July 14: "National Apostasy" and John Keble

In the Church of England, today is the feast day of John Keble, Tractarian, pastor, and poet. He was born on April 25, 1792 and died on March 29, 1866--so obviously his feast is not celebrated on the date of his death. The date chosen for his memorial in the Church of England is the anniversary of his "National Apostasy" sermon, delivered in the University Church of St. Mary the Virgin in 1833. John Henry Newman always considered that date the beginning of the Oxford Movement. As this biography on the Project Canterbury website describes that event:

The text of the sermon was i Sam. xii. 23: 'As for me, God forbid that I should sin against the Lord in ceasing to pray for you; but I will teach you the good and the right way.' The preacher's aim was to draw public attention to the grave and pressing dangers that threatened the Church both from State interference with her liberties, and from the widespread decay of religious convictions. At such a time it was the duty of all who valued the cause of the Apostolic Church to devote themselves to its defence. 'Surely,' said the preacher, 'it will be no unworthy principle if any man is more circumspect in his behaviour, more watchful and fearful of himself, more earnest in his petitions for spiritual aid, from a dread of disparaging the holy name of the English Church in her hour of peril, by his own personal fault and negligence. . . . There may be, as far as he knows, but a very few to sympathize with him. He may have to wait long, and very likely pass out of this world, before he see any abatement in the triumph of disorder and irreligion. But if he be consistent, he possesses to the utmost the personal consolations of a good Christian; and as a true Churchman, he has the encouragement which no other cause in the world can impart in the same degree; he is calmly, soberly, demonstrably sure that, sooner or later, his will be the winning side, and that the victory will be complete, universal, eternal.'

The sermon was published on July 22, under the title National Apostasy. It does not seem to have excited much attention at the time. One of the two judges before whom it was preached is said to have remarked that it was 'an appropriate discourse.' Dr. Pusey, we are told, considered 'some passages rather too pointed.' But there were others who had a truer realization of its significance. To Newman's judgment, already quoted, may be added the words of Dr. J. B. Mozley, one of the ablest of the Tractarians, and one of the deepest thinkers of his time: 'I cannot help thinking it a kind of exordium of a great revolution--shall I call it?--coming on, whether rapidly or slowly we cannot tell, but at any rate most surely.'

Mozley's comment about "a great revolution" matches one of the other great historical events we remember this day: the Storming of the Bastille in 1789, usually identified as the beginning of the French Revolution--Bastille Day.

In Chapter 1 of the Apologia Pro Vita Sua, Newman remembers his high regard for Keble:

The true and primary author of it, however, as is usual with great motive-powers, was out of sight. Having carried off as a mere boy the highest honours of the University, he had turned from the admiration which haunted his steps, and sought for a better and holier satisfaction in pastoral work in the country. Need I say that I am speaking of John Keble? The first time that I was in a room with him was on occasion of my election to a fellowship at Oriel, when I was sent for into the Tower, to shake hands with the Provost and Fellows. How is that hour fixed in my memory after the changes of forty-two years, forty-two this very day on which I write! I have lately had a letter in my hands, which I sent at the time to my great friend, John William Bowden, with whom I passed almost exclusively my Under-graduate years. "I had to hasten to the Tower," I say to him, "to receive the congratulations of all the Fellows. I bore it till Keble took my hand, and then felt so abashed and unworthy of the honour done me, that I seemed desirous of quite sinking into the ground." His had been the first name which I had heard spoken of, with reverence rather than admiration, when I came up to Oxford. When one day I was walking in High Street with my dear earliest friend just mentioned, with what eagerness did he cry out, "There's Keble!" and with what awe did I look at him! Then at another time I heard a Master of Arts of my college give an account how he had just then had occasion to introduce himself on some business to Keble, and how gentle, courteous, and unaffected Keble had been, so as almost to put him out of countenance. Then too it was reported, truly or falsely, how a rising man of brilliant reputation, the present Dean of St. Paul's, Dr. Milman, admired and loved him, adding, that somehow he was strangely unlike any one else. However, at the time when I was elected Fellow of Oriel he was not in residence, and he was shy of me for years in consequence of the marks which I bore upon me of the evangelical and liberal schools. At least so I have ever thought. Hurrell Froude brought us together about 1828: it is one of the sayings preserved in his Remains,—"Do you know the story of the murderer who had done one good thing in his life? Well; if I was ever asked what good deed I had ever done, I should say that I had brought Keble and Newman to understand each other."

