Newman's Life: Part One

My discussions with Anna Mitchell and Matt Swaim on the Son Rise Morning Show begin this morning a little after 7:45 a.m. Eastern time. We begin with a sketch of John Henry Newman's life up to his conversion to Catholicism in 1845, when he was 44 years old.

When I noted that his life is neatly divided into an Anglican half and a Catholic half, I didn't mean to indicate that there's some clean break between those periods. As Newman demonstrated in his Apologia pro Vita Sua, he continued to address and explore the same themes throughout his life before and after his conversion: religion, education, truth, friendship, prayer, doctrine, conscience, the Holy Bible, the Church, the life of Christ, the community of believers, the communion of saints, literature, etc.

As radical a change--in nineteenth century England especially--as Newman's conversion was, there was great deal of continuity in his life.

Here's a brief chronology of Blessed John Henry Newman's life up to 1843, two years before he became a Catholic:

1801 Born on February 21

1816 Enters Trinity College, Oxford

1820 Receives B.A. degree

1822 Elected Fellow of Oriel College

1824 Ordained to the diaconate on June 13
Becomes curate of St. Clement's, Oxford the same day

1825 Ordained to the priesthood on May 29

1826 Becomes tutor of Oriel

1828 Succeeds Edward Hawkins as vicar of St. Mary's

1833 "Lead, Kindly Light"
The Arians of the Fourth Century
Publication of Tracts for the Times begins in September

1838 Becomes editor of The British Critic
Lectures on Justification

1839 Doubts about via media begin

1841 "Tract 90" published on February 27

1842 Moves to Littlemore

1843 Retracts anti-Catholic statements in February
Resigns from St. Mary's in September
Sermons, Bearing on Subjects of the Day
Sermons Before the University of Oxford

The Blessed Lion of Munster

This is the biography of a blessed saint of the Catholic Church: as I read it, I did not know that Clemens August Cardinal von Galens of Munster had been beatified! Father Daniel Utrecht of the Oratory (Toronto) did not write the book as hagiography but as the biography of a bishop who served his diocese during World War II, fighting for religious freedom in the midst of Nazi oppression:

“The dear God placed me in a position in which I had a duty to call black 'black' and white 'white'.” These words were spoken by Cardinal Clemens August von Galen, the bishop of the diocese of Münster in Germany from 1933 to 1946. In so doing, he risked death at the hands of the Nazis, one Gestapo leader even urging that he be publicly hanged. Joseph Goebbels and others in the Nazi leadership, knowing the bishop’s popularity, advised waiting, subscribing to the adage that “revenge is a dish best served cold.”

In this, the definitive English language biography of the great Lion of Münster, readers will encounter the young von Galen as he learns the Catholic faith and love of the fatherland from his family, members of the German aristocracy. A nobleman, a “prince” of his people and of his Church, the boy grew into a man, a six-and-a-half-foot tall giant of a man, who, though he loved his homeland, loved God, His Church and His law even more; for he knew that calling his homeland back to the ways of God is the one way in which a bishop can best demonstrate that love for the people under his spiritual care. And so, in three magnificent sermons and countless other speeches, communiques and gestures, the Lion roared.

This story of his life and his stirring words provides readers with an indispensable glimpse into the confrontation between Church and State in Hitler’s Germany and will serve as a reminder to all men and women of good will of the duty to call black ‘black’ and white ‘white.’

Other than some unnecessary repetition--at the end of the book, describing Cardinal von Galen's funeral, his episcopal motto ["Nec laudibus, nec timore" (Neither praise nor threats will distance me from God)] is cited three times on three pages--the surprising announcement that Cardinal von Galen was beatified may be the most serious flaw in this book. Surely a paragraph describing the institution and progress of his cause would have been helpful. How did the devotion to Cardinal von Galen develop? how was it manifested? what's the status of his cause now?

