For three years Newman sought to resolve insoluble conflicts between his intellect and his emotions and, at the same time, refute the suggestion that he had been corrupted by ancient heresies. First he feared that his singular views would result in him being condemned as a Monophysite – a separatist sect stigmatised by Pope Leo the Great at the Council of Chalcedon in 451. Then he rebutted the accusation that he behaved like a Donatist – the name given to a schismatic North African sect which had been condemned by St Augustine. But his most difficult task was explaining, to himself as well as to the world, how the Church of England – which had not existed for the first fifteen hundred years of the Christian epoch – was part of an unbroken line of belief that stretched from the caves and cells of Ambrose, Gregory Nazianzen and Martin of Tours, into the rectories and vicarages of Victorian England. And there was a second contradiction which – if Newman felt any obligation to intellectual consistency – he had to explain away. He contended that secular control of spiritual matters polluted the Church that endured it. But the Church of England had been created as a creature of the state. Newman resolved the dilemma, at least to his own satisfaction, in ‘Tract XC’.
The Tracts had already caused such disquiet – particularly to the Bishop of Oxford – that Newman had offered to suspend their publication. But the Bishop had not pressed the point and Newman had not made good his offer. The uneasy peace was shattered on February 27th 1841, the day on which the clergy of England read, in their copies of ‘Tract XC’, that the Thirty-Nine Articles were not in conflict with the beliefs of Rome. Indeed, according to the tract, they were a reinforcement of orthodox Catholic opinion. In their condemnation of purgatory, the sale of indulgences, the worship of images and the veneration of relics, they had condemned excesses, which had largely been suppressed by the Council of Trent. A careful reading of the text confirmed that – despite the unpleasantly bellicose style in which they were written – the Articles were compatible with true Roman doctrine. They condemned the ‘sacrifices of masses’ not ‘the Sacrifice of the Mass’. And linguistic analysis even mapped out something approaching common ground on the subject of purgatory. It was the ‘Romish’ doctrine that was anathematised, not the ‘Roman’ doctrine – a very different dogma. In fact the anonymous author of ‘Tract XC’ was arguing that, purged of its evangelical sloth and theological indolence, the Church of England would become a new and improved form of the Church of Rome.
Newman became a lightning conductor for controversy – sometimes with far more intellectual justification than could be claimed for the linguistic contortions of ‘Tract XC’. He wrote that ‘Mr Darwin’s theory need not be atheistical, be it true or not’; and he told John Walker, the parish priest at Scarborough, that The Origin of Species may simply suggest a ‘larger idea of Divine Prescience and skill’. Newman substantiated his claim with the same textual devices that he had used to justify his contention that the Thirty-Nine Articles were not incompatible with Catholic teaching. However commentators had interpreted natural selection, Darwin did not ‘profess to oppose Religion’.1 More difficult to justify – from any view of life eternal – was his contention that damnation did not mean eternal suffering because spirits in an otherworldly state had no conception of time. And he added – more as an indication of his respect for biblical authority than as an intellectual escape route – that the scriptures said very little on the subject.
The heads of Oxford houses were the first to express their outrage at what they regarded as the heresies inherent in ‘Tract XC’ – an emotion that spread, with increasing virulence, after it was discovered that Newman was the author of the offending document. The Bishop of Oxford changed his suggestion that the Tracts should be abandoned, into the instruction that publication must be discontinued. Newman obeyed, but he continued to write and publish lectures and sermons. Their subjects – The Life and Work of St Athanasius and The Nature of Faith in Relation to Reason – were invariably acceptable to established opinion. The choice of topic was the result of caution rather than an acceptance of more orthodox views. Newman was moving away from the Church and was ready to discuss his spiritual doubts. Keble was chosen as the sounding board. His advice was accepted and Newman, as a first tentative step towards conversion, began quietly to retract his most aggressive anti-Roman Catholic statements.
Newman decided it was necessary to have a retreat into which he could escape from St Mary’s and its parsonage. Property was leased in the village of Littlemore. Although the chapel of Sts Mary and Nicholas, which Newman added to the building, was Roman Catholic in design and spirit, it was consecrated by the forgiving Bishop of Oxford, who was so impressed by Newman’s inaugural sermon that he took away, for further study, the notes on which it had been based. He might have been less supportive had he realised that Littlemore was to become the home of a religious community with Newman at its head and Newman’s ideas as its guiding doctrine. Newman’s growing reputation – as a controversialist as well as a theologian – guaranteed a supply of young men who wanted to sit at his feet. Among them was Ambrose St John, from whom he became inseparable for the rest of his life. Newman’s feelings can be best illustrated by the letter he wrote in middle age after hearing of St John’s death. In that it is as much concerned with Newman as it is with St John, the letter properly illustrates its author’s self-obsession. But the depth of his affection is clear: ‘I think that my own wound will never close in the time which remains of my life. It has been granted to me most mercifully to prepare me for that which must be soon.’2 Fifteen years later, on August 19th 1890, St John’s grave in Rednal was opened and the mortal remains of John Henry Newman were laid side by side with the body of his old friend.