Newman continued to hold Keble in high regard, even after his conversion: In Newman and His Contemporaries, Edward Short quotes a letter Newman wrote to his sister Jemima as he considered becoming an Oratorian that he thought St. Philip Neri and John Keble very similar. The saint and his erstwhile friend shared the same "extreme hatred of humbug, playfulness [Keble and Neri were playful], nay, oddity, tender love for others, and severity" (p. 65). Keble could have become the kind of saint that Neri was, Newman thought. Based on his love and admiration to Neri that is high praise indeed.

After Newman left the Oxford Movement, Oxford, and the Church of England and became a Catholic on October 9, 1845, Newman and Keble did not see each other for years. As this EWTN document notes:

Newman called to see Keble in his vicarage at Hursely on September 12, 1865. They did not recognize each other. "How mysterious that first sight of friends is! For when I came to contemplate him, it was the old face and manner, but the first effect and impression was different."1 Newman was taken aback to discover that Pusey was also paying a visit. "As we three sat together at one table, I had as painful thoughts as ever I recollect, though it was pain, not acute, but heavy. There were three old men, who had worked vigorously in their prime."

Until Keble died, Newman hoped that he would join him in the "one true fold of Christ", the Catholic Church. Newman believed that Keble had many tendencies toward the Catholic Church: his piety, devotion to Mary and the saints, his liturgical and Sacramental emphasis, his desire for apostolic authority--but Keble remained in the Church of England, to Newman's pain and sorrow.

Image Credit (Public Domain): Portrait of John Keble

Newman: Docentium at the Spiritual Life Center

Our diocesan newspaper, The Catholic Advance, features a story (page 11) about my presentation on Thursday, August 18 as part of the Spiritual Life Center's monthly Docentium series. The title is: "Blessed John Henry Newman: Faith, Family, and Friends":

When Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI beatified John Henry Newman in September 2010, local author Stephanie A. Mann says, “Something changed about the way Catholics should view this great nineteenth century writer and intellectual. Blessed John Henry Newman is an intercessor and a heavenly patron now, not just an academic interest and research project.”

In the decades after his death in the late nineteenth, his Cause for Canonization moved slowly, Mann notes, but one reason some Catholics believed Newman should be canonized was his influence on others to become Catholic , both in his lifetime and for more than a century after his death. “Some even thought those conversions should be considered the miracles needed for his canonization,” Mann commented.

While Newman has had tremendous influence among converts, his own family rejected Catholicism entirely, and his brothers might even be said to have rejected orthodox, Trinitarian Christianity, in spite of his efforts. His equals in the Oxford Movement, E.B. Pusey and John Keble, didn’t follow his example but remained Anglicans.

Why did someone so persuasive fail within his own close family and friends? What does Newman’s failure mean for those of us whose family and friends have fallen away from Jesus and His Church?

Stephanie A. Mann will explore this aspect of Newman’s life and legacy as part of the Docentium series at the Spiritual Life Center on Thursday, August 18. “Blessed John Henry Newman is a model for us of how to follow Jesus and to reach out to others to follow Him too, despite the cost, difficulty, or failure,” Mann concluded.

Contact the Spiritual Life Center at 316.744.0167 or register online to attend. The Docentium format includes a brief social gathering, buffet dinner, and presentation.

Newman, Gladstone, and Conscience AND Obedience

Tod Worner writes for Aleteia:

The attack was swift and fierce. The leading light and liberal lion in British politics, Prime Minister (sic) W.E. Gladstone, launched a scathing broadside against Catholics in the British Empire. Fearful that a Catholic’s allegiance to the Church in Rome threatened a vile treachery, Gladstone fulminated that “no one can become [the Catholic Church’s] convert without renouncing his moral and mental freedom and placing his civil loyalty and duty at the mercy of another.”

