John Henry Newman
Crews, Clyde F.
Sign of comfort & contradiction JOHN HENRY NEWMAN HIS LIFE AND WORK Brian Martin Oxford, $19.95, 160 pp. Clyde F. Crews TWENTY winters - of frequently dreary discontent - have now passed since...
...Newman's affiliation with the new Catholic University of Ireland in this same period proved short-lived, a misfortune nearly from start to finish...
...One learns little that is new from Martin's telling of the Newman story...
...Of special merit is a concluding essay on the literary worth of Newman's immense output...
...In 1853, for example, Newman was forced to stand trial and fined on a charge of libeling Giacinto Achilli, a rabidly anti-Catholic orator...
...Martin is perhaps at his weakest in not elucidating more the tumultuous political, social, and theological times of his subject...
...Yet, he was that cherished and rare species: a literate conservative who embraced development and change for the sake of the Gospel...
...Faber, incidentally, a consummate complainer and hypochondriac, once drank a mixture of water and three hairs from a dead Brother's head in the hope of a miraculous cure for one of his endless ills...
...In this limited scope, Martin has done his work fairly well...
...He went to Oxford and was ordained for the Church of England...
...As early as 1859, Newman had taken over the Rambler, a journal aimed at an intellectual approach to the faith...
...Newman preferred the title "St...
...He was a straggler for the intellectual respectability of the ancient faith in the modern age, and for the renewal of pastoral life at all its levels - with special care for the rights of the laity...
...He likened the definition to lightning from a cloudless sky...
...Chief agitator was Frederick (Fr...
...Wilfrid) Faber, as temperamentally different from his superior as it was possible to be...
...Mary...
...An ambitious young man, Newman got entangled in academic and theological affairs, most notably the Oxford Movement...
...He was pressured out of such leadership almost at once for his article "On Consulting the Faithful in Matters of Doctrine...
...So devout was his general confession that he began it in the evening and continued it on the following day...
...By the 1860s the battle lines were being drawn between a tolerant, inquiring Catholicism, represented by such men as Newman and Acton...
...It came when Leo XIII honored the old man with the cardinalate in 1879, even though Cardinal Manning apparently employed high-handed tactics to prevent the honor...
...In drawing a picture of the Newman personality, Martin is careful and correct...
...Clyde F. Crews TWENTY winters - of frequently dreary discontent - have now passed since the autumn of 1962...
...Yet, for Newman's commitments to moderation, development, and intellec-,tual honesty, there was to be vindication...
...What am I doing for any religious end...
...He also liked to refer to the Blessed Virgin as "Dear Mama...
...Martin produced an earlier study...
...but as a Catholic, my life dreary, not my religion...
...Newman seemed set down in his age to be a sign of challenge, comfort, and contradiction...
...He appears as one committed to the bringing of order and kindliness into societal and ecclesial confusion...
...Born with the century in 1801, John Henry experienced his first intense evangelical experience at age fifteen...
...and a more intransigent, ultramontane faith championed by Manning and W. G. Ward...
...In his Oxford study of early Christian heresies, Newman became convinced that the Roman church alone had stood its ground through the centuries, while also displaying flexibility...
...Newman became a Roman priest and founder of the Oratory in England...
...As a Protestant I felt my religion dreary, but not my life...
...Consider what the future cardinal entered in his journal for January 21, 1863: This morning, when I woke, the feeling that I was cumbering the ground came on me so strongly that I could not get myself to go for my shower bath...
...The embattled Oratorian from Birmingham passed up an opportunity to attend the First Vatican Council in 1869-70, though he opposed the infallibility doctrine, not in its ultimate formulation, but for what he considered its in-opportuneness...
...Besides such major works as the Apologia (1864), and The Grammar of Assent (1870), this master of English style also managed to publish popular novels - an occasional clerical pastime then as now...
...This case could have been more forcefully made...
...The church would look foolish without them...
...Also in the mid 1850s, dissension surfaced among the Oratorians in Newman's charge...
...And to disendear him from the authoritarians even more, he opposed the temporal power of the papacy and failed to lament its passing in 1870...
...Now began the trials and disillusion-ments that Martin manages to portray succinctly...
...Meriol Trevor once wrote that Newman - from a bishop's point of view - was the equivalent of a time bomb in a diocese...
...His life was laden with ambitious plans, most of them ground down to inconsequence by the force of events and squabbling personalities...
...Amid a great furor, he entered the Church of Rome in 1845...
...Brian Martin, teacher of English at Pembroke College, Oxford, has produced a credible portrayal of Newman as a man often besieged, sometimes weary, but always resilient...
...In that same year, Meriol Trevor published her two monumental and perceptive volumes on the life of John Henry Newman, the figure often invoked as the "invisible spirit" of the Council...
...For more comprehensive and well-wrought biographies of this venerable figure, one still turns to Bouyer, Trevor, Walgrave, or Ward...
...This theological expression of romanticism began in 1833 and brought him into league with some very keen minds: Pusey, Froude, and Keble (on whom Mr...
...still, we are dealing with an introduction of modest length...
...Once, Newman was called in by Bishop William Ullathorne who wished to know precisely who were these laity that Newman so frequently was championing...
...But this text was intended as a literate introduction coupled with a generous presentation of historic photographs...
...Two decades after the epochal event began, Newman may now prove to be a prophet of post-conciliar uncertainty and turmoil as well...
...I said . . . what am I living for...
...Who are they, Newman repeated...
Vol. 110 • February 1983 • No. 3