The construction of a coach house in the Littlemore outbuildings, in anticipation of acquiring some sort of vehicle to carry him to and from his parish, suggests that Newman was sincere in his protestations of a desire to remain vicar of St Mary’s. But the Anglican bishops’ unanimous and unqualified condemnation of ‘Tract XC’ made him think again. There were other signs that he was considering making the great leap. He was already in correspondence with Charles Russell, the Professor of Ecclesiastical History at Maynooth, with the ostensible purpose of clearing his mind of admitted confusion about transubstantiation. Later he was to claim that Russell ‘had, perhaps more to do with my conversion than anyone else’.3 Whatever the cause, in the autumn of 1843 Newman took the first positive step towards Rome by resigning his living. He preached his last sermon on September 25th. It was entitled ‘The Parting of Friends’. It recalled some of the Bible’s great farewells, but it was – like so much of Newman’s writing – essentially about himself: ‘O loving friends, should you know anyone who [has] … made you feel that there is a higher life than this daily one … remember such a one in time to come though you hear him not and pray for him.’4
Littlemore became Newman’s refuge. He spent most of his time writing, but occasionally sallied forth to preach highly personalised sermons about his spiritual future. Often he confessed his doubts to friends in the hope that they would, in some way, resolve them. Pusey – his greatest source of comfort – received a letter which asked, ‘What then is the will of Providence about me? … Am I in delusion, given over to believe a lie? Am I deceiving myself, convinced when I am not?’5 But events conspired – Newman, no doubt, believed guided by a divine hand – to concentrate his mind. A newspaper wrongly reported that he had been received into the Catholic Church and he was bombarded with messages of condemnation and congratulation, support and disapproval – to none of which he felt able to provide an adequate reply.
Although Newman had made a conspicuous retreat from the ‘Tract XC’ controversy, the most ardent Oxford critics of the tract and the movement with which it was associated would not let the matter rest. They first tried to persuade Convocation formally to condemn ‘Tract XC’. They failed, but they did succeed in carrying a resolution which deprived William Ward – a Tractarian of extreme views – of his degree. Newman remained silent. With the world in turmoil around him, he returned to the study of St Athanasius, one of the early Fathers, whose work he believed to be crucial to the understanding of true faith, and – following naturally on his conclusion that the teaching of the ancient Church was neglected – he wrote Essays in the Development of Christian Doctrine. It ended:
And now, dear Reader, time is short, eternity is long. Put not from what you have here found; regard it not as a mere matter of present controversy; set not out to resolve or refute it, and looking about for the best way of doing so, seduce not yourself with the imagination that it comes from disappointment or disgust or restlessness or wounded feeling or undue sensibility or other weaknesses. Wrap not yourself round in the associations of years past, nor determine that to be truth which you wish to be so, nor make an idol of cherished anticipations.6
Rumours of Newman’s impending conversion excited mixed feelings in the Catholic Church. Nicholas Wiseman was wholeheartedly in favour of encouraging the Tractarians to continue their theological speculation, but older ‘home-grown’ Catholics believed that he was wasting his time by interfering with what was no more than a new branch of an old heresy. Wiseman was vindicated. The Tractarian Movement coincided with a significant increase in individual Catholic converts, and the fears that the Tracts would provide a reason for dissatisfied Protestants to stay in a Church of England that was showing new signs of life was proved to be diametrically wrong. However, not all Tractarians shared Newman’s growing affection for Catholicism and Catholics. William Ward illustrated the abrasive personality which had contributed to Convocation’s decision to deprive him of his degree. ‘English Catholics don’t know what education means. Many of them can’t write English. When a Catholic meets a Protestant in conversation, it is like a barbarian meeting a civilised man.’7
Wiseman’s attitude towards prospective Tractarian converts was based on the belief that they would invigorate the English Catholic Church, which he judged was in a ‘low state … Let us have but even a small number of such men who write in the tracts … and we shall be speedily reformed and England quickly converted.’8 Thomas Walsh, the Vicar Apostolic of the Central District to whom Wiseman was then Coadjutor, was just as enthusiastic – though it was widely believed that both men based their hopes on a romantic rather than reasoned assessment of the possibilities. In Ireland, the Hierarchy’s opposition to the Tractarians was intensified by the mistaken belief that the ‘Oxford men’ were sympathetic to Daniel O’Connell’s view that the Catholic Church should be in open support of popular movements. In fact, Tractarians were neither concerned with popular movements nor interested in social questions. Newman’s disputations were not intended to deepen the faith or widen the understanding of the working men and their wives. Although he sometimes believed that he was speaking to the ‘masses’, his support – and his opposition – came from intellectuals who had the time (as well as the ability and inclination) to examine esoteric questions about doctrine and belief. Yet in one of the modern mysteries of the Catholic Church, he became a popular hero.
