by Edward Short
‘Cincinnati 5th Feb. 1875
Revd Dear Dr Newman
Thank you from my heart for all your admirable writings in defence of Catholic truth. Thank you for your most able, and, it ought to be most satisfactory reply to Mr Gladstone.
Our sense of its great merits is imperfectly expressed in this week’s Catholic Telegraph. And now we are shocked by the tirade of a violent, half crazy, and it is said, drunkard’s abuse of that noble Championship of our rightful allegiance to the Church and to the State, by McMaster of the New York Freeman’s Journal. You disregard the persecution which foolish, or even wicked, men seek to make you suffer for your advocacy of justice and truth, but on earth as in Heaven your reward is great indeed. An humble individual who enjoyed your edifying supper at the Oratory in Birmingham and heard one of your pious instructions, should probably ask pardon for this intrusion on your precious moments; but he could not bear his own reproaches if he did not make this amende for an American journalist’s violence.
Go on, Dear Dr. Newman, in the warfare until death, if necessary for the truth – In caelo quies.
Most respectfully Yours J. B. Purcell Abp. Cin.
Archbishop Purcell was eloquent proof of the crucial influence that Newman and his work were having on American churchmen. But he would also have an even greater influence on the “numerous and well-conducted schools and colleges” that the immigrant Catholic Church was erecting up and down the country, stemming as it did from the educational principles that he first articulated in his Idea of a University and put into practice in the Catholic University in Dublin, of which he was Rector from 1851 to 1858. That influence has always had to contend with precisely the forces of errant private judgment that Newman warned against so prophetically in 1839. Yet, at the time that he was laying the foundation for the Catholic University, Newman sensed that he was accomplishing something that would prove seminal. “We are getting on with the University,” he told Mrs. Bowden in August of 1855. “It is swimming against the stream, to move at all—still we are in motion. The great thing is to set up things … It will be years before the system takes root, but my work will be ended when I have made a beginning.”74 From that bold beginning, good things continue to flow. Now, more than ever, Newman’s principles guide the authentic Catholic University. As he affirmed in his sermon preached in the University Church in Dublin in 1856, “A great University is a great power, and can do great things; but, unless it be something more than human, it is but foolishness and vanity … It is really dead, though it seems to live, unless it be grafted upon the True Vine …”75
Corroboration for Newman’s influence on American Catholicism can be found in an article Evelyn Waugh wrote for Life magazine in 1949. Waugh was never an uncritical observer of the United States. To his friend, Graham Greene, he once wrote, “Of course the Americans are cowards. They are almost all the descendants of wretches who deserted their legitimate monarchs for fear of military service.”76 But Waugh also saw the good points of America, and especially of its Catholicism. Speaking particularly of the contribution that the Irish made to the American Church, Waugh noted: “The Irish with their truculence and practical good sense have built and paid for the churches, opening new parishes as fast as the population grew; they have staffed the active religious orders and have created a national system of Catholic education.” Waugh does not say as much explicitly but it is clear that this system of education was, in character, largely Newmanian. If Newman’s idea of Catholic education hardly prevailed in Dublin against the shilly-shally of the Irish hierarchy or the indifference of Irish and English Catholics, it found fertile ground in America. And this bore out Newman’s recognition of the true meaning of failure, for as he told Lord Braye, an old Etonian with whom he was friendly in his dotage, “It is the rule of God’s Providence that we should succeed by failure.”77 Certainly, Waugh’s description of the highly successful American system of Catholic colleges shows its distinct affinity with objects that Newman identified for the otherwise abortive Catholic University.78 “Without help from the state,” Waugh wrote, “indeed, in direct competition with it—the poor of the nation have covered their land with schools, colleges and universities, boldly asserting the principle that nothing less than an entire Christian education is necessary to produce Christians. For the faith is not a mere matter of learning a few prayers and pious stories at home. It is a complete culture infusing all human knowledge … Their object is to transform a proletariat into a bourgeoisie; to produce a faithful laity, qualified to take its part in the general life of the nation; and in this way they are manifestly successful. Their students are not, in the main, drawn from scholarly homes. Many of them handle the English language uneasily … But, when all of this is said, the Englishman, who can boast no single institution of higher Catholic education and is obliged to frequent universities that are Anglican in formation and agnostic in temper, can only applaud what American Catholics have done in the last hundred years.”79
