SAINT JOHN HENRY CARDINAL NEWMAN (1801–90), Anglican Tractarian leader and later Roman Catholic Cardinal. He was brought up in the Church of England under Evangelical influence. He entered Trinity College, Oxford, in June 1817, became Fellow of Oriel in 1822, and was ordained and Anglican deacon in 1824. On Trinity Sunday, 29 May 1825, he was ordained an Anglican priest in Christ Church Cathedral by the Bishop of Oxford, Edward Legge. He became, at Pusey's suggestion, curate of St Clement's Church, Oxford. In 1825 he was appointed vice-principal of Alban Hall by R. Whately, and in 1828 vicar of St Mary’s, Oxford. In 1832–3 he toured Southern Europe and on returning became intimately associated with the Oxford Movement, in which he was the leading spirit.

 His sermons in St Mary’s, published as Parochial and Plain Sermons (1834–42), had a profound influence on the religious life not only of Oxford but of the whole country. Their spirituality was based on a systematic study of the Fathers which bore fruit in The Arians of the Fourth Century (1833), whereas the Tracts for the Times (1833–41), 27 of which came from his pen, were popular statements of his religious position. Directed ‘against Popery and Dissent’, they defended his thesis of the ‘via media’, i.e. the belief that the Church of England held an intermediate position, represented by the patristic tradition, as against modern Romanism on the one hand and modern Protestantism on the other. This belief received developed expression in his Lectures on the Prophetical Office of the Church (1837) and in his Lectures on Justification (1838). In the famous Tract No. 90 (1841) he advocated the interpretation of the Thirty-Nine Articles in a sense generally congruous with the decrees of Trent. The Tract, which caused a violent controversy, was condemned by the Hebdomadal Board, and R. Bagot, Bp. of Oxford, imposed silence on its author.

Meanwhile, from 1839 onwards, Newman began to have doubts about the claims of the Anglican Church, and from 1841 onwards he gradually gave up his position in Oxford, living from 1842 at the neighbouring village of Littlemore, which was at that date part of the ecclesiastical parish of St Mary’s. Here he set up a semi-monastic establishment and, during the next years, lived in retirement with a few friends. He resigned the incumbency of St Mary’s on 18 Sept. 1843, preaching a few days later a celebrated sermon in Littlemore church on ‘The Parting of Friends’.

On 9 Oct. 1845 he was received into the RC Church. Almost immediately afterwards he issued his Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine in defence of his change of allegiance and a very brief series of Retractions of Anti-Catholic Statements. Having been ordained in Rome, he established the Oratorians at Birmingham in 1849 and was in Ireland as rector of the short-lived RC university in Dublin from 1854 to 1858.

On his return to England he became for a few months editor of the Rambler, in which he published a controversial article ‘On Consulting the Faithful in Matters of Doctrine’, which was delated to Rome, His declared opposition to the retention of the Pope’s Temporal Power was the occasion of his serious breach with his fellow-convert, H. E. Manning. In 1864 a controversy with C. Kingsley resulted in his Apologia pro vita sua, which, by its combination of frankness and delicacy, won him the sympathies of Roman Catholics and others alike. In the next year he wrote The Dream of Gerontius depicting the journey of the soul to God at the hour of death, an almost Dantesque poem inspired by the Requiem Offices. In 1870 he published A Grammar of Assent, the work which contains much of his ripest thought. It is especially remarkable for its differentiation between real and notional assent, its analysis of the function of the conscience in our knowledge of God and of the role of the ‘illative sense’, i.e. the faculty of judging from given facts by processes outside the limits of strict logic, in reaching religious certitude. Although Newman never doubted Papal Infallibility, he opposed the mounting Ultramontanist pressure to obtain a conciliar definition in 1870. In his Letter to the Duke of Norfolk (1875) he supplied what has generally been acclaimed a masterly exposition of the implications of the Infallibility decree. In 1877 he was elected an Honorary Fellow of Trinity College, and two years later Leo XIII made him Cardinal-Deacon of St George in Velabro.

Newman’s thought was nourished by the Fathers rather than by the Schoolmen, and his main contribution to the thought of his age lay much more in the fields of psychological analysis and acute moral perception than in matters strictly theological. His fruitful use of the idea of development, in its application to the growth of Christian doctrine, and his profound insight into the nature and motives of religious faith, place him in the first rank of modern Christian thinkers. His ideals for Christian religious education were set forth in his Idea of a University (1852).Though unsuccessful in most of his undertakings in the RC Church during his lifetime, his genius has come to be more and more recognized after his death, and much of his teaching on liberty of conscience, the nature of biblical inspiration, and the role of the episcopate in the magisterium of the Church was to find official expression in the Second Vatican Council. Proceedings for Newman’s canonization were initiated in 1958; he was beatified in 2010 by Pope Benedict XVI and canonized in 2019 by Pope Francis.