Newman’s supporters were further enthused, and the opponents more firmly antagonised, by the publication of the Essays in the Development of Christian Doctrine. It amounted to a coded announcement that Newman had made up his mind. Only the Roman Catholic Church – the modern world’s direct connection with the ancient Fathers, and the manifestation of the Apostolic Succession – could provide the authority and unity essential to the propagation of true faith. The basis of his conversion was part mystical and part intellectual. But the timing and occasion of the ceremony by which he was received into his new faith was determined by the example set by his friends. One by one, members of the community which had formed around him at Littlemore converted to Catholicism. On October 2nd 1845 his closest friend, Ambrose St John, was received into the Church. The next day Newman resigned his Oriel Fellowship. The Provost, anticipating the event that made the resignation necessary, responded with an example of what the intellectual elite of the Established Church thought Catholicism required. He hoped that Newman would ‘at least be saved from some of the worst errors of the Church of Rome, such as praying to human Mediators or falling down before images – because in you, with all the great advantages with which God has blessed and tried you, I must believe such errors to be most deeply sinful’.9
The best that can be said of the Provost’s conduct was that he had the grace, and the sense, not to attempt to change Newman’s mind. The decision was irrevocable. Only the occasion of its implementation was in doubt. Then Newman heard that Father Dominic Barberi, a Passionist monk who had received several of his friends into the Church, was to visit Littlemore on his way to Belgium. Bernard Dalgairns, one of Newman’s converts, was sent to meet Barberi when he arrived in Oxford, on the Birmingham coach. As Dalgairns left Littlemore, Newman asked him, ‘When you see your friend, will you tell him that I wish him to receive me into the Church of Christ?’10 It was raining hard and Barberi had travelled on the exposed top of the coach. He was drying himself in front of the Littlemore fire when Newman entered the room and, kneeling, asked Barberi to hear his confession. On the evening of October 9th 1845, John Henry Newman and two of his young followers became Roman Catholics. Next day, Roman Catholic Mass was said in the Littlemore chapel for the first time.
Newman still felt attracted by collegiate life – the exploration, by similarly inclined young men, of ideas that excited them. So it was natural enough that at the end of the month he should visit the seminary at Oscott where Nicholas Wiseman was President. The two men had met, ten years earlier, in Rome, when Wiseman had urged Newman to spend more time in the Eternal City and Newman had replied that there was work for him to do in England. On November 1st 1845, Newman and his little band of followers were all confirmed in the Oscott chapel. Then Wiseman set out his idea of how Newman’s English destiny should be fulfilled. Ordination should precede apostolic work in the Midlands – possibly as an Oratorian.
Until then, Newman had not even considered becoming a Catholic priest. But it is clear that the idea immediately appealed to him. The Oratory – not a religious Order, but a group of secular priests who lived together in a life devoted to pastoral care and scholarship – attracted him. So did the offer of Old Oscott (the college’s original buildings) as a home and refuge for himself and his followers. Newman agreed and accepted, but he did not move in for three months. Instead he toured England, familiarising himself with Catholic habits and institutions. Then in February 1846, Old Oscott – renamed Maryvale – became his home. Everything of importance that happened to Newman during those early days confirmed his conviction that he had taken the right decision. But he had not enjoyed his early months as a Roman Catholic. He had hated being ‘the gaze of so many eyes’, as if he were ‘some wild incomprehensible beast caught by the hunter and a spectacle for Dr Wiseman to exhibit’.11 Almost as bad was the indignity that awaited his return to the seminary: the obligation to ‘stand at Dr Wiseman’s door waiting for Confession amid the Oscott boys’.