Most of the book recounts Bishop von Galen's efforts to thwart Nazi oppression of Catholics in their schools, churches, and hospitals. Bishop von Galen did not speak out as openly about the oppression and extermination of the Jewish community in Germany, although he did argue forcefully against the Nazi views on race. While he opposed many of the Nazi's actions during the rule of the Third Reich, Bishop von Galen always did so on the grounds that the Nazi government was violating the promises it had made to protect and uphold religious freedom. He wanted the German bishops to be more united in opposing the Nazi regime's abuses of religious freedom but he never advised anything but passive resistance. He worked to make sure that Pope Pius XI's Mit brennender Sorge was well distributed and he successfully led the campaign to highlight the Nazi scheme to euthanize the handicapped and mentally ill, halting it at least temporarily. 

Father Utrecht describes the three great sermons Bishop von Galen preached in 1941 and includes long excerpts from each (you may read them all here): he opposed the actions of the Gestapo, the Nazi efforts to take over education and programs for the young (forcing everyone into the Nazi Youth groups), and the euthanasia programs to eradicate "life not worth living". After he preached those three sermons, some in the Nazi regime wanted to arrest and try von Galen for treason, but the Nazis feared unrest in his community and so as the blurb notes decided to wait until Germany and the Axis had won the war. The sermons inspired resistance, as the White Rose group attested, and Jewish readers were impressed by someone speaking out against the regime.

Father Utrecht also does not neglect the Bishop's opposition to what he saw as injustices committed by the occupying British and American forces after Germany's defeat. He was a proud German and he did not accept the notion that all Germans were guilty of the crimes against humanity committed by Hitler's Nazi Party. 

The last chapters of the book are remarkable: von Galen is named a Cardinal by Pope Pius XII and embarks on an incredibly difficult journey from Germany to Rome in postwar Europe, driving through floods, enduring car breakdowns, etc. He is welcomed a hero of resistance in Rome and praised by Pope Pius XII. Von Galen begins to feel a little ill on the way home, is welcomed rapturously by the people of Munster--and then becomes dangerously ill from an infection, has emergency surgery, and dies of peritonitis. He goes from the height of triumph to delirium and death in mere weeks!

The book is well-written, well-illustrated, and well-documented. Except for the gap of explaining how von Galen's cause for canonization began and proceeded, it's an excellent, sympathetic, and comprehensive biography.

Leanda de Lisle on the White King, Charles I

For the Waterstones blog, Leanda de Lisle writes about her latest book: White King: Charles I - Traitor, Murderer, Martyr:

Myth has an insidious way of working into way into history. Stories that ring true, that appeal to our prejudices, become ‘fact’. Sometimes they are rooted in contemporary propaganda, the old lies giving a veneer of respectability to the new. But they are also nurtured by attitudes hard-wired into us over centuries.

In my Tudor books I described how our patterns of thought have distorted the reputations of historical figures, particularly women. But in the case of my latest book, White King, a biography of Charles I, there was still more to do. The character of the king and the women around him have been so maligned that readers have turned away from one the most dramatic reigns in British history: a tale of court glamour and political populism, of misogyny and religious violence, that speaks to our time.

The title of this book – White King – is drawn from a sobriquet used by Charles’s contemporaries, and was inspired by the story that he was crowned in white. It is a sobriquet that is unfamiliar today. I hope it inspires curiosity and encourages readers to approach the biography of this damned monarch with an open mind.

Charles the Martyr, and Charles the Murderer, lauded by his friends, and condemned by his enemies, is now largely forgotten, but in popular memory something just as extreme remains. He is pinned to the pages of history as a failed king, executed at the hands of his own subjects, and now preserved like some exotic, but desiccated insect. In many accounts it seems that Charles was doomed almost from birth, his character immutable.
We like to believe we have turned our back on our old prejudices, but the way we remember him shows they lie just below the surface, still influencing the way we think.

Please read the rest there. 

