Newman, Ven. John Henry

Newman, Ven. John Henry (1801–90), Tractarian leader and later Cardinal. Brought up under Evangelical influence, he became a Fellow of Oriel College, Oxford, and in 1828 Vicar of St Mary's. He was intimately associated with the Oxford Movement, and the leading spirit in it. He wrote 27 of the Tracts for the Times. In Tract 90 (1841) he advocated an interpretation of the Thirty-Nine Articles in a sense generally congruous with the decrees of the Council of Trent; the tract was condemned by the Hebdomadal Board of the University and the Bp. of Oxford imposed silence on its author. Meanwhile from 1839 Newman had begun to have doubts about the claims of the C of E. From 1842 he lived at Littlemore, where he set up a semi monastic establishment. He resigned from St Mary's in 1843; in 1845 he became a RC. He issued his Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine (1845) in defence of his change of allegiance.

Having been ordained in Rome, he established the Oratorians in Birmingham in 1849, and was in Ireland as rector of the short-lived RC university in Dublin from 1854 to 1858. His opposition to the retention of the Pope's temporal power was the occasion of his breach with H. E. Manning. In 1864 a controversy with C. Kingsley resulted in Newman's Apologia pro vita sua, which won him much sympathy. The following year he wrote The Dream of Gerontius (q.v.). His Grammar of Assent (1870) is remarkable for its differentiation between real and notional assent, its analysis of the function of 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 certainty. In 1879 he was made a cardinal. Although unsuccessful in most of his undertakings in the RC Church in his lifetime, much of his teaching found official expression at the Second Vatican Council. In 1991 he was declared Venerable. Feast day in CW, 11 Aug.