After his beatification last week in Birmingham by Pope Benedict, I would like to reflect this week on the life of Cardinal John Henry Newman. I wanted to do this anyway, and so when I turned to this week’s readings, I was hoping there would be something in them which would provide me with a starting point for our reflection. Well, I was not disappointed. There it was, right at the start of the second reading. “As a man dedicated to God” Paul writes to Timothy, “...fight the good fight of the faith and win for yourself the eternal life to which you were called when you made your profession and spoke up for the truth in front of many witnesses.” These words could have been written about Newman himself and so I would like to begin by reminding you of some simple facts about his life.
He was born in London in 1801 and at the age of fifteen, after a profound religious conversion experience, he entered Trinity College, Oxford. Fifteen might seem very young to have such an experience, but the evidence suggests that our most powerful experiences of God do come when we are young. My own, for example, was at the age of eleven. And so, in passing, I invite you to remember any important experiences of God you yourself may have had as a child. Six years after his, however, in 1822, Newman, having got his degree, was elected a fellow of Oriel College, Oxford and in 1826, having been ordained an Anglican priest two years earlier, became a tutor there. As well as tutoring at the University, he worked, first as a curate and then as vicar of St Mary’s in Oxford, and when, after a dispute he resigned as a tutor in 1832, he continued his ministry at St Mary’s. His Sunday afternoon sermons were famous and students packed in to hear them. And in an age when our capacity to listen to anything serious for more than ten minutes has virtually disappeared, you might be interested to know that during those Anglican days Newmans’s sermons lasted about fifty minutes, although in later life, after he became a Catholic, he cut them down to thirty. My own, in case you are wondering, last between seven and eight.
And it was during this time in St Mary’s that Newman’s conversion to Catholicism began to happen. He was a leading figure in what was known as the Oxford Movement, and despite the fact that earlier in his life he had been very anti-catholic, his study of history and the Fathers of the early Church gradually led him to the conclusion that the one, true Church which he was searching for, existed, not in Anglicanism, but in Catholicism. And so in 1845 he was received into the Church and a year later was ordained a Catholic priest. His conversion caused great scandal at the time. His Anglican friends shunned him and yet he was never fully accepted by Catholics who were deeply suspicious of him. This led to years of painful isolation and it was only towards the end of his life that this particular suffering came to an end when Pope Leo XIII, in 1879, made him a Cardinal. He died in 1890 and we saw what happened last week in Birmingham. But what relevance does this man’s story have for us ? Well, I offer you just three of many reasons why he remains important today.
And the first is the importance of conscience, an idea very closely associated with Newman. He had a deep sense of the fact that God has a unique dream for each of us, that there was something God wanted him to do that nobody else could do, and he was prepared to do it. This meant being to true to himself, and he was prepared to go wherever that led him, even when it led him where, at another level of himself, he would rather not have gone. Becoming a Catholic brought great sadness into his life. It ended his academic career in Oxford and many of his friends, including one of his own sisters, never spoke to him again. But he did it because it was the right thing to do and in this he challenges each one of us to look at ourselves. Are we true to ourselves? Are we seeking to do that unique thing God wants us to do and which no one else can do, or do we take the easy road, pleasing others and allowing all kind of forces outside of ourselves, like the media, to determine what we do and what we think?
And the second thing is Newman’s commitment to truth itself. Truth for him, as it was for Pope Benedict last week, is not something relative. It is not simply what we think it is or want it to be. Truth is something outside of ourselves, something objective which we have to seek until we find it. And for that to be possible, we have to be willing to let go of anything and everything which is not the full truth. “To be human” he famously said “is to change and to be perfect is to have changed often.” And so again he challenges us, inviting us to examine ourselves to see how willing we are to change, to embrace new ideas and new ways of thinking, to stop clinging to the things we have always thought, to move beyond our prejudices and open up our minds to the fullness of truth which comes from God.
And the third thing, closely linked to the first two, is the importance Newman put on education. In nineteenth century England, Catholics were not allowed to go to University. It was against the law. And so, after he became a Catholic, one of the things Newman did was found a Catholic University in Dublin which at that time was still part of Britain. He himself was one of the great academics of his day and when he joined a Church which many in England saw as a Church for Irish navvies, he was determined to do everything he could to raise the level of education in it. And in this he challenges us to look at how willing we are to engage with what is now known as life-long learning. How willing are we to make the effort, by reading or by attending appropriate courses, to learn more about the things of God so that we come to deeper personal faith and are better able to share that faith with others?
Blessed John Henry Newman challenges us at many levels. To be who we are and to be committed to the truth in all its fullness is not easy. But it’s what it means to be human.
BIDDING PRAYERS
Blessed John Henry Newman’s deep conviction that God has a unique dream for individual and that there was something God wanted him to do which no other person could do, was the basis of the spiritual journey he made throughout his life. As a result of this conviction, he had the courage to be who he was and follow his own conscience wherever it took him regardless of whether others approved or disapproved. And so, inspired by his example, we pray for the courage to do the same in our own lives.......Lord hear us
Cardinal Newman’s commitment to searching for the truth led him through many stages. For him, truth was more than what he himself happened to think it was at any given moment, and this conviction forced him to change the way he thought many times. But he was always willing to go where truth led him. And so we pray for something of that same willingness in ourselves so that we can go beyond our prejudices and not remain forever trapped in the limitations of our own narrow thinking........Lord hear us
This commitment to the truth led John Henry Newman to see the importance of life-long education. During his lifetime, most Catholics in Britain were poor and uneducated and he saw clearly the need to do something about this. In our own time, we have advantages people then could not have imagined, but we pray for the grace never to lose sight of the importance of education so that, regardless of age or intellectual ability, we are always open to the possibility of learning new things..........Lord hear us
Although Newman was one of the great writers and intellectuals of his day, after he became a Catholic he spent his life working as a priest in a very poor area of Birmingham. So great was his commitment to the poor during those years that, when he died, more than thirty thousand people lined the local streets for his funeral. And so, remembering the story of the poor man outside the rich man’s gate, we pray that Catholics in Britain today will always stand firmly on the side of the poorest in our society.....Lord hear us
The story Jesus tells today has, of course, world-wide implications. In terms of this week’s readings, we ourselves are the rich man dressed in purple and fine linen and feasting magnificently every day. We are the ones whom the prophet Amos speaks of: the people lying on ivory beds, sprawling on divans and dining on lambs from the flock and stall-fattened veal while others go hungry. And so we ask God to stir in us today a deep sense of this sinful and unjust situation which we are all part of......Lord hear us
In this week’s second reading, St Paul reminds the young Timothy of the day when he made his profession of faith and spoke up for the truth in the presence of many witnesses. He urges him to be faithful to this commitment and to fight the good fight of the faith in Cyprus where Paul has left him in charge of the community there. And so we pray for that same grace for ourselves: to be faithful to our own baptism and confirmation and to be witnesses to the Gospel, not in Cyprus, but here in West Kilbride.....Lord hear us
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