Father Juan Velez is making a documentary about St. John Henry Newman!

Just a quick post about some notices I've received from Father Juan Velez, a Newman scholar, who is making a documentary about St. John Henry Newman--he's shared updates on visits to London and Oxford so far. Here's a sample from his second day in Oxford:

In the afternoon, we reunited with Dr. Paul Shrimpton, whose familiarity with Oriel College made our visit feel like stepping into a well-loved home. His insights into Newman’s life and legacy were both profound and engaging.

In the Senior Common Room, beneath a portrait of Newman, Paul recounted the significance of this space—a place where Fellows and Tutors once engaged in conversations, debates, and celebrations.

Oriel College was central to Newman’s life. He was elected a Fellow on April 12, 1822, at the age of 21—a prestigious academic position that marked the beginning of his influence in Oxford’s intellectual life. In 1826, he was appointed a Tutor at Oriel, becoming directly involved in the teaching and moral supervision of undergraduates. This role became central to his attempt to reform the tutorial system and promote a more personal and formative model of education. He continued as a Tutor until the end of 1832, when the Provost ceased to assign him new students. This was the result of a controversy with the provost over the tutorial system. . . .

When I went to Oxford in 2010 I was not able to enter Oriel College and see the stained-glass window of Newman in the chapel nor his portrait in the Senior Common Room, so I enjoyed seeing pictures of them at least. 

Here's the post for Newman sites in London and here's the one for the first day in Oxford!

You could follow the journey here.

Either Mark or I took the picture of the pulpit in the University Church of St. Mary's the Virgin in Oxford when we visited together with our great friend Monsignor Bill Carr years and years ago!

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!

Newman and Literature, Part Two

As promised, I'll be on the Son Rise Morning Show bright and early this morning (6:50 a.m. Central/ 7:50 a.m. Eastern) to talk with Anna Mitchell about Newman and Literature, focusing today on the wide range of Newman's literary output.

If we survey Newman's literary works--not forgetting the four great books he wrote (the Apologia pro Vita Sua; The Idea of the University; the Essay on the Development of Doctrine; the Grammar of Assent)--we see a great variety. He wrote book reviews, poetry, novels, hymns, saint's lives, historical essays, sermons, speeches, presentations, essays, tracts, prefaces; he translated Latin hymns and works of the Fathers of the Church, etc. He edited his books, reworked them years after their first publication, dedicated them to friends of many years. (His other novel, Callista: A Sketch of the Third Century, is also a conversion story, but in the midst of martyrdom in Roman North Africa--and features St. Cyprian of Carthage!)

Newman's command of literary genres is masterful. As Father Ian Ker commented years ago, he can be brutally satirical as in The Present Position of Catholics in England in which he sends up the English tradition of anti-Catholicism while lampooning the English claim that tradition doesn't bind them: they are reasonable, skeptical, fact-finding men who have accepted the tradition that Catholics are ignorant, superstitious, and under priestly control without evidence, without ever having met or talked to a Catholic in their lives, based on what someone else told them and what everyone has always said:

If you asked the first person you met why he believed that our religion was so baneful and odious, he would not say, "I have had good proofs of it;" or, "I know Catholics too well to doubt it;" or, "I am well read in history, and I can vouch for it;" or, "I have lived such a long time in Catholic countries, I ought to know;"—(of course, I do not mean that no one would make such a reply, but I mean that it would not be the reply of the mass of men; far from it). No; single out a man from the multitude, and he would say something of this sort: "I am sure it is;" he will look significant, and say, "You will find it a hard job to make me think otherwise;" or he will look wise and say, "I can make a pretty good guess how things go on among you;" or he will be angry, and cry out, "Those fellows, the priests, I would not believe them, though they swore themselves black in the face;" or he will speak loudly, and overbear and drown all remonstrance: "It is too notorious for proof; every one knows it; every book says it; it has been so ruled long ago. It is rather too much in the nineteenth century to be told to begin history again, and to have to reverse our elementary facts." That is, in other words, the multitude of men hate Catholicism mainly on tradition, there being few, indeed, who have made fact and argument the primary or the supplemental grounds of their aversion to it. And observe, they hate it on a single, isolated tradition, not a complex, conclusive tradition—not the united tradition of many places. It is true, indeed, that Holland, and Geneva, and Prussia, each has its own tradition against the Catholic Church; but our countrymen do in no sense believe, from any judgment they form on those united British and foreign traditions, but from the tradition of their own nation alone; which, though certainly it comprises millions of souls, nevertheless, is so intimately one by the continual intercourse and mutual communication of part with part, that it cannot with any fairness be considered to contain a number of separate testimonies, but only one. Yet this meagre evidence, I say, suffices to produce in the men of this generation an enthusiastic, undoubting and energetic persuasion that we torture heretics, immure nuns, sell licences to sin, and are plotting against kings and governments; all, I say, because this was said of Catholics when they were boys. It is the old heirloom, the family picture, which is at once their informant and their proof.

Image Credit (Public Domain): Newman's Desk in the Birmingham Oratory

Or he can be rhapsodic, as in this praise of his patron St. Philip Neri, in presenting the example of a good man in contrast to the fascination of sin and evil in fiction:

Philip preferred, as he expressed it, tranquilly to cast in his net to gain them; he preferred to yield to the stream, and direct the current, which he could not stop, of science, literature, art, and fashion, and to sweeten and to sanctify what God had made very good and man had spoilt. 

And so he contemplated as the idea of his mission, not the propagation of the faith, nor the exposition of doctrine, nor the catechetical schools; whatever was exact and systematic pleased him not; he put from him monastic rule and authoritative speech, as David refused the armour of his king. No; he would be but an ordinary individual priest as others: and his weapons should be but unaffected humility and unpretending love. All he did was to be done by the light, and fervour, and convincing eloquence of his personal character and his easy conversation. He came to the Eternal City and he sat himself down there, and his home and his family gradually grew up around him, by the spontaneous accession of materials from without. He did not so much seek his own as draw them to him.

This post would be as long as one of Newman's paragraphs (or sentences) if I went on to describe all his command of literary style and persuasive argument, all the beauty and power of his prose, etc. So just one more genre: poetry.

Newman would have to be considered a minor poet, but as a minor poet, he's had a significant impact in Catholic (and Anglican) hymnography, with three poems turned into hymns ("Lead, Kindly Light", "Praise to the Holiest", "Firmly I Believe and Truly"). The first is probably the most famous, set to various hymn tunes:

LEAD, Kindly Light, amid the encircling gloom          
Lead Thou me on!
The night is dark, and I am far from home—          
Lead Thou me on!
Keep Thou my feet; I do not ask to see

The distant scene—one step enough for me.

I was not ever thus, nor pray'd that Thou          
Shouldst lead me on.
I loved to choose and see my path, but now          
Lead Thou me on! 
I loved the garish day, and, spite of fears,

Pride ruled my will: remember not past years.