Newman remained in Oscott until October, when the summons to Rome – which he had expected since April – arrived. The long days during which he prepared for ordination were no more enjoyable than his early months at Oscott, not least because he regarded himself as ordained already. Together with St John, he was enrolled in the College of Propaganda Fide, where he claimed to be embarrassed by being awarded special status – including the provision of English tea every evening. The lectures were undistinguished and he slept through many of them without guilt or embarrassment. The syllabus included neither Aristotle nor Thomas Aquinas. Most of the Jesuits he met were ‘plodding, methodical and unromantic’12 rather than sinister, as he had been taught to believe, and he came to regard their suppression as ‘one of the most mysterious matters in the history of the Church’. He was, however, impressed by the Jesuit rector of the college, Padre Bresciani, who led the ‘self-denying life’ that Newman thought was part of the priestly vocation.
Granted, with other seminarians, an audience with Pius IX, he stumbled while bending to kiss the Pope’s foot and hit his head on the pontifical knee. The highlight of his novitiate was a Christmas visit to the Roman Oratory of St Philip Neri. It convinced him, if further conviction were needed, that he should become an Oratorian. He was made a deacon on May 29th 1847, ordained priest – along with Ambrose St John – on the 30th and said his first Mass. There followed a period of training with and by the Oratorians. It was sufficiently eclectic to include instruction on the liquefaction of the blood of Santa Patrizia on her feast day and ‘room-sweeping, slop emptying, dinner serving, bed making and shoe cleaning’.13 He was given notice that plans for the foundation of an English Oratory would not be approved until November, but in October received news that confirmed more than the creation of the English house. He was to be made Superior for Life of the English Oratory.
Back in England by Christmas, Newman received what should, on the face of it, have been welcome news. Frederick William Faber – a young devotee of his Oxford days – wanted to join the Oratory. Since his conversion Faber had created a community of his own, composed of half a dozen converts who had been Church of England clergymen. They called themselves ‘Brothers of the Will of God’, but – because they lived in St Wilfrid’s House at Cheadle in Staffordshire – were known as the ‘Wilfridians’. Newman was reluctant to accept the new recruits, but Wiseman (by then Pro-Vicar Apostolic of the London District) persuaded him that their ‘surrender’ was providential. So on February 12th 1848, ten days after the English College of the Oratory was set up in Maryvale, Newman travelled to Staffordshire, there to accept the oaths of obedience from the novitiates. Obedience, as defined by Faber, did not preclude disagreement or presumption. He immediately proposed that Newman should leave Maryvale and move to Cheadle. Newman was adamant: St Wilfrid’s must close. The Earl of Shrewsbury, who had provided the premises occupied by the brotherhood, immediately registered his strong disapproval of Newman’s edict.
Whether or not Shrewsbury’s opposition made the difference, Newman’s determination did not last for long. But his capitulation – and move to Cheadle – did not mark the end of Faber’s role as irritant. Faber was writing, and publishing in episodes, the lives of the saints. That was a worthy enough enterprise in itself, but it was being accomplished in such a florid and hagiographical style that Bernard Ullathorne, the Vicar Apostolic of the Central District, found it offensive and believed that Catholics of a traditional disposition would be scandalised by what they would regard as profanity. Ullathorne asked Faber to abandon the project. Newman shared Ullathorne’s dislike of Faber’s work, but felt a duty to protect a member of his society. His inclination to yield to Faber’s demands was to become a feature of the years in which the Oratories were founded and grew.
The Vatican had ordered that one Oratory was to be established in Birmingham and another in London. Interim sites were found – an old gin factory with a classical façade in Alcester Street, Deritend, Birmingham, and a rundown house in King William Street, the Strand, London. Faber wanted to go to London and take some of the best Oratorians with him. Newman agreed. Inevitably Faber came to regard himself as head of the house and therefore justified in challenging the decisions of the Superior for Life.
In Birmingham a permanent site for the Oratory was found on the Hagley Road in the prosperous suburb of Edgbaston. Newman, while establishing the Oratories, fulfilled what he saw as his pastoral duties – preaching, most weeks, at St Chad’s Cathedral and, together with Ambrose St John, moving to Bilston to succour the sick during an outbreak of cholera. The epidemic was virtually over by the time they arrived, but there was cause for concern about a greater threat to the inhabitants of the ‘labyrinth of lanes, beneath a firmament of smoke’.14 The two priests were more concerned about their parishioners’ spiritual well-being than their health and physical welfare. Newman had convinced himself that two-thirds of the Bilston residents wanted to become Catholics, but ‘could not be received for want of instructors and confessors’.
Anxiety about such neglect might have been expected to make Newman welcome the reinvigoration that was expected to follow the restoration of the Hierarchy in 1850. But on hearing the news, he expressed the fear that the Catholic Church in England was ‘not ready’ – without explaining what ‘not ready’ meant. He was more specific about the easily predictable consequences of the Flaminian Gate pastoral letter. Provoking the Protestants could, he argued, only lead to disrupting the work of soul-saving. It certainly led to the demonisation of Catholicism’s most famous English figureheads. Despite his doubts about the new dispensation, Newman agreed to preach the sermon at the installation of Bernard Ullathorne as Bishop, as distinct from Vicar Apostolic, of the Midland District. It contained the justified complaint that there was ‘no calumny [so] gross [and] no imputation on us so monstrous that they will not greedily drink up’.15 He forbore to say that Cardinal Wiseman must accept some of the blame.
Newman himself became engulfed in a new, albeit more secular than spiritual, controversy. His programme of lectures continued unabated. The fifth lecture, in a series given in the Birmingham Corn Exchange during the summer of 1851, included a gratuitous, though justified, attack on the sexual incontinence of Giacinto Achilli, a lapsed Dominican priest who was employed by the Protestant Evangelical Alliance to ‘expose’ corruption in Rome. On September 1st 1851 Newman wrote to his solicitor ‘on a most anxious matter on which I shall have to act, I may say for the whole Catholic body. You know that Cardinal Wiseman accused in Dublin, I think in a pamphlet, Dr Achilli of fornication. I repeated what the Cardinal said and he is going to bring an action against me.’16 He appended the names of witnesses who would endorse his description of Achilli. Newman clearly did not believe that God would provide. Three further letters, sent on December 17th and 20th and on January 9th 1852, contained the names of men and women who would swear that his denunciation of Achilli was unrelated to the plaintiff’s apostasy. Two Oratorians were despatched to Italy to find evidence of Achilli’s misconduct. The results of their labours were inconclusive.
When the hearing was adjourned, there was a moment of unjustified triumphalism. ‘Achilli is afraid to come to court … He has already managed to put off the trial for nine months and will put it off for a year if he can … We are now contemplating an indictment against him for perjury.’17 Six months later, on the eve of the hearing, Newman’s mood had changed. ‘Some say I may be imprisoned for months. Some say fined.’18 He was fined a notional £100 and regarded the modest punishment as complete vindication of his conduct.
Manning – the Archdeacon of Chichester – was enduring his religious doubts with greater dignity than Newman displayed during his year of spiritual anxiety. Rome – to which he travelled more to visit the antiquities than in the hope of spiritual comfort – held him in thrall. In 1848 the beleaguered Pope, giving benediction ‘with a mixture of majesty, love and supplication’, was ‘a sight beyond words’.19 It was, Manning wrote home, ‘impossible not to love Pius IX’. But then Pio Nono possessed a special virtue. He possessed ‘the most truly English countenance’ Manning had seen in Rome. On his way home, he stopped in Milan to view the preserved cadaver of St Charles Borromeo. Everything returned his thoughts to the dilemma that he could not resolve. ‘I was thinking in prayer, if only I could know that St Charles – who represents the Council of Trent – was right and we wrong.’20 Newman, more at peace with himself and firmly embedded in the Church of Rome, found time to write, and publish anonymously, a novel entitled Loss and Gain, the story of a convert who found peace in the Catholic Church. The most famous convert of them all was about to be joined, in his new spiritual home, by men and women whose exodus from the Church of England was brought about not by the call he had heard or the sign for which Manning longed. The next stage in the reinvigoration of the Catholic Church in England was the consequence of the revival of the question that lay at the heart of the Reformation. Does ultimate authority over religious matters lie with the spiritual or the temporal power?
In November 1847, the Lord Chancellor had assigned the living of Branford in the diocese of Exeter to the Reverend George Cornelius Gorham. The Right Reverend Henry Phillpotts, Bishop of Exeter, had reason to believe that Gorham was theologically unsound, especially on the question of baptismal regeneration. He therefore conducted an examination – thirty-eight hours of verbal interrogation and 149 written questions – from which he concluded that Gorham was unworthy to become Vicar of Branford or anywhere else. Gorham appealed, as was his right, to the Court of the Arches – for six hundred years the final arbiter of disputes within the Canterbury archdiocese. His appeal was dismissed. He then appealed against the dismissal to the Privy Council, and the Court of the Arches’ decision was overturned. The outburst of anger and horror which greeted the imposition of a secular judgement on a decision that concerned the Church alone was genuine. But the cause of offence should not have come as a surprise. The ‘supremacy’ of the civil authority had been embodied, since 1534, in an Act of Parliament which bore that name, and a bill – presented to Parliament exactly three hundred years later – had, when passed, made the Privy Council the final court of all appeals. All that the Gorham case did was make High Anglicans face the reality of the Reformation.
