Nostalgia at the Newman Center

Last Friday (April 26) I attended Adoration and Mass at St. Paul's University Parish at Wichita State University, my alma mater. When I was an undergraduate and graduate student, it was known as St. Paul Parish-Newman Center. And on Friday, when I looked at the bulletin, I was reminded even more than I usually am when I'm there of one of the decisive events of my life: The Newman School of Catholic Thought (NSCT) I attended in January 1979.

The reminder last week was that today's 11:45 a.m. Mass is being celebrated for the repose of the soul of Reverend Stephen Almagno, OFM, who was one of the speakers during that great week. I am attending that Mass today, to pray for him in gratitude for his great influence from those five days so many years ago. 

Here is one obituary from Providence, RI where he was born, and one from his conference of the Orders of Friars Minor.

His topic at the January 1979 NSCT was "Newman's Spirituality": I still have my notes from those lectures:

On Tuesday, January 2, his first lecture introduced major themes in his topic, primarily Newman as a champion of forgotten truths, with a sense "that God is and has revealed himself", a sympathetic pastoral sense to help his congregations follow the Faith and live it.

On Wednesday, January 3, Father Almagno spoke on themes like "holiness is wholeness", holiness is the "result of a moral struggle and intellectual understanding", and Newman's spirituality as striving "to come closer to God" while seeking truth in our hearts and our minds, concluding that doctrine and submission to God's revelation were essential.

On Thursday, January 4, he started speaking about Newman and the Fathers of the Church and what he learned from them about handing on the Faith and the truth.

On Friday, January 5, Father Almagno talked more about Newman's conversion and becoming a Catholic, what it cost him but how it was part of his spiritual journey to be closer to God and obedient to the Truth; and Newman's concern for the formation and education of the laity.

Then in his last lecture on Saturday, January 6, he talked about Newman's later years: his efforts to found an Oratory at Oxford for Catholic men to help maintain their Catholic faith; his reactions to the doctrines of the Immaculate Conception and Papal Infallibility; his Grammar of Assent; the late recognition of his efforts: the Honorary Fellowship at Trinity College and the Cardinal's Hat. Father Almagno summed up Newman's spiritual life--in a seeming paradox since we acclaim his scholarship and his influence so highly-- as "being ordinary carried to perfection", especially in those later years as he led the Oratory in Birmingham.

It's interesting that neither of Father Almagno's obituaries mention his interest in St. John Henry Newman, instead highlighting his study of Father Teilhard de Chardin, but memorials are to be sent to National Institute for Newman Studies!

Eternal rest grant to him, O Lord, and may the perpetual light shine upon him. May Father Almagno's soul and the souls of the all the faithful departed rest in peace. May Father Almagno rest in peace. Amen.

Saint John Henry Newman, pray for us!

Theology on Tap: Newman's Kansas Connections

Monday, April 29 will be a Newman Day for me! I have my brief interview on the Son Rise Morning Show early in the morning. Then in the evening I travel to Hutchinson, Kansas to present to the Theology on Tap group. The poster above gives all the details.

I will talk briefly about Newman himself and the progress of his cause, which has been aided much by Catholics in the USA: the man who organized and developed the formal presentation of his cause for canonization was an American Jesuit, Father Vincent Blehl, and the two miracles sought and obtained through Newman's intercession occurred in the USA!

But my main focus will be all the events that I know of at least since 1979 that have taken place here in the diocese of Wichita, Kansas. All the great speakers, lectures, programs, presentations, etc. Many of the best Newman scholars in the world have been here: Father Ian Ker, Dr. John Crosby, Avery Cardinal Dulles, Joyce Sugg, Sister Kathleen Dietz, and many others. This is the Kansas Connection: through our Newman Centers and Kansas Newman College now Newman University, the name of Newman and his life and works have been part of our diocesan history.

What I'm Reading Now: Newman as Spiritual Director

I purchased this book in the Kindle edition to read for more background to the Newman lecture next February:

John Henry Newman (1801-1890) was a man who sought to integrate life and holiness. He believed that the spiritual life needed to be lived in an active and dynamic way, touching a person's fundamental attitudes and actions.

Although Newman rejected the title of spiritual director as such, it is obvious from his correspondence that directing others through various facets of the Christian life was one of his dominant concerns. Surprisingly, comparatively little has been written about Newman's idea of spiritual direction. This book investigates Newman's understanding of spiritual direction during his life as a Roman Catholic, 1845-1890. It examines the major areas in which Newman gave spiritual direction through an analysis of the correspondence from his Catholic years. It also explicates those principles of Newman's own spiritual life that found expression in his direction of others.

Newman had a mammoth "apostolate of correspondence." His Letters and Diaries have been edited and published in a series of thirty-two volumes, embracing more than twenty thousand letters. The first ten volumes deal with Newman's Anglican period; the remaining twenty-two volumes cover his Catholic period and are the primary source for this book. These volumes have been studied chronologically in order to determine and extract the major areas in which Newman gave spiritual direction to others, and to investigate the stages of development in his spiritual advice.