So long Thy power hath blest me, sure it still          
Will lead me on,
O'er moor and fen, o'er crag and torrent, till          
The night is gone;
And with the morn those angel faces smile

Which I have loved long since, and lost awhile.

At Sea.
June 16, 1833.

Even the Mormon Tabernacle Choir appreciates Newman's poem in their sensitive performance of the John B. Dykes setting of the hymn I've linked above!

One of his longer poems, The Dream of Gerontius, was extraordinarily popular in its day--and was used by Sir Edward Elgar as the text for his oratorio of the same name. In a couple of weeks Matt Swaim and I will discuss it and its theme of the Four Last Things: Death, Judgment, Heaven, and Hell. (Anna Mitchell is preparing to go on maternity leave!)

Preview: Newman and Literature, Part Two

As I commented on the Son Rise Morning Show earlier this week (Monday, 8/19), Blessed John Henry Newman knew the power of Literature--of stories, tales, fiction--to persuade and move an audience. One of the best proofs of this is his first novel, Loss and Gain: The Story of a Convert. It is a semi-autobiographical story about a High Church Anglican at Oxford who becomes Catholic.

When the novel was published in 1848, the Advertisement to the novel explained its purpose:

THE following tale is not intended as a work of controversy in behalf of the Catholic Religion, but as a description of what is understood by few, viz., the course of thought and state of mind,—or rather one such course and state,—which issues in conviction of its Divine origin.

Nor is it founded on fact, to use the common phrase. It is not the history of any individual mind among the recent converts to the Catholic Church. The principal characters are imaginary; and the writer wishes to disclaim personal allusion in any. It is with this view that he has feigned ecclesiastical bodies and places, to avoid the chance, which might otherwise occur, of unintentionally suggesting to the reader real individuals, who were far from his thoughts.

At the same time, free use has been made of sayings and doings which were characteristic of the time and place in which the scene is laid. And, moreover, when, as in a tale, a general truth or fact is exhibited in individual specimens of it, it is impossible that the ideal representation should not more or less coincide, in spite of the author's endeavour, or even without his recognition, with its existing instances or champions.

It must also be added, to prevent a further misconception, that no proper representative is intended in this tale of the religious opinions which had lately so much influence in the University of Oxford.

Newman wrote the novel in part to answer another work of fiction, From Oxford to Rome: And how it fared with some who lately made the journey by Miss Elizabeth Harris. Harris had become a Catholic and then returned to the Anglican communion. She intimated in the novel that Newman and his Oratorian fellow converts were thinking about returning to the Church of England too. As the advertisement to the sixth edition of Loss and Gain in 1874 explained:

A TALE, directed against the Oxford converts to the Catholic Faith, was sent from England to the author of this Volume in the summer of 1847, when he was resident at Santa Croce in Rome. Its contents were as wantonly and preposterously fanciful, as they were injurious to those whose motives and actions it professed to represent; but a formal criticism or grave notice of it seemed to him out of place.

The suitable answer lay rather in the publication of a second tale; drawn up with a stricter regard to truth and probability, and with at least some personal knowledge of Oxford, and some perception of the various aspects of the religious phenomenon, which the work in question handled so rudely and so unskilfully.

Especially was he desirous of dissipating the fog of pomposity and solemn pretence, which its writer had thrown around the personages introduced into it, by showing, as in a specimen, that those who were smitten with love of the Catholic Church, were nevertheless as able to write common-sense prose as other men.

Under these circumstances "Loss and Gain" was given to the public.

Newman  was not aiming to write a Catholic novel of opposing propaganda, however, but a good novel. Notice that one of things he disliked about Harris's novel was that the Catholic converts she depicted weren't as able "to write common-sense prose as other men"! Her characters were pompous and pretentious--Newman wanted to write more naturally and often pokes fun at those who do speak pompously. He did not write about perfect, sinless men and women, but real, fallen people who are struggling to find their way. In this novel, the way the protagonist, Charles Reding, is navigating is the way of religion. Newman introduces the religious matters that were at issue in Oxford in his time with a discussion about a chapel as Reding and his friend William Sheffield encounter a Mr. Bateman as they walk down High Street in Oxford on their way to Oxley:

He proceeded to give the history of the chapel—all it had been, all it might have been, all it was not, all it was to be.

"It is to be a real specimen of a Catholic Chapel," he said; "we mean to make the attempt of getting the Bishop to dedicate it to the Royal Martyr—why should not we have our St. Charles as well as the Romanists?—and it will be quite sweet to hear the vesper-bell tolling over the sullen moor every evening, in all weathers, and amid all the changes and chances of this mortal life."

Sheffield asked what congregation they expected to collect at that hour.

"That's a low view," answered Bateman; "it does not signify at all. In real Catholic churches the number of the congregation is nothing to the purpose; service is for those who come, not for those who stay away."

"Well," said Sheffield, "I understand what that means when a Roman Catholic says it; for a priest is supposed to offer sacrifice, which he can do without a congregation as well as with one. And, again, Catholic chapels often stand over the bodies of martyrs, or on some place of miracle, as a record; but our service is 'Common Prayer,' and how can you have that without a congregation?"

Bateman replied that, even if members of the University did not drop in, which he expected, at least the bell would be a memento far and near.

"Ah, I see," retorted Sheffield, "the use will be the reverse of what you said just now; it is not for those that come, but for those who stay away. The congregation is outside, not inside; it's an outside concern. I once saw a tall church-tower—so it appeared from the road; but on the sides you saw it was but a thin wall, made to look like a tower, in order to give the church an imposing effect. Do run up such a bit of a wall, and put the bell in it."

"There's another reason," answered Bateman, "for restoring the chapel, quite independent of the service. It has been a chapel from time immemorial, and was consecrated by our Catholic forefathers."

Sheffield argued that this would be as good a reason for keeping up the Mass as for keeping up the chapel.

"We do keep up the Mass," said Bateman; "we offer our Mass every Sunday, according to the rite of the English Cyprian, as honest Peter Heylin calls him; what would you have more?"

Whether Sheffield understood this or no, at least it was beyond Charles. Was the Common Prayer the English Mass, or the Communion-service, or the Litany, or the sermon, or any part of these? or were Bateman's words really a confession that there were clergymen who actually said the Popish Mass once a week? Bateman's precise meaning, however, is lost to posterity; for they had by this time arrived at the door of the chapel. It had once been the chapel of an almshouse; a small farm-house stood near; but, for population, it was plain no "church accommodation was wanted". Before entering, Charles hung back, and whispered to his friend that he did not know Bateman. An introduction, in consequence, took place. "Reding of St. Saviour's—Bateman of Nun's Hall;" after which ceremony, in place of holy water, they managed to enter the chapel in company.