Manning supported Phillpotts’ stand against ‘slovenly unbelief’. But before the Privy Council pronounced, he made clear that his real objection was to the process, not its outcome:
It is indifferent which way the judgement may go. Indeed a judgement in favour of the true doctrine of baptism would deceive many. A judgement right in matter cannot heal a wrong in the principle of the Appeal. And the wrong is this. The appeal removes the final decision of a question involving both doctrine and discipline out of the Church to another centre and that the Civil Court.21
Robert Wilberforce suggested a more ingenious but less magisterial response. Fearful that the Gorham case would make a flight to Rome inevitable, he proposed that Tractarians find a sympathetic colonial bishop and, under his leadership, found a new Church. Manning’s dismissive reply illustrated the way in which his mind was working. ‘Three hundred years ago we left a good ship for a boat. I am not going to leave the boat for a tub.’
Despite Manning’s principal objection being to the process, when the decision was announced he was happy to lead the opposition to the judgement itself. On March 9th 1850 he chaired, with a show of reluctance, a meeting of clergy that drafted a declaration which asserted that the Privy Council had no locus standi in the matter and that, in any event, it had come to the wrong conclusion. It was published in The Times ten days later, over the signature of both clergy and distinguished laymen. Manning’s close friend, William Ewart Gladstone, President of the Board of Trade and Colonial Secretary in Robert Peel’s late government, was not (to much surprise) among the signatories. Explanations of his absence vary. John Morley – too devoted a follower to write an objective biography – argued that his hero merely wanted a period of reflection before the denunciation was published. Manning himself attributed Gladstone’s absence to propriety. The Privy Council could not be publicly excoriated by one of its members. The likelihood is that Gladstone would not endorse a declaration that was bound to be followed by resignations from the Church of England to which he felt such a messianic devotion that, in 1870, he very nearly prevented the introduction of the Forster Education Bill because it trespassed on Church property. Manning knew that apostasy was the inevitable outcome of being a principal party to the declaration. In the summer of 1850, after he renewed the argument by organising a circular which denounced the idea of royal supremacy in matters of Church doctrine, he told Robert Wilberforce, ‘I have written myself fairly over the border – or Tiber rather.’22
By September Manning’s doubts had finally been resolved. After a visit to Lavington, Samuel Wilberforce – Soapy Sam, the third son of the great reformer – wrote to Gladstone with the news that Manning was on the point of leaving the Church of England. But for six months Wilberforce’s judgement was not confirmed. Then, motivated more by the obligation of friendship than the demands of doubt, Manning sought out William Gladstone. Their first meeting lasted three hours and ended in mutual bewilderment. There were two more meetings. Both were as unsatisfactory as the first. On March 25th 1851 Manning resigned as Archdeacon of Chichester. There was one more meeting with Gladstone. Manning described it in his diary. It took place ‘in the little chapel off the Buckingham Palace Road’. The two men were kneeling, ‘side by side … Just before the Communion Service began Manning turned to Gladstone and said “I can no longer take Communion in the Church of England” … and laying my hand on Mr Gladstone’s shoulder I said “come” … Mr Gladstone remained and I went my way.’23 On April 6th 1851 Henry Manning was received into the Roman Catholic Church in the Jesuit church in Farm Street, Mayfair.
The Catholic Church – in the form of its most influential laymen – did not give up all hope of Gladstone’s conversion. Six years after the parting of the ways in the Buckingham Palace Road chapel, the ever-cautious Earl of Shrewsbury expressed to Wiseman his doubts about the wisdom of the tactics that were employed by what would now be called celebrity head-hunters. ‘Your Lsp says Gladstone is expected. I hope so with all my heart but I doubt it very much and surely the part taken by those who seem most to desire it is, of all others, calculated to prevent it. By the Cath Standard of the 17th of May, I see his name put publicly forth for a novena for his conversion. This will rouse all his Protestant relatives and friends and perhaps drive him into denials and repudiations which may go to counteract all the Grace he may receive by means of the Prayers.’