Many of Newman’s works have been repub. in crit. edns. The most notable are: the Apologia, ed. M. J. Svaglic (Oxford, 1967), The Grammar of Assent, ed. I. T. Ker (ibid., 1985); and The Idea of a University, ed. id. (ibid., 1976); Detailed aspects of Newman’s theology in The Theological Papers of John Henry Newman on Faith and Certainty, ed. H. M. de Achaval, SJ, and J. D. Holmes (Oxford, 1976); The Theological Papers of John henry Newman on Biblical Inspiration and on Infallibility, ed. J. D. Holmes (ibid., 1979). Letters and Diaries, ed. C. S. Dessain, Cong. Orat., and others (1961 ff. [vols. 11–22, London, 1961–72; other vols., Oxford, 1973 ff.]); Sermons, ed. P. Murray, OSB (Oxford, 1991 ff). W. Wand, The Life of John Henry Newman (2 vols., 1912); I. [T.] Ker, John Henry Newman: A Biography (Oxford, 1988). Other biographical works include H. *, Newman: Essai de biographie psychologique ([1906]; Eng. tr. 1907); M. ward, Young Mr. Newman (1948); C. S. Dessain, Cong. Orat., John Henry Newman (1966; 2nd edn., 1971); H. [C.] Graef, God and Myself: The Spirituality of John Henry Newman (1967). [W.] O. Chadwick, From Bossuet to Newman: The Idea of Doctrinal Development (Cambridge, 1957), passim; N. Lash, Newman on Development (1975); R. C. Selby, The Principle of Reserve in the Writings of John Henry Cardinal Newman (Oxford, 1975); P. Minser, Papacy and Development: Newman and the Primacy of the Pope (Studies in the History of Christian Thought, 15; Leiden, 1976). F.McGrath, SJ, Newman’s University: Idea and Reality (1951); A. D. Culler, The Imperial Intellect: A study of Newman’s Educational Ideal (New Haven, Conn., and London, 1955). T. Kenny, The Political Thought of John Henry Newman (1957). J. Coulson, Newman and the Common Tradition: A Study in the Language of Church and Society (Oxford, 1970). S. Gilley, Newman and his Age (1990). D. [H.]Newsome, The Convert Cardinals: John Henry Newman and Henry Edward Manning (1993). F. M. Turner, John Henry Newman: The Challenge to Evangelical Religion (New Have and London [2002]).

The New York Review of Books, “A Hero of the Church”, Eamon Duffy, December 23, 2010

The New York Review of Books, “A Hero of the Church”, review of Peter Cornwall, Newman’s Unquiet Grave: The Reluctant Saint, by Eamon Duffy, December 23, 2010.

[...] Newman was, by nineteenth-century Catholic standards, a deeply unconventional theologian. Soaked in the writings of the Early Church Fathers, he disliked the rigidly scholastic cast of mind that cramped the Catholic theology of his day. He was one of the first theologians to grasp the historical contingency of all theological formulations. Accordingly, he resisted doctrinaire demands for unquestioning obedience to contemporary Church formulae as if they were timeless truths. He was an ardent defender of the legitimate autonomy of the theologian and of the dignity of the laity as custodians of the faith of the Church. He was scathingly critical of the authoritarian papacy of Pope Pius IX (Pio Nono), who held the office between 1846 and 1878, and he opposed the definition of papal infallibility in 1870 as an unnecessary and inappropriate burden on consciences. “We have come to a climax of tyranny,” he wrote. “It is not good for a Pope to live 20 years.... He becomes a god, [and] has no one to contradict him.”

The appetite of the pro-papal “Ultramontane” party for new dogmatic definitions seemed to Newman the sign of a lack of intellectual integrity, “the act of a man who will believe anything because he believes nothing, and is ready to profess whatever his ecclesiastical, that is his political, party requires of him.” Such credulity flowed from intellectual shallowness, not true faith: “A German who hesitates may have more of the real spirit of faith than an Italian who swallows.”