Thus, it's clear that Newman had made a good study of English literature; he knew how to use dialogue to depict character and the conflicts and quandaries faced by the characters in his story. The confusions about faith and worship in the Church of England will continue in Reding's heart and conscience. He begins to have doubts about the 39 Articles of the Church of England; he discusses these doubts with other Anglicans, High Church and Low; he talks to one Catholic convert; he has to tell his family about these difficulties, and once he has decided to become a Catholic Reding endures a succession of arguments against taking such a step. Finally, he comes into a Catholic church--the Passionist parish in London (a Passionist, Blessed Dominic Barberi, received Newman into the Catholic Church)--and presents himself for admission to the Church:

Though Reding had continued standing, no one would have noticed him; but he saw the time was come for him to kneel, and accordingly he moved into a corner seat on the bench nearest him. He had hardly done so, when a procession with lights passed from the sacristy to the altar; something went on which he did not understand, and then suddenly began what, by the Miserere and Ora pro nobis, he perceived to be a litany; a hymn followed. Reding thought he never had been present at worship before, so absorbed was the attention, so intense was the devotion of the congregation. What particularly struck him was, that whereas in the Church of England the clergyman or the organ was everything and the people nothing, except so far as the clerk is their representative, here it was just reversed. The priest hardly spoke, or at least audibly; but the whole congregation was as though one vast instrument or Panharmonicon, moving all together, and what was most remarkable, as if self-moved. They did not seem to require any one to prompt or direct them, though in the Litany the choir took the alternate parts. The words were Latin, but every one seemed to understand them thoroughly, and to be offering up his prayers to the Blessed Trinity, and the Incarnate Saviour, and the great Mother of God, and the glorified Saints, with hearts full in proportion to the energy of the sounds they uttered. There was a little boy near him, and a poor woman, singing at the pitch of their voices. There was no mistaking it; Reding said to himself, "This is a popular religion". He looked round at the building; it was, as we have said, very plain, and bore the marks of being unfinished; but the Living Temple which was manifested in it needed no curious carving or rich marble to complete it, "for the glory of God had enlightened it, and the Lamb was the lamp thereof". "How wonderful," said Charles to himself, "that people call this worship formal and external; it seems to possess all classes, young and old, polished and vulgar, men and women indiscriminately; it is the working of one Spirit in all, making many one."

While he was thus thinking, a change came over the worship. A priest, or at least an assistant, had mounted for a moment above the altar, and removed a chalice or vessel which stood there; he could not see distinctly. A cloud of incense was rising on high; the people suddenly all bowed low; what could it mean? the truth flashed on him, fearfully yet sweetly; it was the Blessed Sacrament—it was the Lord Incarnate who was on the altar, who had come to visit and to bless His people. It was the Great Presence, which makes a Catholic Church different from every other place in the world; which makes it, as no other place can be, holy. The Breviary offices were by this time not unknown to Reding; and as he threw himself on the pavement, in sudden self-abasement and joy, some words of those great Antiphons came into his mouth, from which Willis had formerly quoted: "O Adonai, et Dux domûs Israel, qui Moysi in rubo apparuisti; O Emmanuel, Exspectatio Gentium et Salvator earum, veni ad salvandum nos, Domine Deus noster".

More about Newman and Literature, including his other literary works, on Monday. Anna Mitchell and I will continue this discussion of Newman and Literature in our Santo Subito! series on the Son Rise Morning Show Monday, August 26 at 6:50 a.m. Central/7:50 a.m. Eastern!

The Oxford Experience

From the Imaginative Conservative, by Jason Baxter:

And as you walk through these streets and quietly pass into and then out of the shadows, you feel a smallness: these buildings have been here for centuries and have that noble antiquity of an earlier and prouder age that did not ask “how much” but “what should be done.” The buildings don’t look down on you, because they’re too lofty, too concerned with higher dreams. You feel small because you know that, to them, you are nothing. They have heard centuries of idle chatter and adolescent boasting; they have heard the first authentic thoughts of learned men; they have seen trees, older than the New World, grow up and die within their walls. These buildings feel as old as the seasons and the streams that flow constantly among them. Experiencing such august nobility in Oxford is to encounter a solemn, foreboding, and mysterious antiquity.

And it’s not only American tourists who get this strange, melancholic feeling about Oxford. Even those iconic titans, Lewis and Tolkien, whose personalities have blended into the stones of the city, felt it, too. Tolkien, in his wonderful Anglo-Saxon manner, called Oxford that “Many-mansion’d, tower covered” city “in its dreamy robe of grey/… aged in the lives of men,/ Proudly wrapt in mystic mem’ry overpassing human ken.” In Lewis’s short poem “Oxford,” he describes this city as a place of deep serenity, like the perpetual movements of the city’s somnolent rivers: “A clean, sweet city lulled by ancient streams…/ A refuge of the elect, a tower of dreams.” Similarly, Hopkins called Oxford, “Towery city and branches between towers; / Cuckoo-echoing, bell-swarméd, lark charméd, rook-racked, river-rounded.” And if you go inside the Ashmolean Museum, you will see any number of romanticizing paintings of the city that give you an Oxford, bathed in soft light. What the Pre-Raphaelites did for knights and ladies, these painters did for Oxford: they give a painfully nostalgic view of the medieval city. To such astute observers, Oxford is that city that mingles antiquity, the natural, and a keen sense of nostalgia.

Read the rest there. I concur.

Pictures (c) Stephanie A. Mann, from my week at the Oxford Experience in 2010.

Happy Birthday, Dorothy L. Sayers!!

Dorothy Leigh Sayers, novelist, translator, and Anglo-Catholic Christian apologist, was born on June 13, 1893; she died on December 17, 1957, one year and three days before I was born. She was born at the Christ Church Cathedral headmaster's house in Oxford because her father was chaplain. She attended Somerville College, the women's college in Oxford and received an MA degree in 1920. Sayers worked in the advertising field as a copywriter for several years, working on Guinness and Colman's Mustard accounts. She also worked in publishing, at Blackwell's of Oxford.

The Dorothy L. Sayers Society provides more detail about her life and works and her alma mater is proud of its influence on her life and work.

Although she is better known for her Lord Peter Wimsey series of mystery novels, I have always appreciated her more for the translation of Dante's Divine Comedy (particularly her introductions to Hell and Purgatory) and her Christian apologetics and other works. Like C.S. Lewis and T.S. Eliot, she stands high in my short-list of 20th century Anglo Catholics. 

I am very sorry that Penguin diverted her from completing the translation of Paradise to translate The Song of Roland! I know that her translation of the Divine Comedy, left incomplete at her death, is not considered the best--but I thought her introductions displayed an excellent understanding of Catholic doctrine and medieval culture.

Creed or Chaos, The Mind of the Maker, and The Whimsical Christian all offer good orthodox Christian doctrine and a valid theological viewpoint. Her emphasis -- her insistence -- on the importance of doctrine and the Creeds of the Church, especially the Athanasian Creed, called Blessed John Henry Newman's Oxford Sermons to mind. Real Words; Strong Meat.

I went through a Dorothy L. Sayers phase when I was working for Eighth Day Books after being laid off from an advertising firm in the 1980's--I read the mysteries, the essays, the translations, nearly everything she wrote--and books about her and her achievement.