Manning had told himself, on the day before his Farm Street baptism, that his career was over. That gloomy forecast illustrated both his human ambition and his willingness to set it aside when Catholicism called. His pessimism proved to be unjustified. Cardinal Wiseman, still convinced that the best way to reinvigorate the Church of Rome was to attract distinguished converts from the Church of England, regarded the recently resigned archdeacon as a bigger catch than he could reasonably have anticipated. Unlike Newman – who had been required to serve a sometimes humiliating apprenticeship – Manning was, in the modern colloquialism, ‘fast-tracked’. One week after his admission to the Church he was confirmed, tonsured, given First Communion, made subdeacon, went into a brief retreat and was made a deacon – all in one day. Two months later, on June 14th 1851, he was ordained priest. He had become, in Wiseman’s words, ‘one of the first fruits of the restoration’.24
It was not only in England that the Catholic Church showed signs of new life. In Ireland, Paul Cullen, Archbishop of Armagh, was planning the creation of a Catholic university. Like so many of the Church’s concessions to progress, its initial purpose was defensive. In 1845 Robert Peel had set up the three non-denominational Queen’s Colleges and the Irish Hierarchy – far from welcoming an alternative to the aggressively Protestant Trinity College – regarded the new foundation as a ‘Godless’ threat, which would elevate science above faith. The campaign against the secular colleges had been led by John McHale, Archbishop of Tuam, who, unable to obtain unanimous support from the other Catholic bishops, appealed to Rome for advice. In October 1847 Propaganda had ruled that the Colleges were ‘detrimental to faith’ and forbade the bishops to cooperate with them in any way. Propaganda repeated the ruling a year later but, despite the papal condemnation, many priests and lay Catholics continued to teach and learn in the colleges.
Shortly after his return to Ireland in 1849, as Archbishop of Armagh and Papal Legate, Paul Cullen convened the Synod of Thurles. Its purpose was to bring some order and discipline into the divided Irish Church. Ending the dispute over secular education was one item on the agenda, and there was no doubt how unity would be restored. During his last weeks in Rome, Cullen had arranged for the Prefect of Propaganda to write to all the Irish bishops with a condemnation of the colleges which they too had described as ‘godless institutions’. At the Synod he tabled a resolution which forbade clergy, on pain of expulsion, from cooperating with the colleges in any way. It was carried by fifteen votes to thirteen. The majority would have been even smaller, had Cullen not insisted that the Abbot of Mount Melleray – a known opponent of the colleges, but not a bishop – be given a vote. A second motion, which opposed the creation of a Catholic university – a subject on which Rome had not pronounced – was defeated. Cullen, in deference to the Synod’s recorded wishes, took advice about how a genuine seat of learning (on the model of the Belgian University of Louvain) could be set up. He twice travelled to Birmingham to consult John Henry Newman. After his second visit he invited Newman to be the first rector and prepare the way for the new foundation by delivering, in Dublin, a series of lectures on the definition and content of a truly Catholic education. Newman replied that, before he accepted either suggestion, he should ‘know something of the state of public opinion on the subject’. Cullen ignored the proviso. He had already set out the purpose of the university – ‘to persuade the people that education should be religious’.25
The prospect of the university becoming reality was much improved by Cullen’s appointment as Archbishop of Dublin, but progress was slow. During the year in which Newman waited for his appointment to be confirmed – and regularly returned to England, including visits to proclaim the Second Spring and to hear the verdict in the Achilli case – he prepared and delivered his Discourses on the Scope and Nature of Education. It was in those lectures that The Idea of a University was based – a work which, when it was published in 1873, became second only to Newman’s Apologia Pro Vita Sua in securing his lasting fame. The message of the lectures – although at times obscured by metaphors about the futility of attempts to ‘quarry the granite rock with razors or moor a vessel with a thread of silk’ – was clear: ‘If the Catholic Faith is true, a university cannot exist externally to the Catholic pale. For it cannot teach Universal knowledge if it does not teach Catholic theology.’26
Setting out the theory of Catholic university education proved to be easier, and less controversial, than the practice of creating the institution. Cullen – ignoring Newman’s judgement that the undergraduates would work best outside town – bought land on St Stephen’s Green. A Vice Rector (of whom Newman disapproved) was appointed without consultation. John McHale, nationalist and Archbishop of Tuam, announced that he would only support the project if membership was limited to Irish students – not open to the Catholic world, as Newman wanted. The fear that Cullen was losing interest in the scheme was fuelled by the Archbishop’s failure to reply to letters. The suspicion that he was losing faith in Newman seemed to be confirmed by his opposition to Wiseman’s proposal that the Rector’s authority should be enhanced by his appointment as a titular bishop.