The First Vatican Council, in 1878, was the apotheosis of much that Newman deplored in the Catholicism of his day. By contrast, it has become a theological truism that the Second Vatican Council, summoned in 1962 by John XXIII, with its reforming impulses, its outreach to other churches and faith traditions, its emphasis on the role of the laity, and its move away from papal and clerical authoritarianism, was “Newman’s Council,” the moment when many of the ideas he first championed became the basis for a radical reimagining of what it was to be Catholic. The Vatican, however, is currently backing a campaign to downplay claims that the council marked a decisive break with the Church’s recent past, and Pope Benedict XVI has condemned such claims as proceeding from a “hermeneutic of discontinuity and rupture.” Cornwell asks, therefore, whether the raising of Newman to the altars of the Church represents not the validation of his true intellectual legacy but an attempt to douse the incendiary potential of his ideas with buckets of holy water, “the taming and enfeebling of his legacy by the resisters of Vatican II.”

IT is certainly true that Newman was a man often intellectually at odds with his Church, indeed, with both his churches. His career straddled almost the whole nineteenth century, and what were then two different worlds, Protestant and Catholic. In both, he was a force for unsettlement.

We think of him as a Victorian, but like his younger contemporary Dickens, he was in fact a product of Regency England. Born in 1801, the son of a prosperous London banker, he could remember candles placed in windows to celebrate Nelson’s fatal victory at the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805. Educated at Great Ealing School and Oxford, he read the novels of Austen and Scott and the poems of Byron as they first appeared, and he had reached the pinnacle of his preeminence within the Church of England before the young Queen Victoria came to the throne in 1837.

A remarkably consistent thinker, to the end of his life Newman looked back on his conversion to evangelical Protestantism in 1816 as the saving of his soul. Yet as a fellow of Oriel, the most intellectually prestigious of the Oxford colleges, he outgrew his earlier Calvinism. 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.

Partly as an antidote to his own instinctive skepticism, Newman sought objective religious truth initially in a romanticized version of the Anglican High Church tradition, emphasizing the mystery of God, the beauty and necessity of personal holiness, and the centrality of the Church’s sacraments and teaching for salvation.

He was ordained as a priest in 1824, and in 1831 was appointed preacher to the university. Eloquent, learned, widely read, combining a beautiful voice with an unmatched mastery of words, by the early 1830s Newman had acquired a cult following in Oxford. Admiring undergraduates imitated even his eccentricities, like his habit of kneeling down abruptly as if his knees had given way.

The university authorities were alarmed at his growing influence, and changed college mealtimes so that undergraduates had to choose between hearing Newman preach and eating their dinners. In their hundreds, they chose the preaching. This was all the more remarkable since Newman’s message was both uncompromisingly austere and often deliberately provocative, as in his declaration that “it would be a gain to this country, were it vastly more suspicious, more bigoted, more gloomy, more fierce in its religion, than at present it shows itself to be.”

The role of provocateur came to him naturally, and Newman quickly established himself as the fieriest spirit of a determined group of like-minded High Church clergy in Oxford. Disgusted by the weakening of the national Church by political concessions to Dissenters and Roman Catholics, they claimed the religious loyalty of the nation, not now on the basis of the Church of England’s legal establishment, but on a new awareness of its “Apostolical descent” from the early Christians.

In 1833 Newman and his associates launched a series of polemical “Tracts for the Times,” designed to reeducate clergy and laity about the value of Catholic doctrines, sacraments, and rituals that until then most Protestants had associated with superstition and popery.

A single-minded campaigner, Newman was far from fastidious about his methods in promoting this “Tractarian” agenda. He ruthlessly ousted the editor of a genteel High Church periodical, the British Critic, and transformed it into the pugnacious mouthpiece of the new movement. He orchestrated a “campaign of denigration and protest against the “heretical” liberal theologian Renn Dickson Hampden, in an unsuccessful attempt to prevent his appointment as Regius Professor of Theology at Oxford in 1836. Such maneuverings disgusted religious liberals like Thomas Arnold, the famous reforming headmaster of Rugby School, who branded Newman and his followers as “the Oxford Malignants.” Ironically, Arnold’s own sons were to fall under Newman’s spell, and one of them would eventually follow him into the Catholic Church.

This “Oxford Movement” succeeded beyond its wildest expectations. In little over a generation it would transform the theology, preaching, worship, and even the architectural style of the Anglican Church. Tractarianism was to be the single most important influence in the shaping of the character of the modern Anglican communion. But by the early 1840s, Newman himself had lost confidence in it. His increasingly subtle attempts to interpret the foundation documents of the Church of England in ways compatible with Roman Catholic teaching provoked a hostile backlash both from the Anglican bishops and from older and more cautious High Churchmen.