A Hymn for Lent from Herebert

Eleanor Parker--the medievalist and blogger, not the actress--writes for The Catholic Herald about William Herebert of Oxford and his hymn translations:

Herebert’s name is not well known today, but his poems, beautiful and distinctive in their own right, also represent an important milestone for English Catholicism: he was one of the first people to turn the Latin hymns of the Church into English poetry.

We don’t have many details about Herebert’s life, but he was probably born in Herefordshire around 1270. He was educated at the universities of Paris and Oxford, where his contemporaries included Duns Scotus and William of Ockham, and in 1317 he became master of the Franciscan house in Oxford.

He was evidently a learned man, and his poems show that he gave careful thought to the difficult question of how best to express complex religious ideas in his own language.

Herebert’s poems survive in a manuscript book written in his own hand, noted down along with his Latin sermons and other texts useful for the medieval preacher. There are 23 short poems, arranged roughly according to the cycle of the liturgical year. Some are original compositions, but most are translations or reworkings of Latin or French texts, freely adapted into English. They include the first English verse translations of some well-known hymns, such as Veni Creator Spiritus and the Palm Sunday hymn All glory, laud and honour.

You could go to her blog, A Clerk of Oxford, and see several posts about William Herebert, including this one about a Lenten hymn:

This is a Middle English translation of the Lent hymn 'Audi, benigne Conditor', by the Franciscan friar William Herebert (c.1270-1333):

Lustne, mylde Wrouhte, oure bones wyth wepinge
In þys holy uastinge, vourti dawes lestynge.
Holy secher of monnes þouht, þou wost oure brotelnesse;
To hem þat beth yturnd to þe graunte vorȝyfnesse.
Meche, vorsoht, we habbeht agult; vorȝyf hem þat knoulecheth.
To worshype of þyn oune nome, to sunvol mon be leche.
Graunte ous pyne wyþouteuorth þe body wyth vastinge,
Þat oure gost wyþynneuorth veste vrom sunnynge.
Graunte ous, Holy Trinite, þat in Godhede art on,
Þat þe ȝyft of leyntes vast notfol boe to mon. Amen.

That is:

Hear, merciful Creator, our prayers with weeping
In this holy fasting, forty days lasting.
Holy searcher of man’s thought, thou knowest our brittleness; [frailty]
To them who are turned towards thee, grant forgiveness.
Much, truly, we have sinned; forgive them that acknowledge it.
For the honour of thine own name, be physician to sinful man.
Grant us so to mortify the body outwardly with fasting
That our souls inwardly may fast from sinning.
Grant us, Holy Trinity, who in Godhead art one,
That the gift of Lent’s fast may be beneficial to man. Amen.

Please read the rest there. She posts about her Catholic Herald article here, and promises more poems and hymns from William Herebert!

A Catholic Oxford Martyr

This parish website posts the story of Blessed George Napper (or Napier) as told by Father Robert F. McNamara:

George Napper (or Napier) belonged to a Catholic recusant family of considerable prominence, (and was grand nephew of the English Franciscan cardinal, William Peyto). Born at Holywell Manor in Oxfordshire, he managed to secure entrance in 1565 at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, but was expelled in 1568 as a recusant. In 1580 he was arrested as a recusant and imprisoned for over eight years.

Weary of imprisonment at the end of that time, Napper decided to capitulate, and declared his acceptance of the religious supremacy of the Queen. But after his release from jail, he became increasingly ashamed of having given in. Determined to make generous amends for having rejected the pope, he decided to study for the Catholic priesthood. God had given him a second chance.

Crossing the English Channel to Douay in Flanders, he now sought admission to the English College there. Ordained a Catholic secular priest in 1596, he was sent back to England in 1603 and spent the remaining seven years of his life on the mission in his native Oxfordshire. . . .

Father Napper naturally followed the policy of working in secrecy, but like many another brave priest, he was at one point apprehended by the police as a suspect. They caught up with him outside a village near Oxford early in the morning of July 19, 1610. Those who had stalked him failed in searching him to find two Eucharistic hosts and a small reliquary that he carried concealed on his person. They did find, however, his breviary and set of holy oils. These provided evidence enough to his priesthood to present at the next court session.

Napper’s friends managed to obtain a stay of his execution when he was arraigned, and were working for a total reprieve. But while in prison Father George ministered to a certain condemned criminal, who died declaring himself a Catholic. Now, “reconciling” a fallen-away Catholic was a particularly heinous crime according to the current anti-Roman legislation. The Anglican clergy therefore raised a row with the court, demanding capital action against the prisoner. Under cross-examination, Napper admitted that he had reconciled the man in question. He even said, wittily, that he would be glad to do the same for the judges. Somehow he was again reprieved. But then he refused to take the oath of allegiance that described the pope’s power to depose as “impious, heretical and damnable”. That was too much for the court to take. George Napper was condemned to death.

“Seminary priest” Napper was executed at Oxford on November 9, 1610.

Dom Bede Camm provides the details of Blessed George Napper at his execution, that he prayed for King James I (that he become a great saint in Heaven), that he confessed that he was a Catholic priest and that only for being that did he die, and that he was a great sinner. He prayed the De Profundis, the Miserere Mei, and repeated several times, "In manus tuas, Domine, commendo spiritum meum", and struck his breast three times (perhaps praying the words he had prayed before taking Communion at each Mass he'd ever said: "Domine non sum dignus ut intres sub tectum meum, sed tantum dic verbo et sanabitur anima mea"?)

Blessed George Napper, pray for us!

William Chillingworth and Father John Fisher, SJ

William Chillingworth was born just six months before Elizabeth I died, on October 12, 1602. He would have an eventful life, including a brief conversion to Catholicism:

. . . the son of a citizen of Oxford, was born in 1602; Laud, then a Fellow of St. John’s, was his godfather. Entered at Trinity College in 1618, he graduated two years later, and, in 1628, he was elected a Fellow of his College. He took from the first an active part in the “Romish” controversy, which then agitated the University, frequently meeting in debate one John Fisher, a Jesuit, who ultimately convinced him that the only refuge from distracting religious conflict was in the bosom of the infallible Roman Catholic Church. Chillingworth went to Douay in 1630, but returned to Oxford in the following year, and, three years later, declared himself to be again a Protestant, though not yet an Anglican. It was not till after the publication of his great work, The Religion of Protestants a safe way to Salvation, that he consented to subscribe the Articles, and accept the Chancellorship of Salisbury. Chillingworth was a close friend of Lord Falkland, and with him took the side of Charles the First against the Parliament. He was taken prisoner on the fall of Arundel Castle, where he had lain ill during the siege, and was almost literally talked to death in January 1644 by Francis Cheynell, a Puritan minister, who attended his funeral, and buried his “corrupt rotten book” with him.