One thing that caught my eye about the book was one of the blurbs:

"Drawing on Newman's vast correspondence, Wilcox has given us a very human portrait of a spiritual master of remarkable sensitivity. Readers will find Newman's account of the development of revealed doctrine reflected in his understanding of the spiritual development of ordinary people. Newman comes across as someone who listens with respect and then speaks with careful balance--promoting devotion without excessive piety, reasonableness without rationality, and compassion without sentimentality--always challenging without demanding."
--William Fey, OFM Cap., Bishop of Kimbe, Papua New Guinea

Bishop Fey spoke years ago at the St. Paul's Parish-Newman Center at WSU on his book about Newman on Faith, Doubt, and Certainty--it was soon after the 1979 Newman School of Catholic Thought, but my notes aren't dated.

The Heart of Newman: John F. Crosby on Newman's Personalism

From Catholic University of America Press this August:

It has been said that John Henry Newman "stands at the threshold of the new age as a Christian Socrates, the pioneer of a new philosophy of the individual Person and Personal Life." Newman's personalism is found in the way he contrasts the "theological intellect" and the "religious imagination." Newman pleads for the latter when he famously says, in words that John F. Crosby takes as the motto of his book, "I am far from denying the real force of the arguments in proof of a God . . .but these do not warm me or enlighten me; they do not take away the winter of my desolation, or make the buds unfold and the leaves grow within me, and my moral being rejoice."

In The Personalism of John Henry Newman, Crosby shows the reader how Newman finds the life-giving religious knowledge that he seeks. He explores the "heart" in Newman and explains what Newman was saying when he chose as his cardinal's motto, cor ad cor loquitur (heart speaks to heart). He explains what Newman means in saying that religious truth is transmitted not by argument but by "personal influence."

Crosby also examines Newman's personalist account of what it is to think; he explains what it is for a person to think not just by rule but by his "spontaneous living intelligence." Crosby examines the subjectivity of Newman, and shows how the modern "turn to the subject" is enacted in Newman. But these personalist aspects of Newman's mind, which connect him with many streams of contemporary thought, are not the whole of Newman; they stand in relation to something else in Newman, something that Crosby calls Newman's radically theocentric religion.

Newman is a modern thinker, but not the modernist he is sometimes mistaken for. The inexhaustible plenitude of Newman derives from the union of apparent opposites in him: the union of his teaching on the heart with his theocentric teaching, of the subjectivity of experience with the objectivity of revealed truth.

Crosby writes for a broad non-specialist public just as Newman did.

As I have noted before on this blog, it was attending a Newman School of Catholic Thought and learning about John Henry Cardinal Newman when I was in college that gave my life direction and inspired my interest in Newman and in the English Reformation and its aftermath. Professor John F. Crosby was one of the speakers during those early days of 1979. As a preview of this book, you could listen to his lectures on Newman and Personalism, delivered at the University of Steubenville in 2011.

More about the Newman School of Catholic Thought

After my post on Father Ian Ker's upcoming visit to Wichita for the Cardinal Newman Week lecture at Newman University, I wanted to share more about the Newman School of Catholic Thought. These conferences, held at the Newman Centers at Wichita State University and Pittsburg State University during the 1970's and then revived at WSU during the 1990's, and now moribund.

The first Newman School of Catholic Thought I attended had been organized by St. Paul's Parish-Newman Center chaplain Father Joseph Gorentz. He was not able to be there, however, because he was hospitalized with brain cancer. It was held in January of 1979 and Bishop David Maloney from the Diocese of Wichita spoke briefly at the beginning of the five days of conferences by four great speakers. Father Stephen Almagno, Mr. Lyman Stebbins, founder of Catholics United for the Faith, Dr. John Crosby, then at the University of Dallas--these three presented on aspects of Newman's life and works; Father Charles Taylor spoke about the Newman Center movement in the United States.

Those five days were probably the most formative of my life, setting me in the direction of trying to obtain the best liberal arts education possible at a secular university without a theology department (pace Newman's Idea of a University model), informing my dedication to studying Church history and understanding Church doctrine and dogma to be faithful to it, and sparking my  interest in the English Reformation. From those January 1979 days to the upcoming Cardinal Newman Week lecture, I've attended many presentations about Blessed John Henry Newman--and given a few myself.

Two high school friends (who were attending the University of Kansas) and I went to Pittsburg, Kansas for a Newman School of Catholic Thought at the St. Pius X Newman Center there one summer a couple of years later, and then the Newman Schools endured a hiatus for a time. When I worked at the Gerber Institute for Catholic Studies at then Kansas Newman College, I helped organize a Newman School in 1997 with Dean Hudson, the Visiting Chair of the Institute, and David B. Warner, then with the Denver Archdiocese (who has since died). Perhaps the Newman School of Catholic Thought will revive again at WSU!