Frustrated by the apparently impregnable Protestantism of their contemporaries, one by one Newman’s more headstrong disciples became Roman Catholics. Newman did what he could to stem the leakage, but was himself in an agony of indecision, increasingly convinced that Rome possessed the fullness of truth, yet unable to bring his loyalties and emotions into accord with his intellect. “Paper logic” was merely the trace of deeper and more mysterious movements of heart and mind. As he wrote later, recalling this long slow “death-bed” as an Anglican:

It is the concrete being that reasons; pass a number of years, and I find my mind in a new place; how? The whole man moves.... Great acts take time.

He resigned his university pulpit and retreated to Littlemore, a village outside Oxford where he had built a church. There he and a dwindling band of followers lived a quasi-monastic life of prayer, fasting, and reflection. In October 1845 Newman at last recognized where his own logic had led him, and was received into the Roman Catholic Church.

Both Newman’s attraction to Catholicism and his hesitation in embracing it sprang from a radical historicism. As an Anglican, he had subscribed to the notion that truth was unchanging. Christianity was a revealed religion, its doctrines descended to the present in an unbroken tradition from the Apostles. Nothing could count as Christian truth, unless the primitive Church had believed and taught it. The modern Church of Rome, therefore, could not claim to be the true Church, since so much about it-its elaborate worship, the dominant place of the Virgin Mary in its piety, the overweening authority of the pope-seemed alien or absent from the earliest Christianity: there were no rosary beads in third-century Carthage. Yet Newman’s reading in early Christian sources convinced him that to condemn Rome on these grounds would also be to outlaw much of the rest of mainstream Christianity. The doctrines of Incarnation and Trinity, accepted as fundamental by both Catholics and Protestants, were not to be found in their mature form in the early Church. If the central tenets of the faith could develop legitimately beyond their New Testament foundations, why not everything else?

To resolve this apparent contradiction between a religion of objectively revealed truth and the flux of Christian doctrines and practices, Newman wrote at Littlemore a theological masterpiece, the Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine (1845). Its central claim is that the concepts and intuitions that shape human history are dynamic, not inert. Great ideas interact with changing times and cultures, retaining their distinctive thrust and direction, yet adapting so as to preserve and develop that energy in different circumstances. Truth is a plant, evolving from a seed into the mature tree, not a baton passed unchanging from hand to hand. Ideas must unfold in the historical process before we can appropriate all that they contain. So beliefs evolve, but they do so to preserve their essence in the flux of history: they change, that is, in order to remain the same. “In a higher world it is otherwise; but here below to live is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often.”

Other nineteenth-century thinkers had anticipated aspects of this dynamic understanding of religious truth. But no one confronted its difficulties or explored its implications as fully as Newman, whose book offered a remarkable series of diagnostic tests by which to distinguish legitimate developments from corruptions of the truth. Not everything in his analysis has been found convincing, but the Essay was a landmark, legitimizing the notion of doctrinal development. Over the next century or so, it was to prove seminal for Catholic theology, as the Church increasingly sought to come to terms with its own historical contingency.

In the Catholic Church of the 1840s, however, Newman’s frank ideas were viewed with considerable suspicion. As the most famous clergyman in England, he was a prestigious trophy for the Pope. For a while after his reordination as a Catholic priest, Rome treated him as a celebrity. But the papacy was a beleaguered institution, its financial and political independence under threat from the movement for Italian unification, its ideological monopoly in European society everywhere challenged by the rise of often hostile democratic states. Pope Pius IX reacted by denouncing modern society and emphasizing the Church’s unchanging authority. In this atmosphere, Newman’s nuanced historicism came to look halfhearted at best, treacherous at worst. For almost twenty years after his conversion, frustration would attend all he attempted, and his position within the Catholic Church became increasingly uncomfortable.

An invitation from bishops of Ireland to create a Catholic university in Dublin elicited a sublime series of lectures on the nature of liberal education. The resulting book, The Idea of a University (1853), was hailed as a classic then and has remained a central text for educational theorists ever since, with its moral vision of the university as a place where the student apprehends the great outlines of knowledge, the principles on which it rests, the scale of its parts, its lights and its shades, its great points and its little, as he otherwise cannot apprehend them. Hence it is that his education is called “Liberal.” A habit of mind is formed which lasts through life, of which the attributes are, freedom, equitableness, calmness, moderation, and wisdom....