"John Fisher" was the alias of Father John Percy, SJ--and choosing the name of the great Bishop of Rochester and martyr, John Fisher, was a great gesture of honor and admiration for a Catholic hero--and Father Percy/Fisher was much involved in the Jesuit mission to England:

Born at Holmeside, Durham, 27 Sep., 1569; died at London, 3 Dec., 1641. Converted when only fourteen years, he went first to Reims, in 1586, then to the English College, Rome, 1589-94. Returning to Belgium, he entered the Jesuit novitiate, 2 May, 1594, and then set out for England in 1596. He was, however, arrested by the Dutch, tortured, and sent prisoner to London. He managed to escape, and became the companion of Father Gerard in several adventures. He was seized at Harrowden (November, 1605) at the time of the Gunpowder Plot, but was eventually banished at the request of the Spanish ambassador (1606). Retiring to Belgium he was for a time head of the English Jesuits, then professor of Scripture at Louvain, after which he returned again to England, and was again imprisoned and condemned to death (1610): He had already begun to write on current controversies, and when James I desired a series of disputations in 1622, Percy, who was then in a prison in London, was required to defend the Catholic side. In these disputations King James himself and Laud took a leading part. As a result of these disputations, Mary Countess of Buckingham, and Chillingworth became converts to the Church. These controversies were afterwards printed and discussed by Percy and Floyd on the Catholic side, and by Laud, Francis White, John White, Featley, and Wotton on the Protestant. Percy was eventually released in 1625 and ordered to banishment in 1635, but he was suffered to remain in London till his death.

For more information about Father John Floyd, SJ, with whom Father Fisher worked, see the Catholic Encyclopedia entry. That Chillingworth was not prosecuted for his conversion, and that Father Fisher was never executed, but in fact asked/commanded to engage in theological disputation, exiled twice, and shown mercy, demonstrates at least some of the leniency toward Catholics that we find in James I's reign. 

A Catholic View of Catholic Oxford

I have to admit that jealousy, that green-eyed monster, preyed upon me when I read this article on the Catholic World Report website. Aurora C. Griffin, who wrote How I Stayed Catholic at Harvard: 40 Tips for Faithful College Students, is a Rhodes Scholar in Oxford, studying Catholic theology:

From what I was able to see in my two years as a Rhodes Scholar pursuing my Master’s degree in theology, Catholic life and faith is alive and well in Oxford. Not in the Theology Department, mind you, which is still largely enamored with nineteenth-century German heretics. There they love to talk about the Enlightenment and how “problematic” traditional theology is. When my advisor discovered that I had worked on Thomas Aquinas for all of my exam and essay requirements, he smiled disapprovingly and looked at me over his glasses: “Well, somehow you’ve managed to come to Oxford and do Catholic Studies!”

There are still faithful Catholics and students of Aquinas at Blackfriars, the Dominican permanent private hall. It is not, technically, one of the thirty-eight colleges at Oxford. If you ask someone at Blackfriars, he will tell you that it is only because they do not have a large enough endowment to be a college. Depending on the year, they may have a sufficiently impressive pool of athletic talent to man a boat for the major crew races (Summer Eights and Torpids), so few visitors would know the difference. The Middle Common Room, which is the hub of student social life, feels just like the one at my own college (Trinity), except there is a note that essentially states: “Wash your own dishes. Unlike the Jesuits, we don’t have the money to pay a maid to clean them for you.”

What is distinctive about Blackfriars, then, is not its status but its deeply Catholic nature and roots. It is said that Thomas Aquinas himself visited Blackfriars in the thirteenth century. To this day, it is a bustling house of study and prayer with daily Mass, Vespers, and its own in-house lectures on everything from beginning Hebrew to the most obscure liturgical theology. Its biggest asset, however, is the set of Dominican priests and brothers who study and teach there. On Monday nights, they lead an Aquinas group: Mass, Vespers, soup dinner, and theology. The discussions often spill over late into the night at the Lamb & Flag pub across the street, a frequent haunt of Lewis, Tolkein, and the Inklings.

She goes on to describe Mass at the Oxford Oratory, events at the Newman Center, Campion Hall, and other Catholic venues. Read the rest there.

Newman and Sayers on the Son Rise Morning Show

Anna Mitchell contacted me and asked me to discuss my comparison between Dorothy L. Sayers and Blessed John Henry Newman, as I posted last week and as I presented it in my discussion of Sayers at this weekend's Inkling Festival. I'll be on the air Monday, July 25, during the first local hour--not on EWTN--on Sacred Heart Radio. Listen live here about 7:45 a.m. Eastern; 6:45 a.m. Central.

During my presentation at the Inklings Festival, I made the following comparison between Newman and Sayers' efforts to make the Gospel real to people who perhaps had heard it so often they had begun to take it for granted:

Like John Henry Newman, the Vicar of the Church of St. Mary the Virgin in Oxford during the Second Oxford/Tractarian Movement, she wanted to make basic Christian doctrine real not notional or even misunderstood, to those who professed it. In “Christ's Privations a Meditation for Christians” Newman asked in the nineteenth century why the Anglicans in his congregation are not making any progress in their faith:

"But why is this? why do you so little understand the Gospel of your salvation? why are your eyes so dim, and your ears so hard of hearing? why have you so little faith? so little of heaven in your hearts?" 

And he answers:

"For this one reason, my brethren, if I must express my meaning in one word, because you so little meditate [upon the life of Christ]. You do not meditate, and therefore you are not impressed."

Sayers thought that by the 1940’s in England there were two reasons Christians did not progress in their faith: not only did they not meditate on the Person and life of Jesus Christ, but also they did not understand it. She believed that Christians didn’t just misunderstand the story or the symbols of the story, the Creeds, but worse, they thought they understood it when they didn’t!

To continue this parallel between Newman and Sayers, in another famous PPS, Newman tries to wake his congregation up, make them feel sorrow for the suffering, crucifixion, and death of Jesus, again noting their familiarity with the accounts of the Passion of Our Lord had somehow left them cold. So he used a homiletic shock therapy, exhorting the students and faculty and townspeople of Oxford: think of an animal being abused and tortured and how that moves you to pity and anger—think of a young child being abused and tortured and how that stirs you—think of an elderly man being abused and tortured and how that affects you—now remember that the Second Person of the Holy Trinity, the Incarnate Son of God and Son of Man was abused and tortured: this must move you to pity and additionally to repentance, because He did it for you.

That’s what Sayers wanted to achieve in The Man Born to Be King, using the medium of radio to take the Gospels out of the context of weekly Sunday readings and present them as a dramatic whole (in a monthly series of broadcasts) so they’d become real to the people again.

I'm happy to highlight the Eighth Day Institute's Inklings Festival on the Son Rise Morning Show--next year (2017!) Joseph Pearce will be the featured speaker! The first picture is of the pulpit in the Church of St. Mary the Virgin in Oxford (c) Mark U. Mann. 

Snapdragon: Newman and Sayers

I've been completing my preparations for my presentation on Dorothy L. Sayers at Saturday's Inkling Festival and I make some comparisons between Sayers and Newman in the course of my talk. They both tried to make the Gospel real to their audiences; Newman in his pulpit at St. Mary the Virgin in Oxford; Sayers in her essays and the radio play, The Man Born to Be King on the BBC.