It wasn’t the first time it had happened, English Catholic priest (and convert from Anglicanism) John Henry Newman surely lamented. Nor would it be the last. And so he was compelled to respond. In his Letter to the Duke of Norfolk written in 1875, Newman schooled the prime minister on the true “moral and mental freedom” of the Catholic faithful. The letter, in fact, turned into a brilliant treatise on the Catholic Conscience. And it is doubtful Gladstone even knew what hit him.

Read the rest there, which includes excerpts from the chapter on conscience in Newman's letter.

Gladstone wasn't Prime Minister in 1874 when he wrote his pamphlet four years after the declaration of the doctrine of Papal Infallibility in 1870 at the First Vatican Council: The Vatican Decrees in Their Bearing on Civil Allegiance. He did know what hit  him: he responded to Newman's Letter to the Duke of Norfolk in another pamphlet, Vaticanism: an Answer to Reproofs and Replies. In that second pamphlet, Gladstone states that England has not yet realized what it lost when Newman became a Catholic--it would take time, as it had in the case of John Wesley, for historians to assess the effects of Newman's conversion on religion in England.

I'd recommend the chapter on "Newman and Gladstone" (as well as the entire book) from Edward Short's Newman and His Contemporaries to understand this entire episode and Newman's great achievement in writing his pamphlet. Short describes how Newman wanted to respond to not only Gladstone but those ultra-Ultramontanists like W. G. Ward who were saying things like the Pope "has the power of deposing any sovereign, whose government he may consider injurious to the spiritual welfare of that country" and that "the Pope's temporal power is 'the very bulwark and citadel of Catholic order, liberty, and progress'" (page 234). Newman complained how much Ward mistrusted him, even hoping that Anglicans would not come to the Catholic Church through his influence! Short also describes how carefully Newman wrote this pamphlet, quoting him: it was "the toughest job I ever had." He was not only reminding his audience of the classic Catholic idea of conscience, with all its responsibilities and rights, but also narrowing the kind of papal statements Catholics would respond to with required obedience: to matters of faith and morals, not practical matters. Whatever the pope teaches, however, the Catholic must consider it with a fully formed and developed conscience, not its counterfeit. As I wrote in the January/February 2014 issue of OSV's The Catholic Answer Magazine:

Since the teaching authority of the pope and the Church concerns matters of faith and morals, of “abstract doctrine” and “the condemnation of particular and given errors,” Newman states there is no conflict at all between it and the individual conscience: the conscience seeks truth, and the Church teaches and defends truth. The pope’s authority as Christ’s Vicar on Earth relies upon the authority of conscience, that “aboriginal Vicar of Christ.”

Blessed John Henry Newman further states that for one to oppose even “the supreme, though not infallible authority of the pope” in some matter (he uses the example of a pope prohibiting Catholics from drinking wine or beer), the individual cannot rely on the counterfeit idea of conscience: “serious thought, prayer and all available means of arriving at a right judgment” must be followed, and the burden of proof is on the individual, not on the pope.

Joseph Ratzinger, both as cardinal and as pope, had praised Newman’s “clear avowal of the papacy.” Commenting on Newman’s beatification in his comments to the Roman Curia on Dec. 20, 2010, Pope Benedict XVI summarized Newman’s understanding of conscience: “Conscience is both capacity for truth and obedience to the truth which manifests itself to anyone who seeks it with an open heart.” Because Blessed John Henry Newman followed the “kindly light” of truth, it led him to become a Catholic in 1845, and as Pope Benedict noted, that conversion cost him everything “that was dear and precious to him,” perhaps even his great opportunity to influence Christian theology in his lifetime. His life as a Catholic was obscure and filled with failed projects, but his letter to the Duke of Norfolk provided a great example of the influence he could have.

