Elgar's setting of Newman's The Dream of Gerontius, "Sanctus fortis, Sanctus Deus" sung by Richard Lewis as Gerontius with the Hallé Orchestra conducted by Sir John Barbirolli (includes "Firmly I Believe in Truly"):

Firmly I believe and truly
God is Three and God is One;
and I next acknowledge duly
manhood taken by the Son.

And I trust and hope most fully
in that manhood crucified;
and each thought and deed unruly
do to death, as he has died.

Simply to his grace and wholly
light and life and strength belong,
and I love supremely, solely,
him the holy, him the strong.

And I hold in veneration,
for the love of him alone,
Holy Church as his creation,
and her teachings as his own.

Adoration ay be given,
with and through the angelic host,
to the God of earth and heaven,
Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.

Mark and I listened to this CD often: I think it is out of print, so to speak: Heart Speaks to Heart, A spiritual day with Blessed John Henry Newman in words and music! From Matins to Compline, featuring hymns and poems by Newman and narration by Archbishop Bernard Longley of the Birmingham Diocese, it's a beautiful compilation! (I will listen to it today--and one does have to listen because Archbishop Longley is soft spoken!)

Blessed John Henry Newman, pray for us!

Newman on Believing in God and Doctrine

As promised, this morning, I'll continue the series on Blessed John Henry Newman on the Son Rise Morning Show. This episode's theme is Newman on God and Doctrine. On Friday, I offered some excerpts from the first chapter of the Apologia pro vita sua on the development of Newman's religious opinions focused on the doctrines he had accepted up to the year 1833, when he became one of the leaders of the Oxford Movement.

One of the ways this belief in God and His Revelation manifested itself in Newman's Oxford years was in his Parochial and Plain Sermons (PPS) which he preached at the University Church of St. Mary the Virgin (my late husband Mark took the picture of the pulpit in that church). In those sermons he elucidated Christian doctrine to his congregation, often emphasizing that they had to live as if they really believed those doctrines. Probably the best example is in "Unreal Words", Sermon 3 in fifth volume of the PPS.

Newman warns that in his day, Christians behaved as though God had not revealed His Truth, the doctrines that they should believe. Just as people have opinions and make statements on many things and ideas they have no real knowledge of, many talk about religious truth without any real knowledge of it. But those who should have knowledge of it, Christians who recite the Creed, read the Holy Bible, go to church services on Sunday, etc., speak the same way. There is a disconnect between what they say they believe and what they really do believe:

This is a day in which there is (rightly or wrongly) so much of private judgment, so much of separation and difference, so much of preaching and teaching, so much of authorship, that it involves individual profession, responsibility, and recompense in a way peculiarly its own. It will not then be out of place if, in connexion with the text, we consider some of the many ways in which persons, whether in this age or in another, make unreal professions, or seeing see not, and hearing hear not, and speak without mastering, or trying to master, their words. This I will attempt to do at some length, and in matters of detail, which are not the less important because they are minute. . . .

This is a day in which all men are obliged to have an opinion on all questions, political, social, and religious, because they have in some way or other an influence upon the decision; yet the multitude are for the most part absolutely without capacity to take their part in it. . . .

And hence it is that the popular voice is so changeable. One man or measure is the idol of the people today, another tomorrow. They have never got beyond accepting shadows for things.

The same thing happens within the Christian life, Newman warns. Christians don't really apply the truths of the Christian faith to their everyday life, to the crises of life and death, illness and recovery, or even to the religious practice of their faith, in how they pray, in their love of Jesus, their fear of God, their preparation for death, their acknowledgement of sin. They don't act as if what the Church teaches is really true--that their belief in God and their assent to Christian Doctrine has consequences. He calls this "profession without action, or . . . speaking without really seeing and feeling".

He offers this advice:

What I have been saying comes to this:—be in earnest, and you will speak of religion where, and when, and how you should; aim at things, and your words will be right without aiming. There are ten thousand ways of looking at this world, but only one right way. The man of pleasure has his way, the man of gain his, and the man of intellect his. Poor men and rich men, governors and governed, prosperous and discontented, learned and unlearned, each has his own way of looking at the things which come before him, and each has a wrong way. There is but one right way; it is the way in which God looks at the world. Aim at looking at it in God's way. Aim at seeing things as God sees them. Aim at forming judgments about persons, events, ranks, fortunes, changes, objects, such as God forms. Aim at looking at this life as God looks at it. Aim at looking at the life to come, and the world unseen, as God does. Aim at "seeing the King in his beauty." All things that we see are but shadows to us and delusions, unless we enter into what they really mean.

It is not an easy thing to learn that new language which Christ has brought us. He has interpreted all things for us in a new way; He has brought us a religion which sheds a new light on all that happens. Try to learn this language. Do not get it by rote, or speak it as a thing of course. Try to understand what you say. Time is short, eternity is long; God is great, man is weak; he stands between heaven and hell; Christ is his Saviour; Christ has suffered for him. The Holy Ghost sanctifies him; repentance purifies him, faith justifies, works save. These are solemn truths, which need not be actually spoken, except in the way of creed or of teaching; but which must be laid up in the heart. That a thing is true, is no reason that it should be said, but that it should be done; that it should be acted upon; that it should be made our own inwardly.