But the project itself foundered amid considerable bitterness, the casualty of the mismatch between Newman’s desire to create a blueprint for Christian education and the hardheaded pragmatism of the Irish bishops, intent on rebuilding a nation decimated by famine, and looking not for an idealized Catholic Oxford but an institute of practical education for an aspiring middle class.

Back in England, Newman yearned for a Catholic mission to the real Oxford. He bought land for a church and house there, but the bishops feared apostasies if Catholics once sampled the fleshpots of the Anglican establishment. Newman’s Oxford project was blocked, not least by his erstwhile friend and Tractarian colleague Henry Edward Manning, future cardinal, and now an implacably papalist Catholic zealot. Newman’s own orthodoxy became suspect. In an essay in the liberal Catholic journal The Rambler, he defended the notion that the laity were not passive recipients of clerical teaching, but themselves witnesses to and transmitters of Catholic truth. In Pio Nono’s church the only role of the laity was to listen and obey: to suggest otherwise was a charter for insubordination. Newman was accused of heresy, and there were abortive attempts to extract a recantation from what one papal adviser now called “the most dangerous man in England.”

Unsurprisingly, Newman, always prone to self-pity, felt increasingly isolated and abandoned. He realized that the influence he had exerted as an Anglican had melted away from the moment he had converted. He became conscious of the haggard lines that disappointment had etched into his face, and bitter that all his endeavors seemed to “crumble under my hands, as if one were making ropes of sand.” He was rescued in 1864 by a casually anti-Catholic journal article by the novelist Charles Kingsley, who remarked in passing that truth had never been considered a virtue by Catholic clergy, and that Newman in particular had proposed “cunning” as the weapon given to the Church “to withstand the brute male force of the wicked world.”

This unprovoked attack on his integrity led to Newman’s best-known book, his Apologia Pro Vita Sua, written for serial publication at breakneck speed, in just ten weeks. Years of brooding over his own religious journey proved ideal preparation for the writing of a religious autobiography that is also a triumphant self-vindication, one of the most persuasive portrayals of a mind and heart in movement, in English or any other language. Overnight, Newman’s embrace of an exotic and alien religion was made intelligible to Victorian readers. Catholics hailed a brilliant apologist who presented their unpopular religion in a new and sympathetic light. Anglicans remembered that this man had once transformed the established Church, as many thought, for the better. Newman had become an Eminent Victorian.

His fame gave him leverage-and a degree of immunity-within Pio Nono’s church, but did little to reconcile him to the direction that church was taking. Manning, now archbishop of Westminster, was deeply distrustful of what he saw as the compromised minimalism of Newman’s Catholicism, “always on the lower side ...the old Anglican, patristic, literary, Oxford tone transplanted into the Church.” The tide of events was with Manning. Newman watched with dismay the progress of papalism, and denounced the pressure for the definition of papal infallibility as the work of “an aggressive insolent faction.”

He mounted his own single-handed campaign to present another face of Catholicism. In a series of works ostensibly defending the Church against its critics, he subtly redrew the lines of contemporary debate and sketched what was to prove to be the future of Catholic theology.

Newman’s later writings were not confined to the internal affairs of the Church. In 1870, in the midst of the furor over papal infallibility, he published his most sustained philosophical work, the Grammar of Assent. It was a searching exploration of the nature and motives of religious belief, which had taken him twenty years to write; the distinguished Oxford philosopher Sir Anthony Kenny recently described it as the most significant contribution to epistemology between Descartes and Wittgenstein. In it, Newman’s hostility to “liberalism,” the rationalist reduction to mere “paper logic” of the processes by which we make life and death decisions, finds its most powerful expression. His subtle analysis of the sometimes untraceable routes by which we arrive at conviction, the “personal conquest of truth,” anticipates some of Wittgenstein’s most characteristic positions.

Pius IX died in 1878, and in the following year his successor, Leo XIII, signaled a new era by making Newman a cardinal [in 1879]. The maverick had been vindicated: as he himself declared, “the cloud is lifted from me for ever.”

Unquestionably the greatest Christian intelligence of his age, Newman’s thought has retained a relevance matched by that of few other Victorians. His centrality for modern Catholic theology was indicated by the theologian-Pope Benedict’s decision to beatify Newman himself (a ceremony normally delegated to cardinals or local bishops). If and when in due course he is canonized, Newman will undoubtedly be declared a “Doctor” or teacher of the Universal Church. John Cornwell argues that Newman’s appeal is wider still, and that his claim to our attention transcends mere ecclesiastical eminence or conventional piety, and lies rather in “his genius for creating new ways of imagining and writing about religion.” [...]