Then I was looking at an on-line collection of her poetry and found out that they had another connection: the snapdragon.

Newman thought that he would be living and working in Oxford all his life. He took the presence of the snapdragon growing on the walls of his alma mater Trinity College as the "emblem" of his "own perpetual residence even unto death in [his] University. Joyce Sugg took that image of the "Snapdragon in the Wall" as the subtitle of her biography of Newman originally published in 1965.

Newman wrote a poem about the snapdragon as "A Riddle for a Flower Book":

I AM rooted in the wall
Of buttress'd tower or ancient hall;
Prison'd in an art-wrought bed.
Cased in mortar, cramp'd with lead;
Of a living stock alone
Brother of the lifeless stone.

Else unprized, I have my worth
On the spot that gives me birth;
Nature's vast and varied field
Braver flowers than me will yield,
Bold in form and rich in hue,
Children of a purer dew;
Smiling lips and winning eyes
Meet for earthly paradise.
Choice are such,—and yet thou knowest
Highest he whose lot is lowest.
They, proud hearts, a home reject
Framed by human architect;
Humble-I can bear to dwell
Near the pale recluse's cell,
And I spread my crimson bloom,
Mingled with the cloister's gloom.
Life's gay gifts and honours rare,
Flowers of favour! win and wear!
Rose of beauty, be the queen
In pleasure's ring and festive scene.
Ivy, climb and cluster, where
Lordly oaks vouchsafe a stair.
Vaunt, fair Lily, stately dame,
Pride of birth and pomp of name.
Miser Crocus, starved with cold,
Hide in earth thy timid gold.
Travell'd Dahlia, freely boast
Knowledge brought from foreign coast.
Pleasure, wealth, birth, knowledge, power,
These have each an emblem flower;
So for me alone remains
Lowly thought and cheerful pains.
Be it mine to set restraint
On roving wish and selfish plaint;
And for man's drear haunts to leave
Dewy morn and balmy eve.
Be it mine the barren stone
To deck with green life not its own.
So to soften and to grace
Of human works the rugged face.
Mine, the Unseen to display
In the crowded public way,
Where life's busy arts combine
To shut out the Hand Divine.

Ah! no more a scentless flower,
By approving Heaven's high power,
Suddenly my leaves exhale
Fragrance of the Syrian gale.
Ah! 'tis timely comfort given
By the answering breath of Heaven!
May it be! then well might I
In College cloister live and die.

Ulcombe.
October 2, 1827.

Eighty-nine years later Dorothy L. Sayers had her first book of poetry published by Blackwell's in Oxford and it includes a poem title SNAP-DRAGONS:

I have the streets in mind
And the yellow sun,--
    Lad, you are left behind,--
    All that is done.

Snap-dragons on the wall
Were homely to see,--
    What was it after all
    But vanity?

Snap-dragons on the wall
In my garden too,--
    There is little to recall
    For me and you.

Dead blossoms adrift
Are falling away,--
    You never gave me a gift
    Would last for a day.

Swift is darkness -- swift
The death of a flower,--
    I never gave you a gift
    Would last for an hour.

Gone is the level light
From the wide lands,--
    I would be glad to-night
    Of the touch of your hands.

History Made at Oxford's Christ Church Cathedral

Christ Church Cathedral, the Anglican cathedral of Oxford, has recently appointed a new Ecumenical Canon, the Reverend Robin Gibbons, per the Oxford University Department for Continuing Education Summer term newsletter:

Honorary Canons are people who have given distinguished service either in the Diocese or wider church and serve as ambassadors for the Cathedral in their parish, life or ministry.

Each year a number of new Canons are installed at a service in the Cathedral at the end of January and take part in the Cathedral life by becoming a member of the College of Canons.

Robin's appointment was made in recognition of his many years of close work with the Anglican Church, his role as a Chaplain for Catholics of the Eastern Rite (Middle Eastern Catholics who belong to the Greek-Catholic Church one of the many eastern churches in communion with Rome ) and for his work in theological education. . . .

Robin's appointment is historical, in that he is the first Catholic priest to be installed as a Canon since the suppression of St Frideswide’s Priory by Wolsey in 1525 to found Cardinal College (later Christ Church) and the foundation of the Cathedral in 1545/6.

The term Ecumenical Canon acknowledges the desire of the Anglican Church to work with other churches and encourage closer relationships through the appointment of individuals as Canons who share the mission and vision of the Cathedral.

Robin already helps with the termly After Eight Service in Christ Church and is involved in collaborative work on St Frideswide with the Educational Officer in the Cathedral and now acts as one of the occasional Day Chaplains.

Professor Henry Mayr-Harting was the first Roman Catholic and also first lay Canon to be appointed in 1997 when he became Regius Professor of Ecclesiastical History.

The photo above (C) Stephanie A. Mann 2016, was taken during my Oxford Experience trip in 2009: it's the tower of Christ Church Cathedral, which is part of the infrastructure of the college's main (Tom) quad, taken from inside the cathedral's garden.

John Donne's Uncle, Jesuit Jasper Heywood

Father Jasper Heywood died on January 9, 1598; he was a Jesuit missionary priest who had attended Oxford University and had been a fellow at both Merton College and All Souls College but had to leave during Elizabeth I's reign because he was Catholic. He went to Rome and studied for the priesthood and then became a Jesuit. According to the Catholic Encyclopedia:

After two years at the Roman College he was made professor of moral philosophy and controversy at the Jesuit College of Dillingen in Bavaria where he stayed for seventeen years. In 1570 he took the full Jesuit vows. In 1581 he came to England as a missionary with Father William Holt, and together they were the means of numerous conversions to the Catholic Faith. Father Heywood was appointed superior of the English Mission in succession to Father Parsons. In the controversy then rife concerning the observance by English Catholics of the severe ancient fasts, Heywood opposed the rigid party. He was considered by the authorities to have erred on the side of laxity, and was therefore recalled from England by his superiors. On this return journey he was arrested as a suspected priest, brought back to London and imprisoned. Several times he was examined by the Privy Council and strongly urged to conform, but neither bribes nor threats moved him, and he was brought up for trial at Westminster with other priests. Before the trial finished, however, he was taken to the Tower and closely imprisoned for seventeen months. Finally, he was exiled with others to the coast of France, and forbidden under pain of death to return. He then went to the Jesuit College at Dôle in Burgundy, and in 1589 was sent to Rome and afterwards to Naples, where, worn out by the sufferings and hardships he had undergone, he died at the age of sixty-three.

As a classical scholar he is known for his translations of three of Seneca's tragedies: the Troas  the Thyestes and Hercules Furens.

John Donne's mother Elizabeth was Jasper Heywood's sister--and their father was the famous poet, playwright, and epigrammist, John Heywood. The Heywood and Donne families were devout Catholics, but John Donne left the Catholic Church soon after his brother Henry died in prison after being tortured and betraying Blessed William Harrison, SJ, who was executed on February 18, 1594. John Donne would also go on to write anti-Jesuit works: Ignatius His Conclave and the Pseudo-Martyr. Dennis Flynn explored John Donne's Catholic connections, including to his uncle in John Donne & The Ancient Catholic Nobility.

