Last week, we arrived at the point in 1845 when Newman converted to Catholicism.  Shortly thereafter, he and his close friend, Ambrose St. John, traveled to Rome to train for the priesthood. 

St. John was to be Newman's constant companion until the former's death in 1875.  Indeed, when Newman himself died in 1890, he was buried, at his request, in the same grave.  This has led to speculation that the two men were sexually involved with each other; and, indeed, when the RCC decided to move Newman toward sainthood, they arranged for Newman to be exhumed and buried separately -- something that provoked the predictable and tiresome posturing of the professionally and permanently outraged Peter Tatchell, gay rights campaigner, and one-issue politician par excellence, who suddenly emerged as a brave  and selfless defender of the rights of dead Catholic dignitaries. A sad sign of our times, when male friendship must always be refracted through the twisted lens of our culture's obsession with sex.   Ironically, when the tomb was opened, Newman's body was not there, apparently already consumed by the soil. 

While at Rome, Newman drew up plans to establish a headquarters, or Oratory, for the Oratorians, in England.  The Oratorians are a Congregation (society) of Catholic priests and lay people which was founded in the sixteenth century by Phillip Neri.  They are more autonomous than most orders, and the choice was a good one for Newman, giving him the freedom to act with the independence that a man of his ability and creativity craved.  Newman eventually established his Oratory in Birmingham, one of the flagship cities of the Industrial Revolution.  The surrounding area of the West Midlands produced, in thee twentieth century, some of the greatest rock music of the 70s and early 80s; in the nineteenth century, Newman was the nearest thing there to a rock star, being as famous and as controversial as it came.

His career within the church was marked in public by a series of high profile controversies, though this has tended to mask his careful and loving attention to his parish work, which even extended to remaining at his post when the plague came to town.  Nevertheless, while he could be a loving parish priest, he was also an extraordinarily effective religious polemicist, of which the most famous example was his clash with Charles Kingsley.  Kingsley, an Anglican evangelical, is perhaps best remembered today for his novel, The Water Babies which was in part a thoroughgoing expose of the abuse of children in the Industrial Revolution.  In 1864, however, while  holding the Chair of History at Cambridge, Kingsley published a review of J. A. Froude's History of England (a work with strong anti-Catholic bias) and made the statement that Newman had declared that 'truth' was not a matter of great importance to Roman clergy. 

Newman took great offense at this, and so began a correspondence between himself and Kingsley which started in private but rapidly became a veritable pamphlet war in which it was soon very clear that Kingsley was completely out of his depth.  Indeed, I remember some thirty years ago watching one of Muhammad Ali's last fights on TV (whether against Larry Holmes or Trevor Berbick, I do not recall) and hearing it described as `like watching an autopsy on a living man.'    That is what it is like to read the exchange between Newman and Kingsley: all of my instinctive sympathies lie with Kingsley; but there comes a point at which the punishment becomes too unbearable to watch. 

One famous passage gives a flavour of the whole, and showcases Newman's characteristic wit and facility with language. Setting down the essence of the exchange in an imaginary dialogue, Newman writes:

"Mr Kingsley relaxes: `Do you know, I like your tone.  From your tone I rejoice, greatly rejoice, to be able to believe that you did not mean what you said.'  

I rejoin: `Mean it!  I maintain I never said it, whether as a Protestant or as a Catholic.'

Mr Kingsley replies: `I waive that point.'

I object: `Is it possible?  What?  waive the main question!  I either said it or I didn't.  You have made a monstrous charge against me; direct, distinct, public.  You are bound to prove it as directly, as distinctly, as publicly; - or to own you can't.'

`Well,' says Mr Kingsley, `if you are quite sure you did not say it, I'll take your word for it; I really will.'

My word!  I am dumb.  Somehow, I had thought that it was my word that happened to be on trial.  The word of a Professor of lying that he does not lie!

But Mr Kingsley reassures me: `We are both gentlemen,' he says; `I have done as much as one English gentleman can expect from another.'

I begin to see: he thought of me as a gentleman at the very time that he said I taught lying on a system......'

400 plus pages of that was more than enough to bury Kingsley. As I said, it's like watching an autopsy on a man who is still alive.

Most of the pamphlets by Newman in this exchange were later published under the rather pretentious title, Apologia Pro Vita Sua, but the work is far from stuffy and self-important.  In fact, it ranks just below Augustine's Confessions as one of the great works of religious self-analysis in the canon of Western literature.

Newman's later life was marked both by two significant events.  The first was the First Vatican Council, in 1870.  With the emergence of Italy as a nation state, key questions about the nature and extent of papal power were in the air, and the Council resolved these by defining the doctrine of Papal Infallibility.   Newman, unlike his contemporary, Cardinal Manning, was not entirely convinced of the wisdom of the decision; while he did hold to a form of such, his view was more modest than that which was ultimately defined as dogma.

The second event was his being made Cardinal in 1879.  At this time, he applied for, and was granted, a special dispensation not to have remove his residence to rome but to stay in Birmingham.     To anyone who knows Birmingham (and, for Americans, i think i can say with confidence that Birmingham, AL, is the only place in America that is just as pretty as the English original) such a decision might seem mad.  But it kept him near to his community and to his parish.

Newman died in 1890, having lived through most of a very turbulent British century.    The streets were apparently lined with ordinary folk with fond memories of the great intellectual who had also cared for them as people.

In the third and final post, I want to look at what Protestants can learn from this remarkable theologian.  We may regard him as fundamentally wrong-headed on a  host of issues; but the questions he addressed, and the manner in which eh addressed them, are most important and instructive.