The chapter on conscience ends with a toast that many have misinterpreted: “Certainly, if I am obliged to bring religion into after-dinner toasts (which indeed does not seem quite the thing), I drink — to the pope, if you please — still, to conscience first, and to the pope afterwards.” Pope Benedict provides us with the correct interpretation: Newman is not reverting to that counterfeit version of conscience as “the right of self-will.” In the first toast Newman is again expressing our natural ability to seek and find the truth; the second toast is “dedicated to the pope because it is his task to demand obedience to the truth.”

Blessed John Henry Newman

I am nearly finished reading Edward Short's Newman and His Family and have found it remarkably insightful. To think that the leading Anglican, then Catholic religious intellectual of his age would have had so little influence on his family's religious life is astounding. His two brothers would not even follow him so far as having faith in common Christian truths like the divinity of Jesus Christ, the incarnate, suffering, risen Savior of the world, and his sisters surely could not follow him into the "one fold of the Redeemer" as he called the Catholic Church. Short demonstrates how Newman's family (his father John, mother Jemima, brothers Frank and Charles, sisters Harriett, Jemima, and Mary) all influenced him in different ways--and he certainly influenced them, but not in religious matters to the extent that they would even accept or countenance his conversion to Catholicism, much less that they would become Catholic!

If he did not influence his family to accept Christian doctrine and the Catholic Church, he has influenced many hundreds of people in his own time and ours. Since his beatification in 2010, you can see his influence spreading even more widely, especially since he was chosen as the spiritual patron of the Anglican Ordinariate--he is the patron saint of Anglican converts to Catholicism. Here are just two examples:

The Fellowship of Blessed John Henry Newman:

The Fellowship of Blessed John Henry Newman was founded in September, 2011 when a majority of the members of the Episcopal Church of The Good Shepherd, Rosemont, Pennsylvania, under the leadership of the Rt. Rev. Dr. David L. Moyer, Rector of Good Shepherd from 1989 to 2011, gathered for Mass to mark a new beginning free from the disorder of the Episcopal Church.

We chose to continue as an Anglo-Catholic fellowship with Cardinal Newman as our Patron because he was a man who, from deep prayer and concentrated study, made a hard and costly journey from the Church of England to the Catholic Church in the mid 19th century. We identify with him because we too, as a former parish and as a present fellowship, have been on that path, making that journey.

We are people who have been led by God to spend years witnessing to “the faith once delivered to the saints,” and who have striven to “speak the truth in love” to the leaders of the Episcopal Church, whom we saw as being increasingly led by the spirit of the age, rather than being rooted in the revealed religion of historic Christianity and its sacred Tradition. This was a grave concern to us and for our children, and our children’s children.

The Fellowship of Blessed John Henry Newman has been founded as a community of Anglo-Catholic Christians who live in hope that their corporate vocation will ultimately be as part of the Personal Ordinariate of the Catholic Church.

It seems to me that the Fellowship is like Newman and his friends gathered in Littlemore at the College, praying and preparing for their future as Catholics!

And the Ordinariate parish in Orange County California, Blessed John Henry Newman Catholic Church:

Our future as a parish in Orange County revolves around two aspects: creating an Anglican Catholic community that nurtures, preserves, and grows our patrimony - which is ultimately the people - to help us on our way to heaven; and the second aspect is participating in the unity of Christians which Our Lord commanded (cf. St. John xvii). These are really two sides of the same coin. Our position as Anglicans in full communion with the Mother Church, who see Anglicanorum coetibus as the way for Anglicans to achieve the corporate unity our forefathers have longed sought, provides Bl. John's with a unique standpoint and capacity to participate in ecumenism in the Orange County area, both on a corporate level and to reach individuals. This necessarily requires Bl. John's to evangelize Orange County with the fullness of the gospel of Jesus Christ through his Church here on earth. Our committment to the Catholic faith and the Anglican patrimony leads us to not only reach out to other Anglicans and Episcopalians in our area, but also to Protestant Christians and to non-Christians.

