St. John Henry Newman was a highly influential theologian of the nineteenth century and his writing continues to have great influence on Catholic thinkers today. His name may sound familiar, due to the presence of Newman Centers, which offer Catholic ministry and community on university campuses throughout the United States. Newman spent many years of his life as a tutor and priest-in-residence at Oxford, thus, his passion for and vision of good university life is invoked by Newman Centers across the country.

Newman was born in London on February 21, 1801. In his great spiritual classic, Apologia Pro Vita Sua, which Newman wrote after his controversial conversion to Catholicism, Newman recalled his earliest experiences with religion. Newman notes that his imagination first latched onto Christian belief. Young John took delight in reading the Bible and was enamored with the supernatural world depicted in fairy tales. In his grammar school and university education, Newman encountered the skeptic arguments against religion prevalent in eighteenth and nineteenth century Europe.

When Newman was fifteen, he had a religious experience that cemented his belief. In his own words, he “fell under the influences of a definite Creed, and received into my intellect impressions of dogma, which, through God’s mercy, have never been effaced or obscured.” Newman continued to write eloquent apologies for the importance of Tradition, dogma, and religious certainty throughout his career. These passionate defenses all had their origin in this single moment as a teenager.

In the nineteenth century, the emergence of modern science, the age of revolutions, and a rapidly changing technological world caused a great crisis of religious faith. It seemed to many of Europe’s best and brightest thinkers that religious faith was something inherently irrational, could not be supported or approached through one’s intellect—a Christian could “feel” her faith but could not be “certain of it.” Newman also believed Christian faith to be ultimately something above our rational or mental operations, and certainly a felt experience of relationship with God and others. But Newman was adamant that Christianity was not simply a religious feeling, but a faith that necessarily involved dogmas, creeds. Furthermore, a believer’s assent to the creeds of Christianity was not a private experience but rather informed and reformed her entire life: from her broad imaginative worldview to the smallest actions of her daily life. For Newman, faith was a matter of the mind and the heart—and occurred at the level of deepest union in both. His poetry, sermons, and scholarly writings show how deeply informed all of his work was by his own faith.

In 1825, Newman was ordained an Anglican priest in Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford, and in 1828, he was appointed vicar of St. Mary’s University Church at Oxford. While at Oxford, Newman was a leader of the Oxford movement, which catalyzed renewal and reformation in the Church of England, and which ultimately led Newman to the Catholic Church. As Newman’s scholarship dealt with the importance of Tradition and apostolic succession, it brought him to the conclusion that the Catholic Church is the one Christian Church that has maintained this unbroken Apostolic succession. In 1845, amid great uproar from his colleagues and countrymen, and causing great scandal in the Church of England, Newman left the Church of England and was received into the Catholic Church.

In 1847, Newman was ordained a Catholic priest in Rome, and Pope Pius IX sent him back to Oxford to found small communities of priests, in the model of St. Philip Neri. These communities of priests—known as Oratorians—live and study together and dedicate themselves to preaching and works of charity.

Newman has helped many modern believers grapple with the tensions between faith and reason. Newman keenly felt the hostility that science and technological advances cast on the worldview of faith, and the uncertainty that comes from pursuing faith with certainty in a secular society. In his spiritual autobiography and in theological works such as An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent and The Development of Doctrine, Newman confronted these forces and paved a path forward for believers to pursue a faith that can dialogue with contemporary intellectual movements and cultural mores, but is grounded in the rich apostolic Tradition of Christianity. Newman believed that the human person’s conscience is the place within each person where God speaks to him or her. Conscience, Newman argued, arises from our deep-seated desire for God, and this desire is the foundation and wellspring of belief.

One of Newman’s most widely-read works is The Idea of a University, which was inspired, in part by his work as the first rector of the newly-formed Catholic University in Dublin which eventually became University College Dublin. As rector, Newman oversaw construction of the beautiful University Church, which is now cared for by Notre Dame’s Newman Centre for Faith and Reason. Persuaded by Newman’s many English Catholic admirers, Pope Leo XIII appointed Newman to the College of Cardinals in 1879. Newman died eleven years later on August 11, 1890. Very shortly after, in 1893, the first Newman Club was established at the University of Pennsylvania in the United States. Hundreds have followed on college campuses the world over, and Newman’s efforts to unite the life of the mind with the life of faith continue to bear fruit in Catholic universities. Newman’s vision continually challenges Catholic universities to pursue truth with a clear intellect and in dialogue with the world around them.

Cardinal Newman was beatified in 2010 and canonized by Pope Francis on October 13, 2019 in Rome. The image above is a statue of Cardinal Newman on the side of Dillon Hall. One of the poems he wrote on the eve of his conversion, “The Pillar of the Cloud,” has become popularized in song form as the hymn “Lead Kindly Light,” sung here by the Notre Dame Folk Choir.

St. John Henry Newman, whose great faith illuminated his intellect and brightened his imagination—pray for us!

To learn even more about Saint John Henry Newman, watch this video lecture from the McGrath Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame.