John Henry Newman

At the age of 15, during his last year at school, Newman converted to Evangelical Christianity, an incident of which he wrote in his Apologia that it was "more certain than that I have hands or feet".[29] Almost at the same time (March 1816) the bank Ramsbottom, Newman and Co. crashed, though it paid its creditors and his father left to manage a brewery.[30] Mayers, who had himself undergone a conversion in 1814, lent Newman books from the English Calvinist tradition.[25] It was in the autumn of 1816 that Newman fell under the influence of a definite creed and received into his intellect impressions of dogma never afterwards effaced.[27] He became an evangelical Calvinist and held the typical belief that the Pope was the antichrist under the influence of the writings of Thomas Newton,[31] as well as his reading of Joseph Milner's History of the Church of Christ.[22] Mayers is described as a moderate, Clapham Sect Calvinist,[32] and Newman read William Law as well as William Beveridge in devotional literature.[33] He also read The Force of Truth by Thomas Scott.[34]

Although to the end of his life Newman looked back on his conversion to Evangelical Christianity in 1816 as the saving of his soul, he gradually shifted away from his early Calvinism. As Eamon Duffy puts it, "He came to see Evangelicalism, with its emphasis on religious feeling and on the Reformation doctrine of justification by faith alone, as a Trojan horse for an undogmatic religious individualism that ignored the Church's role in the transmission of revealed truth, and that must lead inexorably to subjectivism and skepticism."[35]

Newman's name was entered at Lincoln's Inn. He was, however, sent shortly to Trinity College, Oxford, where he studied widely. His anxiety to do well in the final schools produced the opposite result; he broke down in the examination, under Thomas Vowler Short,[27][36] and so graduated as a BA "under the line" (with a lower second class honours in Classics, and having failed classification in the Mathematical Papers).

Desiring to remain in Oxford, Newman then took private pupils and read for a fellowship at Oriel College, then "the acknowledged centre of Oxford intellectualism".[27] He was elected a fellow at Oriel on 12 April 1822. Edward Bouverie Pusey was elected a fellow of the same college in 1823.[27]

In December 1832, Newman accompanied Archdeacon Robert Froude and his son Hurrell on a tour in southern Europe on account of the latter's health. On board the mail steamship Hermes they visited Gibraltar, Malta, the Ionian Islands and, subsequently, Sicily, Naples and Rome, where Newman made the acquaintance of Nicholas Wiseman. In a letter home he described Rome as "the most wonderful place on Earth", but the Roman Catholic Church as "polytheistic, degrading and idolatrous".[27][43]

During the course of this tour, Newman wrote most of the short poems which a year later were printed in the Lyra Apostolica. From Rome, instead of accompanying the Froudes home in April, Newman returned to Sicily alone.[27] He fell dangerously ill with gastric or typhoid fever at Leonforte, but recovered, with the conviction that God still had work for him to do in England. Newman saw this as his third providential illness. In June 1833 he left Palermo for Marseille in an orange boat, which was becalmed in the Strait of Bonifacio. Here, Newman wrote the verses "Lead, Kindly Light" which later became popular as a hymn.[44][43]

Portrait miniature of John Henry Newman, by William Charles Ross

Newman was at home again in Oxford on 9 July 1833 and, on 14 July, Keble preached at St Mary's an assize sermon on "National Apostasy", which Newman afterwards regarded as the inauguration of the Oxford Movement. In the words of Richard William Church, it was "Keble who inspired, Froude who gave the impetus, and Newman who took up the work"; but the first organisation of it was due to Hugh James Rose, editor of the British Magazine, who has been styled "the Cambridge originator of the Oxford Movement".[45] Rose met Oxford Movement figures on a visit to Oxford looking for magazine contributors, and it was in his rectory house at Hadleigh, Suffolk, that a meeting of High Church clergy was held over 25–26 July (Newman was not present, but Hurrell Froude, Arthur Philip Perceval, and William Palmer had gone to visit Rose),[46] at which it was resolved to fight for "the apostolical succession and the integrity of the Prayer Book".[45]

A few weeks later Newman started, apparently on his own initiative, the Tracts for the Times, from which the movement was subsequently named "Tractarian". Its aim was to secure for the Church of England a definite basis of doctrine and discipline. At the time the state's financial stance towards the Church of Ireland had raised the spectres of disestablishment, or an exit of high churchmen. The teaching of the tracts was supplemented by Newman's Sunday afternoon sermons at St Mary's, the influence of which, especially over the junior members of the university, was increasingly marked during a period of eight years. In 1835 Pusey joined the movement, which, so far as concerned ritual observances, was later called "Puseyite".[45] Through Francis Rivington, the tracts were published by the Rivington house in London.[47]

In 1836 the Tractarians appeared as an activist group, in united opposition to the appointment of Renn Dickson Hampden as Regius Professor of Divinity. Hampden's 1832 Bampton Lectures, in the preparation of which Joseph Blanco White assisted, were suspected of heresy; and this suspicion was accentuated by a pamphlet put forth by Newman, Elucidations of Dr Hampden's Theological Statements.[45]

At this date Newman became editor of the British Critic. He also gave courses of lectures in a side chapel of St Mary's in defence of the via media ("middle way") of Anglicanism between Roman Catholicism and popular Protestantism.[45]

Newman's influence in Oxford was supreme about the year 1839.[45] Just then, however, his study of monophysitism caused him to doubt whether Anglican theology was consistent with the principles of ecclesiastical authority which he had come to accept. He read Nicholas Wiseman's article in the Dublin Review on "The Anglican Claim", which quoted Augustine of Hippo against the Donatists, "securus judicat orbis terrarum" ("the verdict of the world is conclusive").[45] Newman later wrote of his reaction:

For a mere sentence, the words of St Augustine struck me with a power which I never had felt from any words before. ...They were like the 'Tolle, lege,—Tolle, lege,' of the child, which converted St Augustine himself. 'Securus judicat orbis terrarum!' By those great words of the ancient Father, interpreting and summing up the long and varied course of ecclesiastical history, the theology of the Via Media was absolutely pulverised. (Apologia, part 5)

After a furore in which the eccentric John Brande Morris preached for him in St Mary's in September 1839, Newman began to think of moving away from Oxford. One plan that surfaced was to set up a religious community in Littlemore, outside the city of Oxford.[48] Since accepting his post at St. Mary's, Newman had a chapel (dedicated to Sts. Nicholas and Mary) and school built in the parish's neglected area. Newman's mother had laid the foundation stone in 1835, based on a half-acre plot and £100 given by Oriel College.[49] Newman planned to appoint Charles Pourtales Golightly, an Oriel man, as curate at Littlemore in 1836. However, Golightly had taken offence at one of Newman's sermons, and joined a group of aggressive anti-Catholics.[50] Thus, Isaac Williams became Littlemore's curate instead, succeeded by John Rouse Bloxam from 1837 to 1840, during which the school opened.[51][41] William John Copeland acted as curate from 1840.[52]

Newman continued as a High Anglican controversialist until 1841, when he published Tract 90, which proved the last of the series. This detailed examination of the Thirty-Nine Articles suggested that their framers directed their negations not against Catholicism's authorised creed, but only against popular errors and exaggerations. Though this was not altogether new, Archibald Campbell Tait, with three other senior tutors, denounced it as "suggesting and opening a way by which men might violate their solemn engagements to the university".[45] Other heads of houses and others in authority joined in the alarm. At the request of Richard Bagot, the Bishop of Oxford, the publication of the Tracts came to an end.[45]

Newman also resigned the editorship of the British Critic and was thenceforth, as he later described it, "on his deathbed as regards membership with the Anglican Church". He now considered the position of Anglicans to be similar to that of the semi-Arians in the Arian controversy. The joint Anglican-Lutheran bishopric set up in Jerusalem was to him further evidence that the Church of England was not apostolic.[45][53]

Newman College, College Lane, Littlemore

In 1842 Newman withdrew to Littlemore with a small band of followers, and lived in semi-monastic conditions.[45] The first to join him there was John Dobree Dalgairns.[54] Others were William Lockhart on the advice of Henry Manning,[55] Ambrose St John in 1843,[56] Frederick Oakeley and Albany James Christie in 1845.[57][58] The group adapted buildings in what is now College Lane, Littlemore, opposite the inn, including stables and a granary for stage coaches. Newman called it "the house of the Blessed Virgin Mary at Littlemore" (now Newman College).[59] This "Anglican monastery" attracted publicity, and much curiosity in Oxford, which Newman tried to downplay, but some nicknamed it Newmanooth (from Maynooth College).[60] Some Newman disciples wrote about English saints, while Newman himself worked to complete an Essay on the development of doctrine.[45]

In February 1843, Newman published, as an advertisement in the Oxford Conservative Journal, an anonymous but otherwise formal retractation of all the hard things he had said against Roman Catholicism. Lockhart became the first in the group to convert formally to Catholicism. Newman preached his last Anglican sermon at Littlemore, the valedictory "The parting of friends" on 25 September, and resigned the living of St Mary's,[45] although he did not leave Littlemore for two more years, until his own formal reception into the Catholic Church.[45][41]

In February 1846, Newman left Oxford for St. Mary's College, Oscott, where Nicholas Wiseman, then vicar-apostolic of the Midland district, resided; and in October he went to Rome, where he was ordained priest by Cardinal Giacomo Filippo Fransoni and awarded the degree of Doctor of Divinity by Pope Pius IX. At the close of 1847, Newman returned to England as an Oratorian and resided first at Maryvale (near Old Oscott, now the site of Maryvale Institute, a college of Theology, Philosophy and Religious Education); then at St Wilfrid's College, Cheadle; and then at St Anne's, Alcester Street, Birmingham. Finally he settled at Edgbaston, where spacious premises were built for the community, and where (except for four years in Ireland) he lived a secluded life for nearly forty years.[45]

Statue outside the Church of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, popularly known as Brompton Oratory, in London

Before the house at Edgbaston was occupied, Newman established the London Oratory, with Father Frederick William Faber as its superior.[45]

Anti-Catholicism had been central to British culture since the 16th-century English Reformation. According to D. G. Paz, anti-Catholicism was "an integral part of what it meant to be a Victorian".[63] Popular anti-Catholic feeling ran high at this time, partly in consequence of the papal bull Universalis Ecclesiae by which Pope Pius IX re-established the Catholic diocesan hierarchy in England on 29 September 1850. New episcopal sees were created and Cardinal Nicholas Wiseman was to be the first Archbishop of Westminster.

On 7 October, Wiseman announced the Pope's restoration of the Catholic hierarchy in England in the pastoral letter From out of the Flaminian Gate.

Led by The Times and Punch, the British press saw this as being an attempt by the papacy to reclaim jurisdiction over England. This was dubbed the "Papal Aggression". The prime minister, John Russell, wrote a public letter to the Bishop of Durham and denounced this "attempt to impose a foreign yoke upon our minds and consciences".[64] Russell's stirring up of anti-Catholicism led to a national outcry. This "No Popery" uproar led to violence with Catholic priests being pelted in the streets and Catholic churches being attacked.

Newman was keen for lay people to be at the forefront of any public apologetics, writing that Catholics should "make the excuse of this persecution for getting up a great organization, going round the towns giving lectures, or making speeches".[65] He supported John Capes in the committee he was organising for public lectures in February 1851. Due to ill-health, Capes had to stop them halfway through.

Newman took the initiative and booked the Birmingham Corn Exchange for a series of public lectures. He decided to make their tone popular and provide cheap off-prints to those who attended. These lectures were his Lectures on the Present Position of Catholics in England [45]and they were delivered weekly, beginning on 30 June and finishing on 1 September 1851.

In total there were nine lectures:

1. Protestant view of the Catholic Church
2. Tradition the sustaining power of the Protestant view
3. Fable the basis of the Protestant view
4. True testimony insufficient for the Protestant view
5. Logical inconsistency of the Protestant view
6. Prejudice the life of the Protestant view
7. Assumed principles of the intellectual ground of the Protestant view
8. Ignorance concerning Catholics the protection of the Protestant view
9. Duties of Catholics towards the Protestant view

which form the nine chapters of the published book. Following the first edition, a number of paragraphs were removed following the Achilli trial as "they were decided by a jury to constitute a libel, June 24, 1852."[66]

Andrew Nash describes the Lectures as "an analysis of this [anti-Catholic] ideology, satirising it, demonstrating the false traditions on which it was based and advising Catholics how they should respond to it. They were the first of their kind in English literature."[67]

John Wolffe assesses the Lectures as:

an interesting treatment of the problem of anti-Catholicism from an observer whose partisan commitment did not cause him to slide into mere polemic and who had the advantage of viewing the religious battlefield from both sides of the tortured no man's land of Littlemore.[68]

The response to the Lectures was split between Catholics and Protestants. Generally, Catholics greeted them with enthusiasm. A review in The Rambler, a Catholic periodical, saw them as "furnishing a key to the whole mystery of anti-Catholic hostility and as shewing the special point of attack upon which our controversial energies should be concentrated."[69] However, some Catholic theologians, principally John Gillow, president of Ushaw College, perceived Newman's language as ascribing too much to the role of the laity. Gillow accused Newman of giving the impression that the church's infallibility resides in a partnership between the hierarchy and the faithful, rather than falling exclusively in the teaching office of the church, a concept described by Pope Pius IX as the "ordinary magisterium" of the church.[70] The Protestant response was less positive. Archdeacon Julius Hare said that Newman "is determined to say whatever he chooses, in despite of facts and reason".[71]

Wilfrid Ward, Newman's first biographer, describes the Lectures as follows:

We have the very curious spectacle of a grave religious apologist giving rein for the first time at the age of fifty to a sense of rollicking fun and gifts of humorous writing, which if expended on other subjects would naturally have adorned the pages of Thackeray's Punch.[72]

Ian Ker has raised the profile of Newman's satire.[73] Ker notes that Newman's imagery has a "savage, Swiftian flavour" and can be "grotesque in the Dickens manner".[74]

Newman himself described the Lectures as his "best written book".[75]

Caricature of Newman by "Spy", published in Vanity Fair in 1877

One of the features of English anti-Catholicism was the holding of public meetings at which ex-Catholics, including former priests, denounced their prior beliefs and gave detailed accounts of the horrors of Catholic life. Giacinto Achilli (1803–1860), an ex-Dominican friar, was one such speaker.

In 1833 Achilli, author of Dealings with the inquisition: or, Papal Rome, her priests, and her Jesuits... (1851), had been made Master of Sacred Theology at the College of St. Thomas, the future Pontifical University of Saint Thomas Aquinas, Angelicum.[76]

Nash describes Achilli's journey to England thus:

[Achilli] had been imprisoned (in a monastery) by the Inquisition for heresy, he claimed, but actually for a series of sexual offences against under-age young women. He had been "rescued" from the Inquisition by a group of English ultra-Protestants as a hero six months before the Papal Aggression crisis broke. He was received by the Foreign Secretary, Lord Palmerston, greeted at a public meeting at Exeter Hall with a specially written hymn, "Hail Roman prisoner, Hail" and given a chapel in London. His Dealings with the Inquisition was a best seller. In his public lectures, sponsored by the Evangelical Alliance, he professed to the errors of Catholicism and to be a sincere Protestant, and his exciting account of the cruelties of the Inquisition made him a credible and popular anti-Catholic speaker.[77]

In July 1850, Wiseman wrote a detailed exposé of him in The Dublin Review which listed all of his offences. Newman therefore assumed, after seeking legal advice, that he would be able to repeat the facts in his fifth lecture in his Lectures on the Present Position of Catholics in England.

In these lectures, Newman denounced various anti-Catholic utterances. These included those of Maria Monk, the allegation of cells under his own Oratory on Hagley Road, Birmingham and those of Giacinto Achilli. Newman emphasises the importance of responding to Achilli:

For how, Brothers of the Oratory, can we possibly believe a man like this [Achilli], in what he says about persons and facts, and conversations, and events, when he is of the stamp of Maria Monk, of Jeffreys, and of Teodore, and of others who have had their hour, and then been dropped by the indignation or the shame of mankind.[78]

The section of the lecture that was decided by jury to constitute a libel was:

I have been a Catholic and an infidel; I have been a Roman priest and a hypocrite; I have been a profligate under a cowl. I am that Father Achilli, who as early as 1826, was deprived of my faculty to lecture, for an offence which my superiors did their best to conceal; and who in 1827 had already earned the reputation of a scandalous friar. I am that Achilli, who in the diocese of Viterbo in February, 1831, robbed of her honour a young woman of eighteen; who in September 1833, was found guilty of a second such crime, in the case of a person of twenty-eight; and who perpetrated a third in July, 1834, in the case of another aged twenty-four.[79] I am he, who afterwards was found guilty of sins, similar or worse, in other towns of the neighbourhood. I am that son of St. Dominic who is known to have repeated the offence at Capua, in 1834 or 1835; and at Naples again, in 1840, in the case of a child of fi[f]teen. I am he who chose the sacristy of the church for one of these crimes, and Good Friday for another. Look on me, ye mothers of England, a confessor against Popery, for ye 'ne'er may look upon my like again.' I am that veritable priest, who, after all this, began to speak against, not only the Catholic faith, but the moral law, and perverted others by my teaching. I am the Cavaliere Achilli, who then went to Corfu, made the wife of a tailor faithless to her husband, and lived publicly and travelled about with the wife of a chorus-singer. I am that Professor of the Protestant College at Malta, who with two others was dismissed from my post for offences which the authorities cannot get themselves to describe. And now attend to me, such as I am, and you shall see what you shall see about the barbarity and profligacy of the Inquisitors of Rome.

You speak truly, O Achilli, and we cannot answer you a word. You are a Priest; you have been a Friar; you are, it is undeniable, the scandal of Catholicism, and the palmary argument of Protestants, by your extraordinary depravity. You have been, it is true, a profligate, an unbeliever, and a hypocrite. Not many years passed of your conventual life, and you were never in the choir, always in private houses, so that the laity observed you. You were deprived of your professorship, we own it; you were prohibited from preaching and hearing confessions; you were obliged to give hush-money to the father of one of your victims, as we learned from an official document of the Neapolitan Police to be 'known for habitual incontinency;' your name came before the civil tribunal at Corfu for your crime of adultery. You have put the crown on your offences, by as long as you could, denying them all; you have professed to seek after truth, when you were ravening after sin.[80]

The libel charge was officially laid against Newman in November. Under English law, Newman needed to prove every single charge he had made against Achilli. Newman requested the documents that Wiseman had used for his article in the Dublin Review but he had mislaid them. He eventually found them but it was too late to prevent the trial.

Newman and his defence committee needed to locate the victims and return them to England. A number of the victims were found and Maria Giberne, a friend of Newman, went to Italy to return with them to England. Achilli, on hearing that witnesses were being brought, arranged for the trial to be delayed. This put Newman under great strain as he had been invited to be the founding rector of the proposed Catholic University in Dublin and was composing and delivering the lectures that would become The Idea of a University.

On 21 June 1852, the libel trial started and lasted three days.[81] Despite the evidence of the victims and witnesses, Achilli denied that any of it had happened; the jury believed him and found Newman guilty of libel. The injustice of the verdict was widely recognised:

a great blow has been given to the administration of justice in this country, and Roman Catholics will have henceforth only too good reason for asserting that there is no justice for them in matters tending to rouse the Protestant feelings of judges and juries.[82]

A second trial was not granted and sentencing was postponed. When sentencing occurred, Newman did not get the prison sentence expected but got a fine of £100 and a long lecture from Judge John Taylor Coleridge about his moral deterioration since he had become a Catholic. Coleridge later wrote to Keble:

It is a very painful matter for us who must hail this libel as false, believing it is in great part true—or at least that it may be.[83]

The fine was paid on the spot and while his expenses as defendant amounted to about £14,000, they were paid out of a fund organised by this defence committee to which Catholics at home and abroad had contributed; there was £2,000 left over which was spent on the purchase of a small property in Rednal, on the Lickey Hills, with a chapel and cemetery, where Newman was eventually buried.[45]

Achilli, despite his victory, was discredited. Newman removed the libellous section of the fifth lecture and replaced them by the inscription:

De illis quae sequebantur / posterorum judicium sit – About those things which had followed / let posterity be the judge.[84]

In 1854, at the request of the Irish Catholic bishops, Newman went to Dublin as rector of the newly established Catholic University of Ireland, now University College, Dublin. It was during this time that he founded the Literary and Historical Society. After four years, he retired. He published a volume of lectures entitled The Idea of a University, which explained his philosophy of education.[45]

Bust of Newman, by T. Westmacott, 1841

Newman believed in a middle way between free thinking and moral authority—one that would respect the rights of knowledge as well as the rights of revelation.[14] His purpose was to build a Catholic university, in a world where the major Catholic universities on the European continent had recently been secularised, and most universities in the English-speaking world were Protestant. For a university to claim legitimacy in the larger world, it would have to support research and publication free from church censorship; however, for a university to be a safe place for the education of Catholic youth, it would have to be a place in which the teachings of the Catholic church were respected and promoted.[85]

The University ... has this object and this mission; it contemplates neither moral impression nor mechanical production; it professes to exercise the mind neither in art nor in duty; its function is intellectual culture; here it may leave its scholars, and it has done its work when it has done as much as this. It educates the intellect to reason well in all matters, to reach out towards truth, and to grasp it.[86]

This philosophy encountered opposition within the Catholic Church, at least in Ireland, as evidenced by the opinion of bishop Paul Cullen. In 1854 Cullen wrote a letter to the Vatican's Sacred Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith (now called the Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples), criticising Newman's liberal exercise of authority within the new university:

The discipline introduced is unsuitable, certainly to this country. The young men are allowed to go out at all hours, to smoke, etc., and there has not been any fixed time for study. All this makes it clear that Father Newman does not give enough attention to details.[87]

The university as envisaged by Newman encountered too much opposition to prosper. However, his book did have a wide influence.[88]

In 1858, Newman projected a branch house of the Oratory at Oxford; but this project was opposed by Father (later Cardinal) Henry Edward Manning, another influential convert from Anglicanism, and others. It was thought that the creation of a Catholic body within the heart of Oxford was likely to induce Catholics to send their sons to that university, rather than to newly formed Catholic universities. The scheme was abandoned.[45] When Catholics did begin to attend Oxford from the 1860s onwards, a Catholic club was formed and, in 1888, it was renamed the Oxford University Newman Society in recognition of Newman's efforts on behalf of Catholicism in that university city. The Oxford Oratory was eventually founded over 100 years later in 1993.[89]

In 1859, Newman established, in connection with the Birmingham Oratory, a school for the education of the sons of gentlemen along lines similar to those of English public schools.[45] The Oratory School flourished as a boys' boarding school, and was one of a number which were to be dubbed "The Catholic Eton".

Newman's desk in the Birmingham Oratory

Newman had a special concern in the publisher Burns & Oates; the owner, James Burns, had published some of the Tractarians, and Burns had himself converted to Catholicism in 1847. Newman published several books with the company, effectively saving it. There is even a story that Newman's novel Loss and Gain was written specifically to assist Burns.

In 1863, in a response to Thomas William Allies, while agreeing that slavery was bad, Newman would not publicly condemn it as "intrinsically evil" on the grounds that it had been tolerated by St Paul—thus asserting that slavery is "a condition of life ordained by God in the same sense that other conditions of life are".[90]

Newman and Henry Edward Manning both became significant figures in the late 19th-century Catholic Church in England: both were Anglican converts and both were elevated to the dignity of cardinal. In spite of these similarities, in fact there was a lack of sympathy between the two men who were different in character and experience, and they clashed on a number of issues, in particular the foundation of an Oratory in Oxford. On theological issues, Newman had reservations about the declaration of papal infallibility (Manning favoured the formal declaration of the doctrine).

George W. E. Russell recorded that:

When Newman died there appeared in a monthly magazine a series of very unflattering sketches by one who had lived under his roof. I ventured to ask Cardinal Manning if he had seen these sketches. He replied that he had and thought them very shocking; the writer must have a very unenviable mind, &c., and then, having thus sacrificed to propriety, after a moment's pause he added: "But if you ask me if they are like poor Newman, I am bound to say—a photograph."[91]

In 1878, Newman's old college elected him an honorary fellow, and he revisited Oxford after an interval of thirty-two years, on the same day Pope Pius IX died. Pius had mistrusted Newman but his successor, Pope Leo XIII, was encouraged by the Duke of Norfolk and other English Catholic laymen to make Newman a cardinal, despite the fact that he was neither a bishop nor resident in Rome.[101] Cardinal Manning seems not to have been interested in having Newman become a cardinal, and remained silent when the Pope asked him about it. Ullathorne, as Newman's immediate superior, sent word to Pope Leo that he would welcome the honour. The offer was made by Rome in February 1879. Newman accepted the gesture as a vindication of his work, but made two requests: that he not be consecrated a bishop on receiving the cardinalate, as was usual at that time; and that he might remain in Birmingham.[101]

Newman was elevated to the rank of cardinal in the consistory of 12 May 1879 by Pope Leo XIII, who assigned him the Deaconry of San Giorgio al Velabro. While in Rome, Newman insisted on the lifelong consistency of his opposition to "liberalism in religion"; he argued it would lead to complete relativism.[101][102]

Newman in May 1890

After an illness, Newman returned to England and lived at the oratory until his death, making occasional visits to London and chiefly to his old friend R. W. Church, now Dean of St Paul's. As a cardinal, Newman published nothing beyond a preface to a work by Arthur Wollaston Hutton on the Anglican ministry (1879) and an article, "On the Inspiration of Scripture", in The Nineteenth Century (February 1884).[101] In 1880, Newman confessed to an "extreme joy" that conservative Benjamin Disraeli was no longer in power, and expressed the hope that Disraeli would be gone permanently.[103]

From the latter half of 1886, Newman's health began to fail. He celebrated Mass for the last time on Christmas Day in 1889. On 11 August 1890[14] he died of pneumonia at the Birmingham Oratory. Eight days later his body was buried alongside Ambrose St. John in the cemetery at Rednal Hill, Birmingham, at the country house of the oratory. At the time of his death he had been Protodeacon of the Holy Roman Church.

In accordance with his express wishes, Newman was buried in the grave of his lifelong friend Ambrose St. John.[14] The pall over the coffin bore the motto that Newman adopted for use as a cardinal, Cor ad cor loquitur ("Heart speaks to heart"),[104] which William Barry, writing in the Catholic Encyclopedia (1913), traces to Francis de Sales and sees as revealing the secret of Newman's "eloquence, unaffected, graceful, tender, and penetrating".[14] Ambrose St. John had become a Roman Catholic at around the same time as Newman, and the two men have a joint memorial stone inscribed with the motto Newman had chosen, Ex umbris et imaginibus in veritatem ("Out of shadows and phantasms into the truth"),[105] which Barry traces to Plato's allegory of the cave.[14]

On 27 February 1891, Newman's estate was probated at £4,206.

Newman's grave was opened on 2 October 2008, with the intention of moving any remains to a tomb inside Birmingham Oratory for their more convenient veneration as relics[35] during Newman's consideration for sainthood; however, his wooden coffin was found to have disintegrated and no bones were found. A representative of the Fathers of the Birmingham Oratory alleged that this was because the coffin was wooden and the burial took place at a damp site.[106] Contemporary sources show that the coffin was covered with a softer type of soil than the clay marl of the grave site.[107] Forensic expert John Hunter, from the University of Birmingham, tested soil samples from near the grave and said that total disappearance of a body was unlikely over that timescale. He said that extreme conditions which could remove bone would also have removed the coffin handles, which were extant.[108]

Newman's celibacy, which he embraced at the age of 15,[14] also contributed to negative representations of his character,[130] laying him open to what he called "slurs".[131] To exponents of Muscular Christianity such as Charles Kingsley, celibacy was synonymous with unmanliness. Kingsley, who interpreted the Biblical story of Adam and Eve as expressing a "binary law of man's being; the want of a complementum, a 'help meet', without whom it is not good for him to be",[132] feared and hated vowed sexual abstinence, considering it, in Laura Fasick's words, "a distinct and separate perversion".[133] The charge of effeminacy was aimed not just at Newman but at Tractarians and Roman Catholics in general. "In all that school", wrote Kingsley in 1851, "there is an element of foppery—even in dress and manner; a fastidious, maundering, die-away effeminacy, which is mistaken for purity and refinement".[134] John Cornwell comments that "the notion of Newman's effeminacy tells us more about the reaction of others to him at the time than [about] any tendency in his own nature".[135]