Our intention is grow spiritually and numerically, and as we grow, invest time, energy, talent and finances into the lives of parishioners and the community around us. Not only do we hope and pray for a physical location of our own one day, but also we hope to develop one of the finest musical programs in Orange County. We take very seriously the adage attributed to St. Augustine, “To sing is to pray twice." Likewise we hope to develop a Catholic school in the Anglican tradition using Scripture, Tradition and Reason to form students in the classical tradition in the best of Western Civilization. These hopes for Bl. John's in the future arise from our patron, Blessed John Henry Newman, who himself desired this to be how parish churches should be modeled.

So this parish is like Newman and his friends, established at the Oratory, teaching, worshipping, and working in Birmingham!

Like so many others with special devotion to Blessed John Henry Newman, I pray for the day he is raised to altars as a canonized saint, this feast day is on the Roman Calendar, and Catholic parishes, both Anglican Rite and Roman Rite, may be dedicated to his name:

Prayer for Canonization

Eternal Father, You led John Henry Newman to follow the kindly light of Truth, and he obediently responded to your heavenly calls at any cost. As writer, preacher, counselor and educator, as pastor, Oratorian, and servant of the poor he labored to build up your Kingdom.

Grant that through your Vicar on Earth we may hear the words, 'Well done, thou good and faithful servant, enter into the company of the canonized saints'.

May you manifest your Servant's power of intercession by even extraordinary answers to the prayers of the faithful throughout the world. We pray particularly for our intentions in his name and in the name of Jesus Christ your Son our Lord.

Amen.

UPDATE: Choral Vespers from Westminster Cathedral will be broadcast tonight on BBC 3! We'll be able to listen to the recording of the broadcast for a week at that site. According to The New Liturgical Movement, the musical selections are:

Introit: Tout puissant (Poulenc)
Hymn: Iste confessor (Plainsong)
Psalms 14, 111 (Plainsong)
Canticle: Magna et mirabilia (Plainsong)
Responsory: Iustus Dominus (Plainsong)
Magnificat for Double Chorus, Op.164 (Stanford)
Motet: Iustorum animæ (Stanford)
Antiphon: Salve Regina (Poulenc)
Organ Voluntary: Præludium in E minor (Bruhns)

Edward Short's Newman Trilogy

Edward Short sent me this link to the T&T Clark blog about a presentation he'll be making in London this September and more information about his Newman Trilogy: Newman and His Contemporaries; Newman and His Family; and Newman and His Critics:

Edward Short on Newman and his Family, the 2nd volume in his trilogy on John Henry Newman

 

Edward Short will be delivering a talk intitled Newman and the Idea of Sanctity on the 5th of September, 8pm at St Wilfrid's Hall, The London Oratory, UK. Below he speaks about his second book in his trilogy on Cardinal Newman.

 

“Newman and his Family is the second volume in my trilogy about the great priest, poet, satirist, novelist, educator, philosopher and theologian, John Henry Newman. If in the trilogy’s first volume, Newman and his Contemporaries, I looked at Newman and his friendships with Edward Pusey, John Keble, Emily Bowles, William Froude, and Lady Georgiana Fullerton, as well as his influence on such prominent Victorian figures as Thackeray, Matthew Arnold, Arthur Hugh Clough and Richard Holt Hutton, in my second book I look at Newman’s relationships with his immediate family.

 

These were close and complex relationships, and they were instrumental in shaping how Newman viewed not only English society in its social, intellectual, religious and moral aspects but himself and his evolving Christian faith as well. Accordingly, there are chapters on each of the parents and each of his five siblings, Charles, Frank, Harriet, Jemima and Mary. There is also a chapter on his nephew, John Rickards Mozley, with whom Newman entered into a fascinating exchange of letters in 1875. Mozley inherited something of the scepticism of late Victorian Cambridge, with, however, nagging reservations, and I discuss how in many ways he resembles other uneasy sceptics of that age—Henry Sidgwick most particularly. Then, again, I discuss how Mozley and Sidgwick corroborated Newman’s sense of the diffidence of doubt, which only strengthened his appreciation for the appeal of faith, even for those most dubious about the grounds for faith.