Vestiges of Mary's Dowry: Reformation Iconoclasm

Once I Was A Clever Boy continues his series on English Reformation Iconoclasm, focused the destruction of Marian shrines and chapels:

Nothing so encapsulates English iconoclasm in the Reformation period and in subsequent centuries than the attack on the cult, on the veneration, on almost even the name, of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Mary's Dowry appeared more than anxious to expunge her from its collective life and worship.
I have already mentioned the 1538 burning of several famous statues of her as well as other devotional images, and in the first years of the Elizabethan settlement there were similar scenes - what I wonder did the good people of Sleaford in Lincolnshire think in 1560 when the Crucifix was taken out from their parish church of St Denys and burned in the market place outside?

Lady Chapels in churches attracted the attention of zealous reformers. At Ely cathedral the wondrous fourteenth century Lady Chapel lost all its glass and every statue in the canopy work around the arcades was meticulously decapitated. . . .

The English liturgy was purged of virtually all Marian devotions in 1548, and little survived beyond the feasts of her birth and, surprisingly perhaps, conception. In Oxford University the feast of the Assumption survived as a lesser commemoration, and as it still exists in the University Calendar.

In Oxford the University Church of St Mary the Virgin had a new porch built in 1636-37 by the mason Nicholas Stone at a cost of £230. This was adorned with a statue of the Virgin and Child, and in 1644 this was one of the capital charges brought against Archbishop Laud by the Parliamentarians, on the basis that Laud as Chancellor of the University had sanctioned this. The statue had attracted the respect and indeed devotion of some University students and was blasted by a Parliamentarian musket when the army left the city at the beginning of the Civil War. A modern replacement now occupies the niche.

Read the rest there.

A Short Passage to Eternity: Blessed Peter Wright, SJ

Blessed Peter Wright was a Jesuit martyr in England. Born in Slipton, Northamptonshire, England in 1603, Peter reverted to Catholicism after deserting from the English army on the Continent and was trained for the priesthood in Ghent and Rome. Entering the Jesuits in 1629, he taught at St Omers and then he ministered to English Catholics soldiers fighting for the King of Spain in Flanders/the Spanish Netherlands and accompanied Sir Henry Gage back to England. He also served as a chaplain to the Royalist army during the English Civil War at Oxford first with Sir Henry Gage and then with John Paulet, the 5th Marquess of Winchester. After the war, he was arrested at the home of the Paulet on Candlemas, February 2, 1651--thus sharing an arrest date with St. Anne Line--and imprisoned in Newgate. During his trial, the late Henry Gage's brother Thomas presented evidence that Wright was a priest and thus had violated the Elizabeth statutes against Catholic priests in England, so he was sentenced to death by hanging, drawing, and quartering. (Note that Thomas had been ordained a priest in the order of preachers, the Dominicans--and that Thomas had aided officials in the condemnation of three other priests: the Jesuit Thomas Holland in 1642, the Franciscan Francis Bell in 1643, and the Jesuit Ralph Corby in 1644--he was a busy informant.)

Blessed Peter Wright, beatified in 1929 by Pope Pius XI, spoke these words at Tyburn Tree on May 19 in 1651:

Gentlemen, this is a short passage to eternity; my time is now short, and I have not much to speak. I was brought hither charged with no other crime but being a priest. I willingly confess I am a priest; I confess I am a Catholic; I confess I am a religious man of the Society of Jesus, or as you call it, a Jesuit. 

This is the cause for which I die; for this alone was I condemned, and for propagating the Catholic faith, which is spread through the whole world, taught through all ages from Christ's time, and will be taught for all ages to come.

For this cause I most willingly sacrifice my life, and would die a thousand times for the same if it were necessary; and I look upon it my greatest happiness, that my most good God has chosen me most unworthy to this blessed lot, the lot of the saints. This is a grace which so unworthy a sinner could scarce have wished, much less hoped for. And now I beg of the goodness of my God with all the fervour I am able, and most humbly entreat Him that He would drive from you that are Protestants the darkness of error, and enlighten your minds with the rays of truth. And as for you Catholics, my fellow soldiers and comrades, as many of you as are here I earnestly beseech you to join in prayer for me and with me till my last moment; and when I shall come to Heaven I will do as much for you. God bless you all; I forgive all men. From my heart I bid you all farewell till we meet in a happy eternity.

A Catholic Martyr in Oxford: Blessed George Napier

His name is variously given as Napper or Napier. From the Catholic Encyclopedia:

English martyr, born at Holywell manor, Oxford, 1550; executed at Oxford 9 November, 1610. He was a son of Edward Napper (d. in 1558), sometime Fellow of All Souls College, by Anne, his second wife, daughter of John Peto, of Chesterton, Warwickshire, and niece of William, Cardinal Peto. He entered Corpus Christi College 5 January, 1565-6, but was ejected in 1568 as a recusant. On 24 August, 1579, he paid a visit to the English College at Reims, and by December, 1580, he had been imprisoned. He was still in the Wood Street Counter, London, on 30 September, 1588; but was liberated in June, 1589, on acknowledging the royal supremacy.

He entered the English College, Douai, in 1596, and was sent on the mission in 1603. He appears to have lived with his brother William at Holywell. He was arrested at Kirtlington, four miles from Woodstock, very early in the morning of 19 July, 1610, when he on him a pyx containing two consecrated Hosts as well as a small reliquary. Brought before Sir Francis Eure at Upper Heyford (Wood says before a justice named Chamberlain), he was strictly searched; but the constable found nothing but his breviary, his holy oils, and a needle case with thread and thimble. The next day he was sent to Oxford Castle, and indicted at the session soon after under 27 Eliz., c. 2 for being a priest. The possession of the oils was held to be conclusive and he was condemned, but reprieved. In gaol he reconciled a condemned felon named Falkner, and this was held to aggravate his crime, but as late as 2 November it was believed that he would have his sentence commuted to one of banishment.

As he refused the oath of allegiance, which described the papal deposing power as a "false, damnable, and heretical" doctrine, it was decided to execute him. He suffered between one and two in the afternoon, having said Mass that morning. His head according to Wood was set up on Tom Gateway; according to Challoner's less probable statement on Christ Church steeple. His quarters were placed on the four city gates, but at least some were secretly removed, and buried in the chapel (now a barn) of Sanford manor, formerly a preceptory of Knights Templar.

In October of 2010 (just a month after Pope Benedict XVI's visit to Scotland and England), Archbishop Bernard Longley of Birmingham dedicated a plaque to the martyr:

During his homily Archbishop Longley said: "Today we gather as pilgrims to celebrate the Mass of the Martyrs of Oxford University and to commemorate the 400th Anniversary of the martyrdom of Blessed George Napier. As pilgrims we are part of a long tradition of Christians setting out from home on a journey of faith to some place particularly associated with the life of our Lord - of those most closely associated with him as Christian witnesses.