Let us avoid talking, of whatever kind; whether mere empty talking, or censorious talking, or idle profession, or descanting upon Gospel doctrines, or the affectation of philosophy, or the pretence of eloquence. Let us guard against frivolity, love of display, love of being talked about, love of singularity, love of seeming original. Let us aim at meaning what we say, and saying what we mean; let us aim at knowing when we understand a truth, and when we do not. When we do not, let us take it on faith, and let us profess to do so. Let us receive the truth in reverence, and pray God to give us a good will, and divine light, and spiritual strength, that it may bear fruit within us.

Newman wrote "The Dream of Gerontius" in 1865. Before he dies Gerontius makes a statement of his faith. Gerontius is on the edge of that eternity and his last thoughts are of God. He is dying in the conviction that these words are real:

Sanctus fortis, Sanctus Deus,
De profundis oro te,
Miserere, Judex meus,
Parce mihi, Domine.
Firmly I believe and truly
God is three, and God is One;
And I next acknowledge duly
Manhood taken by the Son.
And I trust and hope most fully
In that Manhood crucified;
And each thought and deed unruly
Do to death, as He has died.
Simply to His grace and wholly
Light and life and strength belong,
And I love, supremely, solely,
Him the holy, Him the strong.
Sanctus fortis, Sanctus Deus,
De profundis oro te,
Miserere, Judex meus,
Parce mihi, Domine.
And I hold in veneration,
For the love of Him alone,
Holy Church, as His creation,
And her teachings, as His own.
And I take with joy whatever
Now besets me, pain or fear,
And with a strong will I sever
All the ties which bind me here.
Adoration aye be given,
With and through the angelic host,
To the God of earth and heaven,
Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.
Sanctus fortis, Sanctus Deus,
De profundis oro te,
Miserere, Judex meus,
Mortis in discrimine.

Beyond Elgar's oratorio based on Newman's poem, "Firmly I Believe and Truly" has been set as a hymn, either to the tune Halton Holgate or Shipston.

Tract 90's Anniversary

The last of the Tracts of the Times came out on January 25, 1841 and received a very cold reaction that had nothing to do with the winter weather. The full title of Tract 90 is "Remarks on certain Passages of the Thirty-nine Articles."

In it, Tractarian John Henry Newman examined the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England and argued that they had more in common with Roman Catholicism than with Protestantism: as he noted in the introduction, "while our Prayer Book is acknowledged on all hands to be of Catholic origin, our articles also, the offspring of an uncatholic age, are, through GOD'S good providence, to say the least, not uncatholic, and may be subscribed by those who aim at being catholic in heart and doctrine." Because of Tract 90, the Oxford Movement was effectively shut down; Newman soon retreated to Littlemore. The Tract was condemned and Newman barely escaped censure--it was a good time to leave town! 

As he wrote later in the Apologia Pro Vita Sua:

I saw indeed clearly that my place in the Movement was lost; public confidence was at an end; my occupation was gone. It was simply an impossibility that I could say any thing henceforth to good effect, when I had been posted up by the marshal on the buttery-hatch of every College of my University, after the manner of discommoned pastry-cooks, and when in every part of the country and every class of society, through every organ and opportunity of opinion, in newspapers, in periodicals, at meetings, in pulpits, at dinner-tables, in coffee-rooms, in railway carriages, I was denounced as a traitor who had laid his train and was detected in the very act of firing it against the time-honoured Establishment.

Canterbury Press publishes the volume pictured above with many excerpts from the Tracts and from sermons by Newman and other clergy in the Oxford Movement:

What we know today as Anglo-Catholicism, a strong and distinctive strand within Anglicanism that accounts for approximately a third of all Anglicans, began with a small act of political protest in an Oxford pulpit. There in 1833 John Keble preached a sermon that gave voice to widespread and growing fears of increasing state control of the Church and erosion of its status.

At the same time, Roman Catholics were enjoying new freedoms in society and Anglicans who regarded themselves as loyal to the Catholic tradition, despite the interruption of the Reformation, saw this as an opportunity to promote Catholic theology in the Church of England.

Keble's sermon sparked an immediate and active response and the Oxford Movement sprang into life. Publications flowed from its luminaries which included John Henry Newman and Edward Bouverie Pusey.

Ninety influential tracts together with Newman's legendary sermons and work by other writers, including some novels, focused on the themes that today characterise Anglo-Catholicism: a high doctrine of the Church as a divine society, the importance of the sacraments, insistence that Anglican clergy were priests in the Apostolic Succession with sacerdotal power, the quest for personal holiness.

Energised by the vitality of the old, true faith, parish life began to be transformed. Religious life revived for the first time since the Reformation, remarkable social work in slum parishes was accomplished and a distinctive liturgical style emerged.

Firmly I Believe offers a wide selection of the writings of the Tractarians and other supporters of the Oxford Movement, introduced with a useful commentary and explanation. This unique volume is both an ideal starting point for students and scholars and a rich treasury of Anglo-Catholic devotion and theology.

I only wish that it had a more robust index so that one could find, for example, Tract 90 excerpts without scanning each chapter! And I must admit that its title is ironic since it quotes a hymn written by Blessed John Henry Newman from The Dream of Gerontius, years and years after his conversion to Catholicism.

Firmly I Believe and Truly, It's My Birthday!

And here is my birthday present from my husband!

"The Spiritual Tradition of Catholic England, An Anthology of Writings from 1483 to 1999" is obviously not a book to be read straight through, but to be dipped into, sampled, and surveyed often. I want to read the Introductions to the three parts first and then consult some of the extracts from both familiar and new writers.

[BTW, his other gift to me is a DVD of Kung Fu Panda 2, in which Po searches for inner peace!]