The autonomy of this Catholic network of schools and universities, which Waugh justly singled out for praise, was something Newman also valued, though his understanding of self-reliance had nothing Emersonian about it. In using the term, Newman was careful to distance himself from “every wild religionist who makes himself his own prophet and guide, and despises Holy Fathers and ecclesiastical rulers.” Still, he confirmed that “One of the main secrets of success is self-reliance. This seems a strange sentiment for a Christian journalist to utter; but we speak of self in contrast, not with a higher power, but with our fellow-men. He, who leans on others, instead of confiding in his own right arm, will do nothing great.”80
Newman’s insistence on self-reliance can serve as a well-deserved rebuke to those American Catholics who have abdicated their self-reliance and made very dubious alliances indeed with a secular State and its agents that have nothing but contempt for the very idea of Catholic education—indeed, with Catholicism itself. Newman remarked how literary men, throughout history, often relinquished their self-reliance for the same reason as universities, because they were convinced that none could “possibly prosper without the sanction of the State and the favour of great personages.” To prove the fallacy of this, Newman cited the example of the English universities: “They have been dragooned, indeed, by tyrannical despotism; they have had theories, or have felt the passion of loyalty; they all but worship the law as the first of all authorities in heaven or upon earth; but when the question is that of submitting to the Government of the day, or to persons in power, it requires but little knowledge of the history, for instance, of Oxford, to be aware that it has been its rule to rely upon itself—upon its prejudices, if we will, but still on what was its own.” And here he cited the example of how Oxford had voted out Sir Robert Peel, “its favourite son, the Leader of the Commons,” after he apostatized over Catholic Emancipation—an ousting in which Newman had played an ardent part. In conclusion, Newman wrote, “we hope that no Catholic University that is or that shall be, with its vantage-ground of higher principles, will ever show less self-respect, consistency, and manliness, than Protestant Oxford, in standing on its own sense of right and falling back upon its own resources.”81
One American who agreed with Newman that Catholic education, in order to be authentically Catholic, must exercise Catholic self-reliance was a man named, oddly enough, Jenkins, a priest of the diocese of Louisville, who was also a passionate defender of Catholic schools.82 Now with a surname like Jenkins this might strike my readers as rather improbable.83 But, as a matter of fact, in 1882 Thomas Jefferson Jenkins wrote a book insisting on the indispensability of autonomous Catholic education. When Newman received his copy, he assured Jenkins that it was “as seasonable here and important as it is in America.”84
Earlier, I had occasion to touch on the ill-fated Tractarianism of St. Saviour’s, Leeds. Well, St. Saviour’s had an interesting American connection. Bishop Doane of New Jersey, the leader of the High Church party in America, was in
vited to preach at the opening of St. Saviour’s in 1845. Ten years later, Doane’s son converted to Rome, to his father’s profound chagrin. In 1856, when he was studying in Rome, George Hobart Doane met Newman. Later, he even considered joining the Oratory, but chose instead to return to the United States, where he became a well-known monsignor in the Newark diocese, founding many churches, hospitals, schools, orphanages and academies, as well as the Catholic Young Men’s Society, which, in 1880, sent Newman very handsome congratulations on his receiving the red hat from Leo XIII. In these American young men, Newman might have seen the antithesis of certain other young men he had known at Oxford, who were as contemptuous of religion as they were keen on getting on. In his sermon God’s Will the End of Life, Newman addressed these would-be fashionable young men directly. “You my brethren have not been born splendidly; you have no high connections; you have not learned the manner or caught the tone of good society … yet you ape the sins of Dives while you are strangers to his refinement … you think it the sign of a gentleman to set yourself above religion … to look at Catholic or Methodist with impartial contempt … The Creator made you it seems … for this office and work, to be a bad imitation of polished ungodliness.”85