"The life of a pilgrim is touched and transformed through the experience of pilgrimage and of the ways that are linked with the life and witness of the saints we honour. For us this pilgrimage is characterised by the fidelity to the Church and teaching of Christ demonstrated by Blessed George Napier and his companion martyrs – and by the courage of the Holy Spirit at work within them and strengthening them in the final act of love and of witness in this city."

The Archbishop of Birmingham said: "The lives of our martyrs were taken from them because they adhered to their faith in Christ within the Catholic Church. Their witness is echoed for me whenever we sing the beautiful words of Blessed John Henry Newman: 'And I hold in veneration, For the love of him alone, Holy Church as his creation, And her teaching as his own.'"

Archbishop Bernard Longley concluded: "One month ago an apostolic witness came to strengthen our faith. We continue to benefit from the impact of Pope Benedict’s visit to this diocese. Paradoxically in the time of Blessed George Napier and his companions the role of faith as the foundation of civil society was hardly questioned, yet the liberty to practice faith was narrowly defined.

"Today the Holy Father has reminded us of the importance of faith in strengthening civil society and of the opposition we can encounter. He said: 'There are some who now seek to exclude religious belief from public discourse, to privatise it or even to paint it as a threat to equality and liberty. Your religion is in fact a guarantee of authentic liberty and respect, leading us to look upon every person as a brother or sister."

You may see a picture of the plaque here.

Blessed John Henry Newman and Blessed Dominic Barberi

 

Today (in England) is the memorial of Blessed Dominic Barberi, probably best known as the Italian missionary priest who received Blessed John Henry Newman into the "one true fold of Christ" as Newman always said, on October 9, 1845. This essay, written by Fr. Adolfo Lippi for The International Centre of Newman Friends, describes the circumstances of that event:

“Dalgarins (sic) invited a certain Fr. Dominic of the Mother of God, a Provincial of the Passionists, to go to Aston Hall in Littlemore, telling him that he was being called to a work in the service of God: and unwittingly, he agreed. He was always conscious that every delay could possibly result in some great harm to the office to which he called. However because of a terrible storm he set out in a covered coach. He endured five hours of driving rain and, as it so pleased God, completely exhausted he arrived at Littlemore at night. Without delay he entered in the solitary dwelling of those fervent men who were famous throughout England, and with great humility Newman fell at his feet, telling him that he would not move from there until he was blessed and received into the Church of Jesus Christ.”

Father Lippi goes deeper into the connections between the Passionists and Newman, however, including Father Ignatius (George) Spencer:

There is another Passionist, who undoubtedly moved Newman’s spirit: George Spencer, the Anglican pastor of a noble family (the same as Lady Diana) who had already entered the Catholic Church in 1830. He had met Barberi in Rome and was certainly influenced by him who had preached a crusade throughout Europe for the return of England to the Catholic Church. Years later Leo XIII spoke about St. Paul of the Cross and meetings that the Pope had with George Spencer, who became Fr. Ignatius of the Heart of Jesus, at the nunciature in Brussels. George Spencer became a Passionist in 1846, two years before Newman published his novel [Loss and Gain]. . . .

The novel Loss and Gain was written by Newman after his conversion. Undoubtedly Newman was thinking about Spencer when Charles, the protagonist of the novel, meets his friend Willis who had become a Catholic before him and had become a Passionist with the name of Fr. Aloysius. There is a phrase, inspired by St. Augustine, which reveals some of the admiration of Newman for Spencer and, at the same time, conceals it. Precisely on the last page of the novel, Charles, the protagonist, says to his friend Willis who had become a Passionist, that he admired the first fervor of the new convert: “No, Willis…you have taken the better part betimes, while I have loitered. Too late have I known Thee, O Thou ancient Truth; too late have I found Thee, First and only Fair.”

And Father Lippi goes on to cite three quotations from Blessed John Henry Newman about his first confessor in the Catholic Church. Read rest here. More details about Blessed Dominic Barberi from a previous post on this blog here. The photo of the ex voto from three English converts, referring to George Spencer, is from Notre Dame des Victoires in Paris.

Around the World with the Wichita Public Library

My husband and I have vicariously visited four European capitals in the past couple of weeks: Paris, London, Rome, and Prague--via Naxos Musical Journey DVDs combining video of famous sights in each city with appropriate classical music. We thought two were very effective and two less effective. We have been to all but one of the cities, Prague.

The DVD on Paris, which also includes Chantilly, Versailles, and Chartres, was one of the effective presentations, with scenes from all the famous sights, including Notre Dame, the Musee D'Orsay, Sacre Coeur, etc, and of families in the parks at Luxembourg, the interior of Le Train Bleu in the Gare de Lyon (we ate dinner there twice on business trips to Paris). Good detail in Chantilly, Versailles, and Chartres, too. The music ranges from Marais to Wagner; Mozart to Satie; Meyerbeer to Puccini--all appropriately chosen for the venue and choreography of the video presentation.

The DVD on Rome we thought less effective, primarily because the video concentrated so much on street scenes, the Spanish Steps (we thought we'd never stop seeing them), and did not even visit all four major basilicas in Rome--no St. Mary Major, St. Paul Outside the Walls or St. John Lateran at all. The views of the Roman Forum were effective. The musical selections were great, however:

The music here included is all associated in one way or another with Rome and its traditions. It ranges from the overture to Mozart's Roman opera La clemenza di Tito to Wagner's Tannhäuser, whose hero seeks pardon for his sins in the Eternal City, from Puccini's opera Tosca, set in Rome dominated by a corrupt chief of police, to Berlioz's evocation of the city in the age of Benevenuto Cellini, his Roman Carnival Overture.

Again, the DVD for London we thought was great: lots of sights, including both Westminster Cathedral and Westminster Abbey and the bonus of Oxford, including Christ Church and Christ Church Cathedral. The music was beautiful, with many selections from the Enigma Variations by Elgar, including "Nimrod" during the scenes of Christ Church. The Verdi selection was interesting--the chorus of the Scottish Exiles from Macbeth (accompanying images of the Tower of London). The video ends with a bang: fireworks and Handel's Music for the Royal Fireworks!

But the DVD for Prague seemed a little dull--not even a good view of the Charles Bridge! The video did include many beautiful scenes along the river and of countryside and parks--and again, the music was great:

The music included here is associated in one way or another with Prague or Bohemia. It includes works by the Bohemian composers Smetana and Dvořák, by the Moravian composer Janáček, and by Fibich who, with Mozart, always found a ready welcome for his music in Prague.

There are more DVDs in the series, including Salzburg (lots of Mozart), Vienna, and Madrid, and DVDs that encompass highlights from the entire country, like Finland, Germany, and Uzbekistan, as well as two videos dedicated to regions of France, the chateaus of the Loire and Brittany & Normandy--the easy way to armchair travel, without luggage or crowds, or really being there!