To many members of the Oxford Movement, Newman included, it was Kingsley's ideal of domesticity that seemed unmanly. As R. W. Church put it, "To shrink from [celibacy] was a mark of want of strength or intelligence, of an unmanly preference for English home life, of insensibility to the generous devotion and purity of the saints".[136] Defending his decision to remain single, Charles Reding, the hero of Newman's novel Loss and Gain, argues that "surely the idea of an Apostle, unmarried, pure, in fast and nakedness, and at length a martyr, is a higher idea than that of one of the old Israelites sitting under his vine and fig-tree, full of temporal goods, and surrounded by sons and grandsons?"[137] James Eli Adams remarks that if manliness is equated with physical and psychological toughness, then perhaps "manhood cannot be sustained within domesticity, since the ideal is incompatible with ease".[138] A "common antagonism to domesticity" links "Tractarian discipline to Carlylean heroism".[128]

Ambrose St. John (left) and John Henry Newman

Although Newman's deepest relationships were with men, he had many affectionate friendships with women.[139] One of the most important was with Maria Giberne, who knew him in his youth and followed him into the Catholic Church. She was a noted beauty, who at age fifty was described by one admirer as "the handsomest woman I ever saw in my life".[140] A gifted amateur artist, she painted many portraits of Newman at various periods, as well as several of the pictures hanging in the Birmingham Oratory. Newman had a photographic portrait of her in his room[141] and was still corresponding with her into their eighties. Emily Bowles, who first met Newman at Littlemore, was the recipient of some of his most outspoken letters on what he felt to be the mistaken course of the extreme infallibilists and his reasons for not "speaking out" as many begged him to do.[142] When she visited Newman at the Birmingham Oratory in 1861, she was welcomed by him "as only he can welcome"; she would never forget "the brightness that lit up his worn face as he received me at the door, carrying in several packages himself".[143]

Newman also experienced intense male friendships, the first with Richard Hurrell Froude (1803–1836), the longest with Ambrose St John (1815–1875), who shared communitarian life with Newman for 32 years starting in 1843 (when St John was 28).[144] Newman wrote after St John's death: "I have ever thought no bereavement was equal to that of a husband's or a wife's, but I feel it difficult to believe that any can be greater, or any one's sorrow greater, than mine".[145] He directed that he be buried in the same grave as St. John: "I wish, with all my heart, to be buried in Fr Ambrose St John's grave—and I give this as my last, my imperative will".[146]

Newman spelt out his theology of friendship in a sermon he preached on the Feast of St John the Evangelist, traditionally thought to be the same person as the disciple John, "whom Jesus loved". In the sermon, Newman said: "There have been men before now, who have supposed Christian love was so diffuse as not to admit of concentration upon individuals; so that we ought to love all men equally. ...Now I shall maintain here, in opposition to such notions of Christian love, and with our Saviour's pattern before me, that the best preparation for loving the world at large, and loving it duly and wisely, is to cultivate our intimate friendship and affection towards those who are immediately about us".[147] For Newman, friendship is an intimation of a greater love, a foretaste of heaven. In friendship, two intimate friends gain a glimpse of the life that awaits them in God.[148] Juan R. Vélez writes that someday Newman "may well earn a new title, that of Doctor amicitiae: Doctor of the Church on Friendship. His biography is a treatise on the human and supernatural virtues that make up friendship".[149]

David Hilliard characterises Geoffrey Faber's description of Newman, in his 1933 book Oxford Apostles, as a "portrait of Newman as a sublimated homosexual (though the word itself was not used)".[150] On Newman's relations with Hurrell Froude, Faber wrote: "Of all his friends Froude filled the deepest place in his heart, and I'm not the first to point out that his occasional notions of marrying definitely ceased with the beginning of his real intimacy with Froude".[151] However, while Faber's theory has had considerable popular influence, scholars of the Oxford Movement tend either to dismiss it entirely or to view it with great scepticism,[152] with even scholars specifically concerned with same-sex desire hesitating to endorse it.[153]

Ellis Hanson, for instance, writes that Newman and Froude clearly "presented a challenge to Victorian gender norms", but "Faber's reading of Newman's sexlessness[154] and Hurrell Froude's guilt[155] as evidence of homosexuality" seems "strained".[156] When John Campbell Shairp combines masculine and feminine imagery in his highly poetic description of Newman's preaching style at Oxford in the early 1840s, Frederick S. Roden is put in mind of "the late Victorian definition of a male invert, the homosexual: his (Newman's) homiletics suggest a woman's soul in a man's body".[157] Roden, however, does not argue that Newman was homosexual, seeing him rather—particularly in his professed celibacy[158]—as a "cultural dissident" or "queer". Roden uses the term "queer" in a very general sense "to include any dissonant behaviours, discourses or claimed identities" in relation to Victorian norms.[159] In this sense, "Victorian Roman and Anglo-Catholicism were culturally queer".[160] In Newman's case, Roden writes, "homoaffectivity" (found in heterosexuals and homosexuals alike)[161] "is contained in friendships, in relationships that are not overtly sexual".[162]