It’s long been my sense that people don't really read or reason their way into or out of the Church, though they often claim to.

The decisive factors are less rational, more experiential. For me, this is one of John Henry Newman's great themes. His Apologia pro Vita Sua took the form of autobiography because he could not explain his religious opinions without telling his whole life story.

Earlier, he had written a book, the Essay on Development, partly to see whether he could reason his way out of the Anglican Church and into the Catholic Church. The intellectual work he does here is very important, in making his conversion possible. But at the end of that book, he leaves his argument not quite complete, then tacks on a conclusion that says, “Time is short, eternity is long.”

This is his way of saying that at a certain point, you stop reasoning and take action. Even the most intellectual conversion is not reducible to reasons but is a matter of will, emotions, imagination—the things that compel action. As Newman wrote elsewhere, “Life is not long enough for a religion of inferences. … Life is for action.”

(1801–90)

1817 entered Trinity College, Oxford, in June

1822 Fellow of Oriel

1824 Anglican deacon

1825 Trinity Sunday, 29 May, ordained Anglican priest  in Christ Church Cathedral by the Bishop of Oxford, Edward Legge..Became, at Pusey's suggestion, curate of St Clement's Church, Oxford.

1825 appointed vice-principal of Alban Hall by R. Whately

1826 his brother Francis Newman became a fellow of Baliol

1828 vicar of St Mary’s, Oxford. Hawkins made Provost of Oriel

1830 or 32? relieved of right to tutor: controv. re. essentially priestly role of tutor (Wilberforce, Froude also removed; Hampden remained as tutor at Oriel)

1832–3 toured Southern Europe and on returning became intimately associated with the Oxford Movement, in which he was the leading spirit. (Hampden gives Bampton Lectures on original, early Christianity)

1833 The Arians of the Fourth Century

1833–41 Tracts for the Times

1834 Hampden made prof. of moral philosophy (over Newman)

1834–42 sermons in St Mary’s, published as Parochial and Plain Sermons

1836 Hampden made Regius Profesor of Divinity – despite Newman's Elucidations 

1839 onwards, doubts about the claims of the Anglican Church

1841 Tract No. 90 advocated the interpretation of the Thirty-Nine Articles in a sense generally congruous with the decrees of Trent. The Tract, which caused a violent controversy, was condemned by the Hebdomadal Board, and R. Bagot, Bp. of Oxford, imposed silence on its author.

1841 onwards gradually gave up position in Oxford

1842 Littlemore, – part of the ecclesiastical parish of St Mary’s. semi-monastic establishment, lived in retirement with a few friends.

1843 resigned incumbency of St Mary’s on 18 Sept., preached in Littlemore church on ‘The Parting of Friends’.

1845, 9 Oct. he was received into the RC Church. Almost immediately afterwards he issued his Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine and a very brief series of Retractions of Anti-Catholic Statements.

1846 ordained in Rome,

1847 returned to England an Oratorian

1849 established Oratorians in Birmingham and London (Faber, Knox)

1850 Catholic Hierarchy reestablished

1951  Nine Lectures on the Present Position of Catholics in England

1852 Libel trial - convicted and fined £100

1854–1858 in Ireland as rector of the short-lived RC university in Dublin

On his return to England he became for a few months editor of the Rambler, in which he published a controversial article ‘On Consulting the Faithful in Matters of Doctrine’, which was delated to Rome, His declared opposition to the retention of the Pope’s Temporal Power was the occasion of his serious breach with his fellow-convert, H. E. Manning.

1864 Apologia pro vita sua,

1865 The Dream of Gerontius

1870 A Grammar of Assent; also opposed Ultramontanist pressure on infallibility.

1875 Letter to the Duke of Norfolk on Infallibility decree.

1877 elected an Honorary Fellow of Trinity College,

1879 Leo XIII made him Cardinal-Deacon of St George in Velabro.

1890 died

TEXTS ON DYSINGER WEBSITE

PAROCHIAL and PLAIN SERMONS (While Anglican Vicar at St. Mary's in Oxford)

VOLUME 1 (.DOC)

VOLUME 4 (.DOC)

VOLUME 7 (.DOC)  (mental prayer)

SERMONS on VARIOUS OCCASIONS (While in Ireland) (.DOC)

This Webpage was created for a workshop held at Saint Andrew's Abbey, Valyermo, California in 1990....x....  ’ “”.