The American Catholics who wrote to congratulate Newman had in view another office and it was Newman who helped form them, who continues to form their counterparts today. When John D’Arcy, the Bishop of South Bend, described the events that led to President Obama being honored by Notre Dame, he gave his compatriots and indeed the world a useful lesson in the baleful moral consequences that follow from educated men delivering themselves up to the direction of “polished ungodliness.” In his statement, Bishop Darcy wrote:
President Obama has recently reaffirmed, and has now placed in public policy, his long-stated unwillingness to hold human life as sacred. While claiming to separate politics from science, he has in fact separated science from ethics and has brought the American government, for the first time in history, into supporting direct destruction of innocent human life. This will be the 25th Notre Dame graduation during my time as bishop. After much prayer, I have decided not to attend the graduation. I wish no disrespect to our president; I pray for him and wish him well. I have always revered the Office of the Presidency. But a bishop must teach the Catholic faith “in season and out of season,” and he teaches not only by his words — but by his actions. My decision is not an attack on anyone, but is in defense of the truth about human life … Even as I continue to ponder in prayer these events … so must Notre Dame. Indeed, as a Catholic University, Notre Dame must ask itself, if by this decision it has chosen prestige over truth.86
As this clear rejection of our own followers of Dives shows, the promise that Newman saw in American Catholicism is alive and well, though the “Socinian temper” spreads apace.
One of the great “what ifs” of Newman’s career is what might have resulted if he had traveled himself to America. In June 1854, Archbishop John Hughes of New York wrote to assure Newman that the money and students America could offer the University would be immense. He also invited Newman to cross the Atlantic to give what he was convinced would be a lucrative lecture tour.87 Thackeray, after his 1852 tour, described it as including “plenty of good fellows, merry dinners, and pleasant cigars.”88 In the first six weeks alone, he earned £500—a tidy sum—especially since he put it into US railway stocks, which yielded a profit of 8 percent.89 Newman might not have been interested in the cigars but he could have used the lecture fees. As it happened, Newman never made the crossing: he was duty bound to leave Dublin and return to his Oratory. So, willy-nilly, a huge opportunity for raising funds for the Catholic University was lost. Still, Newman would always be grateful to Americans for their generous support. He was keenly aware that the ties he was forging with the Catholics of America would bear long-lasting fruit. “This our first step,” he told Archbishop Kenrick, “important as it is, will be by the Divine blessing, only the humblest in a long series (of successive movements) which are to follow; that, many as may be our difficulties, we shall, by the generous prayers and the persevering alms of the faithful, be carried over them; and, that an undertaking, founded in the union of Catholics so widely dispersed and so various by circumstances, will issue in more than corresponding benefits, external and temporal, to many countries and many generations.”90
These “generous prayers and persevering alms” of American Catholics will always make conclusions about Newman and the Americans inadvisable: their heroic story remains unfinished. Nevertheless, some provisional conclusions can be made. While Tractarianism initially galvanized the Anglican Church on both sides of the pond, it never overcame its inherent contradictions. At the same time, the Tractarian movement embroiled Anglicanism in an identity crisis that, far from resolving its divisions, exacerbated them. What was perhaps most instructive about Tractarianism for Newman was that it corroborated something John Adams told Benjamin Rush in 1812: “No clear headed Man; no Man who sees all the consequences of a proposition can be an orthodox Church of England Man without being a Roman Catholic.”91 After Newman converted, despite his hopes for the revival of the English Catholic Church, which he expressed so unforgettably in “The Second Spring” (1852), it was in America, and, particularly in its network of schools and colleges, as Waugh intimated, that his vision for the future of Catholicism found its amplest embodiment.
