Saint John Henry Newman: The Fifth Saint of the City of London

Looking around the internet for something different to say  about Saint John Henry Newman on his feast day, I found this comment on the website for an eponymous parish in Manchester:

He is the fifth saint of the City of London, behind Thomas Becket (born in Cheapside), Thomas More (born on Milk Street), Edmund Campion (son of a London bookseller) and Polydore Plasden (of Fleet Street).

While he has joined that exalted company it should be noted that Saint John Henry Newman is the only Confessor saint among the five. The others are martyrs:

St. Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury, martyred on December 29, 1170, in the Cathedral.

St. Thomas More, Knight and Layman, martyred on July 6, 1535 outside the Tower of London, on the Even of St. Thomas, the vigil of the feast of the Translation of the Relics of St. Thomas of Canterbury.

St. Edmund Campion, SJ, martyred on December 1, 1581 at Tyburn, in London.

St. Polydore Plasden, the son of a London horner (maker of musical instruments) on Fleet Street, martyred on December 10, 1591, outside St. Swithun Well's house near Gray's Inn in London.

As the Birmingham Oratory website reminds us, however, Newman wasn't in London long:

John Henry Newman was born on February 21st, 1801, in London. He was the eldest of six and was the son of John and Jemima Newman. His father was a banker in the city, and was able to give John Henry Newman a middle class upbringing on Southampton Street in Bloomsbury. His family were practising members of the Church of England, so Newman was exposed to Holy Scripture at an early age, becoming an avid reader of it. At the age of seven, Newman went to study at Great Ealing School [in London]. . . .

At the age of sixteen, Newman became an undergraduate at Trinity College, Oxford. After his undergraduate studies he was elected to a fellowship at Oriel College, at the time the leading college of the university, in 1822.

So from 1817 to 1841, when he moved to Littlemore, Newman was, as he thought he always would be, in Oxford (24 years). Therefore, we associate Newman much more with Oxford than we do with London. 

Once he left Littlemore in 1846, he went to Maryvale, then to Rome, and back to Maryvale, finally settling in Birmingham in 1849, where would live in the Oratory until his death in 1890 (41 years), with trips to Dublin, Rome, and other locations, including giving the Lectures on Certain Difficulties felt by Anglicans in submitting to the Catholic Church at the London Oratory in 1850. But troubles between the Birmingham and London Oratories meant that he did not return to the London Oratory until 1881 after he'd been named a Cardinal by Pope Leo XIII. There is now a chapel dedicated to him in the London Oratory.

It's an interesting perspective on Newman, whose life is so often noted as being divided approximately in half: the first half of his life an Anglican, the last half a Catholic. For sixteen years or so he was a Londoner; for 24 years like the snapdragon on the walls in Oxford, and for 41 years in Birmingham.

Just a reminder of the prayers and readings for his feast as celebrated in England.

Saint Thomas of Canterbury, pray for us!

Saint Thomas More, pray for us!

Saint Edmund Campion, pray for us!

Saint Polydore Plasden, pray for us!

Saint John Henry Newman, pray for us!

Book Review: Memory, Martyrs, and Mission

This is the book from the Venerable English College, offered through January 29, 2021 as a free ebook.

As the publisher (Gangemi Editore) describes the book:

Essays to Commemorate the 850th Anniversary of the Martyrdom of St Thomas Becket (c. 1118-1170) | Foreword by Mgr Philip Whitmore Rector of the Venerable English College, Rome. Essays by Judith Champ, Peter Davidson, Eamon Duffy, Peter Leech, Peter Phillips, Carol M. Richardson, Nicholas Schofield. Edited by Maurice Whitehead 

The murder on 29 December 1170 of Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury, sent shockwaves across the Christian world. The combination of his martyrdom, his canonization in 1173, and the creation of a shrine to him at Canterbury in 1220 increased the importance of the Via Francigena – the ancient pilgrim route from Canterbury to Rome: indeed the English Hospice, founded in Rome in 1362 for pilgrims from England and Wales, was dedicated to the Most Holy Trinity and St Thomas of Canterbury. The transformation in 1579 of the English Hospice into a new English College in Rome, preparing future priests to serve on the dangerous post-Reformation mission to England and Wales, engendered further martyrdoms: between 1581 and 1679, forty-four members of the Venerable English College, Rome, were executed for serving as priests on the mission to England and Wales. Exploring three major themes – Memory, Martyrs, and Mission – this volume analyses, on the 850th anniversary of his death, the enduring legacy of St Thomas of Canterbury, expressed in English seminaries in continental Europe through their distinctive spiritual, artistic and literary activities; the resilience of those institutions to radical change over the centuries, in the face of revolution, war and social upheaval; and the challenges and opportunities for the effective formation of priests ready to meet the changing demands of mission in the twenty-first century. The volume concludes by demonstrating how music associated with St Thomas of Canterbury has resonated across the centuries, from soon after his martyrdom down to the present day.

My first comment is that I do not like ebooks and this one compounds my dislike by not having a table of contents with links to the chapters; I also don't like the illustrations being at the back of the book, making it hard to move between them and the chapters they pertain to. Each chapter is well documented with end notes; in those with sections, the end notes appear at the end of each section. Well-illustrated. 

I definitely prefer printed, tangible books.

Contents:

Foreword by Mgr Philip Whitmore, Rector of the Venerable English College, Rome

List of contributors (bios)

List of illustrations

Chapter 1. St. Thomas a Becket (c. 1118-1170): Patron of the Venerable English College Church, Rome and of the English Clergy. --Nicholas Schofield

(each chapter begins with an abstract)

• 'The Holy, Blissful Martyr'
• St. Thomas and the English Catholic diaspora
• 'Thomas Points the Way': The Cult at the Venerable English College
• 'Martyr for the Liberty of the Church': Becket and the Victorians
• A Patron for Modern Times

Chapter 2. The English Colleges of Douai and Rheims, the Venerable English College, Rome, and the Tridentine Seminary. --Eamon Duffy

Chapter 3. The Cultural Life of the English Colleges in Continental Europe: An Overview. --Peter Davidson

Chapter 4. 'No other of Christianity except that which we preach to them': the Venerable Bede and the 1580s Martyrs' Frescoes of the Venerable English College, Rome. --Carol M. Richardson

• The fresco context
• Three conversions
• Peter
• Eleutherius
• Alban and Amphibalus
• Constantine and Helena
• Ursula
• Gregory and Augustine
• Brightness and Englishness

Chapter 5. The Restoration of the English and Welsh Seminaries in the Aftermath of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars. --Peter Phillips

• The final days of the English College, Douai
• The Venerable English College, Rome

Chapter 6. New Wine in Old Wineskins? Harnessing the Power of History to Renew Priestly Formation. -- Judith Champ

• 'Not drowning, but waving' (sic)
• Understanding the past
• Changes of culture: priestly or clerical?
• What kind of Church: what kind of priest?
• The changing nature of vocations to the priesthood
• What kind of formation?
• The role of the parish in formation
• The art of accompaniment
• Seminary and beyond

Chapter 7. Gaudeamus omnes: Catholic Liturgical Music for St. Thomas Becket in the British Isles, Continental Europe, and the Venerable English College, Rome, c. 1170-2020. --Peter Leech

• Liturgical Music for St. Thomas of Canterbury in the British Isles, 1170-c. 1538
• Liturgical Music for St. Thomas of Canterbury outside the British Isles to c. 1570
• Becket Music in Britain, 1533-c. 1800
• Liturgical Music for Becket in Continental Europe, c. 1550-. 1850

The only chapter I found lacking was Chapter 6; the author did not seem to live up to the title of the paper and only tangentially referred to the past or specifically the past formation and mission of priests from the Venerable College and their mission in England during the recusant period. It also raised more issues that it really addressed--although it certainly pertains to the VEC's current mission of training priests from various dioceses of England. Eamon Duffy's paper contained material from Chapter 5 "Founding Father, William, Cardinal Allen" from his 2017 Reformation Divided: Catholics, Protestants, and the Conversion of England.

Father Nicholas Schofield provides an excellent overview of St. Thomas of Canterbury's reputation through the centuries, while Chapters 3 through 5 explore aspects of the art and architecture of the VEC and the internal and external struggles of the English Colleges before, during, and after the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars. The last chapter, which includes musical examples in an appendix, provides an excellent survey of the celebration of the feast of St. Thomas a Becket in liturgical music.

By the way, Father Schofield posts on the blog for the Archives of the Venerable English College, Rome, and I've included a link to Tales from the Archives on my blog roll on the right side of this blog.

If you haven't downloaded this free ebook yet, I recommend you do so soon--before January 29!!

St. Thomas a Becket at the Abbey of Saint Victor in Paris

I am reading Margot E. Fassler's second, revised edition of Gothic Song: Victorine Sequences and Augustinian Reform in Twelfth-Century Paris (originally published by Cambridge University Press and now available from the University of Notre Dame Press):

Margot E. Fassler’s richly documented history—winner of the Otto Kinkeldey Award from the American Musicological Society and the John Nicholas Brown Prize from the Medieval Academy of America—demonstrates how the Augustinians of St. Victor, Paris, used an art of memory to build sonic models of the church. This musical art developed over time, inspired by the religious ideals of Hugh and Richard of St. Victor and their understandings of image and the spiritual journey. Gothic Song: Victorine Sequences and Augustinian Reform in Twelfth-Century Paris demonstrates the centrality of sequences to western medieval Christian liturgical and artistic experience, and to our understanding of change and continuity in medieval culture. Fassler examines the figure of Adam of St. Victor and the possible layers within the repertories created at various churches in Paris, probes the ways the Victorine sequences worked musically and exegetically, and situates this repertory within the intellectual and spiritual ideals of the Augustinian canons regular, especially those of the Abbey of St. Victor. Originally published in hardover in 1993, this paperback edition includes a new introduction by Fassler, in which she reviews the state of scholarship on late sequences since the original publication of Gothic Song. Her notes to the introduction provide the bibliography necessary for situating the Victorine sequences, and the late sequences in general, in contemporary thought.

The Abbey of St. Victor was destroyed during the French Revolution, but during its height of influence, when the Augustinian Canons there were the confessions and spiritual counselors of the Parisian hierarchy, it was filled with many side altars and relics, which specially written sequences for the Blessed Virgin Mary and the saints honored at those altars.

Among them was St. Thomas of Canterbury and devotion to him at the Abbey of St. Victor began even before his canonization. It continued through the 16th century as this little snippet from an article demonstrates:

In late December 1585, the abbey of Saint-Victor, on the south-eastern-edge of Paris, played host to a group of English Catholics. The journal of Guillaume Cotin, the community’s librarian, tells us that the English arrived in the run-up to the feast of the martyrdom of Saint Thomas of Canterbury. The feast itself, on 29 December, was marked by a high mass sung in honour of the saint, with a sermon [service] in English. Several supplementary masses were also celebrated by English priests. Apparently, in order to attend these celebrations, ‘English Catholics came in very great multitude’.

The Abbey of St. Victor was home for great theologians and mystics of the medieval era: Hugh of St. Victor, Adam of St. Victor, and Richard of St. Victor. As the old Catholic Encyclopedia entry for it indicates, its reforming spirit reached England and Ireland, but it lost its fervour, even being tainted by Jansenism:

The time came when abbots in commendam were introduced and signs of decay were manifested. Towards the end of the fifteenth century some efforts were made to reform the abbey with canons brought from the newly-established Windesheim congregation. A few years later Cardinal de Larochefoucauld again attempted to reform it, but in vain. The canons, moreover, were implicated in the Jansenist movement, only one, the Venerable Jourdan, remaining faithful to the old spirit and traditions. At that time there lived at St. Victor Santeul, the great classical poet, whose Latin proses were adopted by the Gallican Liturgy. The end of the abbey came with the French Revolution. In 1800 the church and the other buildings were sold, the famous library was dispersed, and a few years later everything had disappeared. There are still a few convents of canonesses, at Bruges, Ypres, and Neuilly, who keep the rule and spirit which they originally received from the Abbey of St. Victor's. [in 1912]

St. Thomas of Canterbury and St. John Stone

Over at the National Catholic Register, please find my post on St. Thomas of Canterbury today, on his feast. I also tell the story of St. John Stone, a martyr during another Henry's reign:

St. Thomas of Canterbury’s memorial is on December 29 within the Octave of Christmas, and his story may be familiar to many Catholics because we’ve read Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales or T.S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral in school or have seen the movie Becket with Richard Burton and Peter O’Toole. There is another Canterbury martyr we should remember during this Christmastide, however, that most have probably never heard of: St. John Stone.

After describing the questioning, arrest, and execution of St. John Stone, I return to the subject of St. Thomas of Canterbury's great shrine and what Henry VIII did to it:

Therefore, in April of 1538 Henry VIII set about eradicating the legacy of St. Thomas of Canterbury in England. His shrine at the Cathedral and images of him throughout the land were to be destroyed. According to Henry, St. Thomas of Canterbury was neither a saint nor a martyr and his feasts (December 29, the date of his martyrdom and July 7, the date his relics were placed in the shrine at Canterbury in 1220) were to be removed from the liturgical calendar.

This attack on a saint proclaimed by the Church was the final blow for Pope Paul III, who issued a decree of excommunication against Henry on December 17, 1538. With these actions against St. Thomas of Canterbury, and against other saints’ shrines, including the Marian shrines throughout England, it was clear that, as far as Henry VIII was concerned, the Church had reached the point of no return.

The hanging, drawing, and quartering of St. John Stone on December 27, 1539, a year after Henry VIII’s excommunication, demonstrated that sadly, Pope Paul III was right. Friar John Stone was canonized among the 40 Martyrs of England and Wales in 1970 by Pope Paul VI.

St. Thomas of Canterbury is celebrated on the liturgical calendar of the Church of the England, honored as a martyr, on either July 7 or December 29, and people still go on pilgrimage (or as tourists) to Canterbury. What would Henry VIII think about that?

Since the first of September I've had the great opportunity to write these blog posts for the National Catholic Register. It's been a good platform for telling the story of the English Reformation and other historical or liturgical themes that are important to me. I particularly enjoy highlighting the Extraordinary Form of the Latin Rite through these posts. Looking forward to many more posts in 2017! Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!