Back in England, the London Oratory moved to its permanent home in Brompton and the Oratory Church in Birmingham was consecrated. But Newman’s eclectic enthusiasm was focusing his attention on Ireland where, he judged, prospects of founding a Catholic university had diminished and must be revived. He decided to ‘consult’ – by which he meant attempt to convert – the leaders of the Catholic Church in Ireland. The process began badly. Father John Curtis, the Jesuit Provincial, told him that Ireland was too poor to produce young men of the character and breeding expected of undergraduates, and advised that Archbishop Cullen be told to abandon the idea. Father Curtis was not alone in his pessimism. Bishop Delany of Cork, Bishop Ryan of Limerick and Archbishop Slattery of Thurles all echoed his advice. So did Newman’s old friend, Charles Russell, the Vice President of Maynooth. But all the episcopal reservations had to be set aside when, on March 20th 1854, the Pope instructed the Irish bishops to meet and take practical steps towards creating a new university. The papal definition of the university’s role was less intellectually exacting than Newman wished. But it was sufficiently rigorous to allow him to propose the creation of six faculties – theology, law, medicine, philosophy, letters and natural science – and begin the appointment of staff. The extent of his aspiration was confirmed by his attempt to recruit Johann von Dollinger, the world’s foremost authority on the history of the Catholic Church. On May 5th 1854 Newman was able to write to Rome, ‘The Holy Father will be gratified to know that the University is now begun … Zealous priests in England and Ireland are putting their names on our books.’27
Dr Dollinger declined the offer. It was not the only setback during the early months of preparation. Although Archbishop Cullen agreed that the staff should include laymen, he wanted to restrict their number and, despite accepting that it was the best way to attract donations, vetoed the appointment of a lay finance committee because it would diminish the clergy’s control of university management. The auguries were not all bad. St Laurence House, which was once Dr Quinn’s School, was bought and converted into lecture rooms and studies. Number 16 Harcourt Street was leased to become the rector’s residence and chapel. The Celia Street Medical School was incorporated into the university. Twenty students – naturally enough, all members of the Catholic middle class – registered on November 3rd 1854.
The opening of the university was marked by the publication of an associated weekly magazine, the Catholic Gazette, and the announcement of a series of inaugural lectures – of which Newman was to give the first. But there was a dark cloud on the horizon. As Christmas approached and Newman prepared to return to Oscott for the celebration of Christ’s birth, he confided in Ambrose St John that he was finding it increasingly difficult to meet the demands of the English Oratory and the Irish University. Archbishop Cullen had come to the same conclusion and decided that the university needed a full-time rector.
It was not the possible deterioration in academic standards that worried Cullen – a ‘castle bishop’ who, in the opinion of nationalist John McHale, always sided with the Lord Lieutenant. The Archbishop believed (correctly) that some of the university’s staff had been members of O’Connell’s Young Ireland movement and claimed (wrongly) that included among them were participants in the abortive Ballingarry uprising against English rule – Ireland’s contribution to the ‘year of revolution’ in 1848. Newman brushed aside Cullen’s concern with a piety about keeping politics out of the university, and increased the Archbishop’s worries by adding that, in any case, the Young Ireland survivors were ‘admirable persons now’.28 It was, however, the knowledge that the university had been launched successfully – rather than the minor irritants or the trauma of constant travel – that convinced Newman that the time had come to devote more time to the Oratories, which were in need of his full-time care and protection.
Paul Cullen had gone so far as to complain to Rome about the Rector’s too-frequent absences from the university. But when, in 1856, Newman’s contract was about to expire and he warned that he would not renew it, the Archbishop became more understanding. Realising that Newman’s association with the university was essential to its continued success, he travelled to Birmingham to plead with him to change his mind. The result was a compromise. Newman became non-resident Rector for three years. He refused to accept a salary, but agreed to give each year’s inaugural lectures.
Newman’s lofty aspiration – a great centre of Catholic learning for the whole English-speaking world – was always beyond achievement. But the Irish Catholic University did evolve, through a series of incarnations, into a genuine centre of academic excellence. During its short life, under one title or another, University College Dublin has boasted among its graduates some of Ireland’s most exalted Catholics. According to Newman’s Autobiographical Writings, its birth pangs were so painful and protracted because, at the time of it foundation, Ireland was not ready to encourage scholars and scholarship. ‘I was a poor innocent as regards the actual state of things in Ireland when I went there … I relied on the word of the Pope, but … I am led to think it not rash to say that I knew as much about Ireland as he did.’