Restoring a Reputation: NOT Mary I's

Major League Baseball is far from the topic of this blog, but the theme of historians revising received history and setting the record straight is. In justice to the dead, I want to see our views corrected if they are wrong and personal reputations restored if they are unjust: Ty Cobb's no less than Mary I's.

The latest biographer of Ty Cobb found out that there was a reputation to restore. We don't really know the truth about Ty Cobb at all. Charles Leerhsen writes for Imprimis at Hillsdale College, noting how everyone accepted the "truth" that Cobb was a dirty player and terrible racist:

Ty Cobb was one of the greatest baseball players of all time and king of the so-called Deadball Era*. He played in the major leagues—mostly for the Detroit Tigers but a bit for the Philadelphia Athletics—from 1905 to 1928, and was the first player ever voted into the Hall of Fame. His lifetime batting average of .366 is amazing, and has never been equaled. But for all that, most Americans think of him first as an awful person—a racist and a low-down cheat who thought nothing of injuring his fellow players just to gain another base or score a run. Indeed, many think of him as a murderer. Ron Shelton, the director of the 1995 movie Cobb, starring Tommy Lee Jones in the title role, told me it was “well known” that Cobb had killed “as many as” three people.

It is easy to understand why this is the prevailing view. People have been told that Cobb was a bad man over and over, all of their lives. The repetition felt like evidence. It started soon after Cobb’s death in 1961, with the publication of an article by a man named Al Stump, one of several articles and books he would write about Cobb. Among other things, Stump claimed that when children wrote to Cobb asking for an autographed picture, he steamed the stamps off the return envelopes and never wrote back. In another book—this one about Cobb’s contemporary Tris Speaker—baseball historian Timothy Gay wrote (implausibly, if you think about it) that Cobb would pistol-whip any black person he saw on the sidewalk. And then there were the stories about how Cobb sharpened his spikes: before every game, numerous sources claim, he would hone his cleats with a file. In the 1989 film Field of Dreams, Shoeless Joe Jackson says that Cobb wasn’t invited to the ghostly cornfield reunion of old-time ballplayers because “No one liked that son of a bitch.” The line always gets a knowing laugh.

When I pitched my idea for a book on Cobb to Simon and Schuster, I was squarely in line with this way of thinking. I figured my task would be relatively easy. I would go back to the original source material—the newspaper accounts, documents, and letters that previous biographers had never really looked at. I would find fresh examples of Cobb being monstrous, blend them with the stories that Al Stump and others wrote, and come up with the first major Cobb book in more than 20 years. But when I started in on the nuts-and-bolts research with original sources—the kind of shoe-leather reporting I had learned working at Newsweek in its heyday—it didn’t even take me ten minutes to find something that brought me up short.

Leerhsen then describes how much that we thought was true, and much that has been repeated and repeated--including by Ken Burns in his PBS series on Baseball--is wrong. Cobb was certainly not a racist and those who played with him did not consider him a dirty player. *Leerhsen refers to "the so-called Deadball Era" before Babe Ruth and other sluggers came along, hitting home runs and driving up the score. Major League Baseball B.R. (before Ruth) was probably much more exciting to watch because it was all about base running, stealing bases--Cobb, Leerhsen reminds us "still holds the record for stealing home, doing so 54 times. He once stole second, third, and home on three consecutive pitches, and another time turned a tap back to the pitcher into an inside-the-park home run." Now, that's thrilling. But MLB changed some rules and the equipment (the ball, especially), and baseball play changed.

Cobb was no angel (who but an angel is?) but it's not right that his reputation should be as abused as it is. If documentary maker Ken Burns reads this book, he should revise his presentation of Cobb in his Baseball series, since it's not true. Leerhsen notes that Burns casts Cobb as the "anti-Jackie Robinson" when in fact Cobb was all in favor of integration in Major League Baseball. Even though he has a nice narrative going, he should eschew the legend and broadcast the fact. As Leerhsen points out, when people start saying things like "it's well-known fact" and then can't cite any source to prove that "well-known fact", they should admit that they might not know what they are talking about!