In a September 2010 television documentary, The Trouble with the Pope,[163] Peter Tatchell discussed Newman's underlying sexuality, citing his close friendship with Ambrose St John and entries in Newman's diaries describing their intense love for each other.[164][165][166] Alan Bray, however, in his 2003 book The Friend,[167] saw the bond between the two men as "entirely spiritual",[168] noting that Newman, when speaking of St John, echoes the language of John's gospel.[148] Shortly after St John's death, Bray adds, Newman recorded "a conversation between them before St John lost his speech in those final days. He expressed his hope, Newman wrote, that during his whole priestly life he had not committed one mortal sin. For men of their time and culture that statement is definitive. ... Newman's burial with Ambrose St John cannot be detached from his understanding of the place of friendship in Christian belief or its long history". Bray cites numerous examples of friends being buried together.[168] Newman's burial with St John was not unusual at the time and did not draw contemporary comment.[169]

David Hilliard writes that relationships such as Newman's with Froude and St John "were not regarded by contemporaries as unnatural. ... Nor is it possible, on the basis of passionate words uttered by mid-Victorians, to make a clear distinction between male affection and homosexual feeling. Theirs was a generation prepared to accept romantic friendships between men simply as friendships without sexual significance. Only with the emergence in the late nineteenth century of the doctrine of the stiff upper lip and the concept of homosexuality as an identifiable condition, did open expressions of love between men become suspect and regarded in a new light as morally undesirable".[170] Men born in the first decades of the nineteenth century had a capacity, which did not survive into later generations, for intense male friendships. The friendship of Alfred Tennyson and Arthur Hallam, immortalised in In Memoriam A.H.H., is a famous example. Less well-known is that of Charles Kingsley and his closest friend at Cambridge, Charles Mansfield.[171]

When Ian Ker reissued his biography of Newman in 2009, he added an afterword[172] in which he put forward evidence that Newman was a heterosexual. He cited journal entries from December 1816 in which the 15-year-old Newman prayed to be preserved from the temptations awaiting him when he returned from boarding school and met girls at Christmas dances and parties.[173] As an adult, Newman wrote about the deep pain of the "sacrifice" of the life of celibacy. Ker comments: "The only 'sacrifice' that he could possibly be referring to was that of marriage. And he readily acknowledges that from time to time he continued to feel the natural attraction for marriage that any heterosexual man would."[174] In 1833, Newman wrote that, despite having "willingly" accepted the call to celibacy, he felt "not the less ... the need" of "the sort of interest [sympathy] which a wife takes and none but she—it is a woman's interest".[175][176]

Newman founded the independent school for boys Catholic University School, Dublin, and the Catholic University of Ireland which evolved into University College Dublin, a college of Ireland's largest university, the National University of Ireland, which has contributed significantly both intellectually and socially to Ireland.

A number of Newman Societies (or Newman Centers in the United States) in Newman's honour have been established throughout the world, in the mould of the Oxford University Newman Society. They provide pastoral services and ministries to Catholics at non-Catholic universities; at various times this type of "campus ministry" (the distinction and definition being flexible) has been known to Catholics as the Newman Apostolate or "Newman movement". Additionally, colleges have been named for him in Birmingham, England; Melbourne, Australia; Edmonton, Canada; Thodupuzha, India, and Wichita, United States.

Newman's Dublin lecture series The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated is thought to have become "the basis of a characteristic British belief that education should aim at producing generalists rather than narrow specialists, and that non-vocational subjects—in arts or pure science—could train the mind in ways applicable to a wide range of jobs".[177]

The general rule among Roman Catholics is to celebrate canonised or beatified persons on the date of their dies natalis, the day on which they died and are considered born into heaven.[186] However, Newman's dies natalis is 11 August, the same day as the obligatory memorial of Saint Claire of Assisi in the General Roman Calendar which would take precedence. Thus, once Newman was beatified, the Congregation of the Oratory and the Catholic Bishops' Conference of England and Wales opted to place Newman's optional memorial on 9 October, the date of his conversion to Catholicism.[187][188] The reason that 9 October was chosen is because "it falls at the beginning of the University year; an area in which Newman had a particular interest."[189]

Even though Newman has now been canonised, it has not yet been determined whether his memorial will or will not be placed on the General Roman Calendar or other particular calendars and the date that would be chosen for those celebrations.