 

These are some of the intellectual and philosophical aspects of Newman’s familial relationships but in some of the other chapters, particularly those on Mary, Jemima, Harriett and Frank Newman I try to share with readers the deep love that Newman felt for his family, which, despite many trials, never wavered. In writing his mother from Lyons on his way back from the Mediterranean in July, 1833, Newman confessed how “The thought of home has brought tears in my eyes for the last two months.” The interrelated themes of home and love suffuse my book. So many of the differences that Newman experienced with his family and indeed with his contemporaries, especially after his conversion, arose as a result of conflicting ideas of home. And this, in turn, caused so much thwarted love! My book, then, as anyone familiar with the joys and sorrows of family life can see, is, in essence, a work of family history.  

 

Then he previews the third book that he's working on now:

 

Now I am at work on the third book of the trilogy, which is entitled Newman and his Critics. In this final volume, I show what an enormous debt Newsman owed his critics. After all, they forced him to defend himself, to defend his various positions on faith and reason, orthodoxy and liberalism, belief and unbelief. They put him on his mettle. Consequently, one of the underlying contentions of this final book of the trilogy is that if Newman had not done battle with so many of his contemporaries--in most cases, affable, charitable, constructive battle—he would never have become the great defender of the faith that he became. It was precisely because he spent so much time addressing those who did not share his faith—and among those we must number many in his own family—that Newman became such a compelling apologist.

 

The critics in my upcoming book include such lively, combative figures as Charles Kingsley and Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, as well as such former disciples as Mark Pattison and Anthony Froude. What is striking about these figures is how they hearken back to Newman’s brothers, Charles and Frank, who would never suffer their brilliant brother to persuade them of the tenability of faith, certainly not the Roman Catholic faith. In all three books, I have endeavored to show my readers that it is only by putting Newman in his immediate context, with his family and his contemporaries and his critics that we can begin to understand the full caritas and genius of the man.” 

 

I certainly look forward to seeing my review copy of Newman and His Family!

Book Preview: Newman and His Family

I reviewed Edward Short's first book on Blessed John Henry Newman, Newman and His Contemporaries, last year. His second book is due out on August 15--the Feast of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary. According to the publisher:

A study in family history and influence, Newman and his Family looks at how John Henry Newman (1801-90), the priest, educator, theologian, philosopher, novelist, poet and satirist both learned from and was transformed by his parents and his brothers and sisters. The son of a banker in the City of London and a Huguenot mother whose family were famous and innovative paper makers and printers, Newman was the eldest of six children, two boys and three girls--Charles, Harriett, Frank, Jemima and Mary. While the family was reared Anglican, Charles abandoned Christianity for Owenite Socialism and Frank ended his days a Unitarian. Although Mary died young, she had a profound influence on her brother, as did Harriett, who could never reconcile herself to her brother’s conversion. Jemima was also opposed to his conversion, though she lived long enough to witness (from afar) his strange, tumultuous new life as a Catholic. At the same time, since none of the family followed their eldest brother into the Catholic Church, to which Newman converted in 1845, the book also explores the limitations of Newman’s influence and the ways in which family differences led him to a deeper understanding of such themes as home and ostracism, failure and faith, conversion and apostasy, disunity and prayer, infirmity and love.

Based on Newman’s vast correspondence and the correspondence of his different family members, as well as on his published and unpublished writings, Newman and his Family presents the great religious thinker in a freshly personal light, where he can be seen sharing his theological and philosophical convictions directly with those to whom he was most closely tied. While there are excellent studies available on different aspects of Newman and his work, this is the first full-length study to show how the difficulties and heartbreaks inherent in family life helped Newman to understand not only himself and his contemporaries but his deeply personal Christian faith.

Table of Contents: Introduction/ 1. Father and Son/ 2. Mrs. Newman and Amor Matris/ 3. Charles Newman and the Idea of Socialism/ 4. Frank Newman and the Search for Truth/ 5. Mary Newman and the World to Come/ 6. Harriet Newman and English Anti-Romanism/ 7. Jemima Newman and the Misery of Difference/ 8. James Rickards Mozley and Late Victorian Scepticism/ Conclusion: Family, Faith and Love

More about the author and his work here. I look forward to reading this book! (The author has kindly offered to send me a review copy.)