In 1885, an anonymous friend of Newman’s sent him a circular soliciting support for the nascent Catholic University of America. Newman wrote to James Gibbons, the Archbishop of Baltimore, welcoming “with the warmest interest the eloquent appeal of your University Board to the Catholics of the United States … At a time when there is so much in this part of the world to depress and trouble us as to our religious prospects, the tidings which your Circular conveys of the actual commencement of so great an undertaking on the other side of the Ocean … will rejoice the hearts of all educated Catholics in these Islands …”92 Gibbons assured Newman that: “though you have reached the evening of life, you are still regarded by us all as a tower of strength.”93 And so he remains. But the most eloquent testimony to Newman’s influence on his American contemporaries came from the Rev. Clarence Walworth of St. Mary’s Church, Albany, New York, who wrote to Newman in July 1866: “In truth, if you knew all the affectionate interest felt in all you do and say by so many converts in America whom your earlier writings have either led into the Church, or at least introduced to a knowledge of Catholic truth, you would feel that we have … great claim on you in this country as children have upon a spiritual Father.”94
Chapter 10
On the Track of Truth: Newman and Richard Holt Hutton
In the contemporary response to Newman and his work no figure stood out more than Richard Holt Hutton (1826–1897), the editor of the Spectator, who wrote over thirty essays on Newman, as well as a wonderfully incisive short biography. There is some irony in this, for Newman was continually misrepresented by journalists. “Of course there have been endless hits against me in Newspapers, Reviews, and Pamphlets,” he told R. W. Church in 1864.1 And although a crack journalist himself—his pieces in the British Critic and the Rambler show him to have been a well-informed, astute, lively judge of the passing scene—he tended to take a dim view of the public prints. Yet, as I shall show, he recognized their pivotal place in the formation of public opinion and was glad to have so independent-minded and capable a journalist as Hutton reviewing his books. Hutton, for his part, was equally critical of the periodical press, and in Newman’s work he saw a bracing antidote to the influential fallacies of its approved sages. In placing Newman and his work squarely within his contemporary milieu, Hutton showed how they transcended that milieu. In this chapter, I shall revisit the correspondence and the work of the two men to show how they followed what Hutton called “the track of truth” in an age increasingly convinced that truth was unknowable.
The years directly prior to their correspondence were the years leadi
ng up to the writing of the Apologia (1864), when Newman was beset with troubles. He was worried that the Oratory School was losing its distinctly Catholic character. He was under a cloud at Rome for his article, “Consulting the Laity in Matters of Doctrine” (1859). He was accused of “moral dishonesty” by the Bishop of Oxford.2 He was even rumored to be contemplating rejoining the Church of England. Such “gross misrepresentations,” as he called them, were nothing new: he had been on the receiving end of malicious gossip for years.3 Now, however, he had begun to find it especially wearying. “I have tried to do works for God year after year,” he confessed, “and for thirty years … they have all failed. My first sermon as an Anglican, was on the text ‘Man goes forth to his work and to his labour until the evening;’ and now the evening is come and I have done nothing … it is most difficult to go on working in the face of thirty years disappointment … every thing seems to crumble under my hands, as if one were making ropes of sand.”4 Yet Newman never lost sight of the sum of his trials. “I know I am deeply deficient in that higher life which lasts and grows in spite of the ills of mortality—but had I ever so much of supernatural love and devotion, I could not be in any different state from the Apostle, who in the most beautiful of his epistles speaks with such touching and consoling vividness of those troubles, in the midst of which these earthen vessels of ours hold the treasure of grace and truth.”5 When Charles Kingsley attacked his veracity in Macmillan’s Magazine in January 1864, charging that “Father Newman informs us that truth for its own sake need not, and on the whole ought not to be, a virtue with the Roman clergy,” Newman resolved to reacquaint himself with this “treasure of grace and truth.”6 But before he began writing the Apologia—the spiritual autobiography which he would compose in seven heroic weeks in what he told his friend Frederic Rogers was “the most arduous work … I ever had in my life”—he received favorable notice from Hutton in a Spectator piece.7 Of the initial correspondence between Kingsley and Newman, which Newman published in pamphlet form, Hutton observed: “Mr. Kingsley has just afforded, at his own expense, a genuine literary pleasure to all who can find intellectual pleasure in the play of great powers of sarcasm, by bringing Father Newman from his retirement, and showing not only one of the greatest of English writers, but, perhaps, the very greatest master of delicate and polished sarcasm in the English language …”8 After Newman thanked Hutton for the “flattering notice”9 he had taken of him, Hutton thanked Newman for the great influence he had exerted on him: