Newman · 1845
Newman converts at Littlemore
On the evening of Wednesday the eighth of October 1845, in the small-Anglican-community-house at the Littlemore village outside Oxford that John Henry Newman, then forty-four years old, the Vicar of the University Church of St Mary the Virgin at Oxford and the Anglican-leader of the Oxford-Movement Anglo-Catholic religious-revival of the 1830s-and-1840s, had built and lived in continuously since the 1842 Littlemore-retirement period, the Italian-Passionist priest Father Dominic Barberi (a Italian-Catholic priest of the Passionist-order who was on the English-Catholic-missionary circuit) received Newman into the Roman Catholic Church through the Catholic sacrament-of-conditional-baptism-and-First-Confession-and-First-Communion ceremony that took the evening into the early-morning of the ninth of October 1845. The Newman conversion at Littlemore was the foundational Victorian religious-and-intellectual event of the nineteenth-century-English religious-history, the completion of the Newman-Oxford-Movement Anglican-Catholic theological-trajectory that he had pursued across the Tracts-for-the-Times publication-and-Tract-90-controversy period from 1833 onwards, and the permanent-end of his Anglican-Church-of-England ministry. He was the most-prominent senior-Anglican to convert to Roman Catholicism in the modern English religious-history, and his conversion-at-Littlemore was the trigger for the large-scale Anglo-Catholic-conversion-wave to Roman Catholicism across the late-1840s and 1850s.
A religious-establishment is rarely cracked open by the conversion of a single Oxford vicar in a small Littlemore community-house on a Wednesday evening in October. Newman had pursued the Anglican-Catholic theological-position across the twelve-years of the Oxford-Movement period from 1833 onwards, had reached the personal-conclusion in the 1841-and-1842 period that the Roman-Catholic-Church was the true continuation of the Apostolic-Church, and had retired to the Littlemore community-house in 1842 on the personal-spiritual-discernment-period that would conclude in the October-1845 conversion.
THE LONDON BOY
John Henry Newman was born at 80 Old Broad Street in the City of London on the twenty-first of February 1801, eldest son of John Newman, a London banker of the Ramsbottom, Newman and Company City-of-London banking-house, and Jemima Fourdrinier, a Huguenot-descent paper-manufacturer's-daughter of the Fourdrinier paper-machine inventor family. He was raised in the Strand-and-Ealing middle-class London-banking-family environment, was schooled at the Ealing-Great-School from his seventh year in 1808, and on the Ramsbottom-Newman-banking-house collapse in 1816 took the Oxford-University Trinity-College scholarship-place at fifteen (the Ealing-Great-School headmaster Dr Nicholas had recommended Newman to the Oxford-Trinity-College on the strength of his classical-and-scriptural academic-record).
He took the Trinity-College Oxford BA in 1820 (the second-class-honours degree on the 1820 final-examinations), was elected Fellow of Oriel College in 1822 in his twenty-first year (the Oriel-Fellowship was the most-prestigious Oxford-college-Fellowship of the early-nineteenth-century period, on the Oriel-Common-Room intellectual-discipline that produced the Oxford-Movement leadership of the 1830s), was ordained Anglican deacon in 1824 and Anglican priest in 1825, and took the Vicar of the University Church of St Mary the Virgin at Oxford appointment in 1828 in his twenty-seventh year.
THE OXFORD MOVEMENT
He took up the Oxford-Movement leadership in 1833 in his thirty-second year on the Keble Assize-Sermon at Oxford of the fourteenth of July 1833 (the Keble National-Apostasy sermon that John Keble had preached at Oxford on the anti-Anglican-Establishment political-protest against the Whig-government Irish-Church-Temporalities-Bill of 1833). Newman, with Keble, Edward Bouverie Pusey and the Oriel-Common-Room circle of senior Oxford-Anglican-clergy, began the Tracts-for-the-Times publication-series on the ninth of September 1833 (the Tracts-for-the-Times serial-publication that ran across the 1833-to-1841 publication-period at the eighty-eight Tract-issues, the foundational publication-series of the Anglo-Catholic Oxford-Movement religious-revival).
Newman wrote across the 1833-to-1841 Tracts-for-the-Times publication-period the twenty-four of the eighty-eight Tract-issues (the Newman-Tracts including Tract 1 of September 1833 on the Apostolic-Succession argument, the Tract-15 on the Roman-Catholic-Church-and-the-English-Reformation, and the controversial Tract-90 of February 1841 on the Anglo-Catholic interpretation of the Thirty-Nine Articles). The Tract-90 controversy of the March-and-April 1841 period (the Anglican-bishops-and-Oxford-University authorities universally condemned Tract-90 on the Anglo-Catholic theological-trajectory it represented) was the effective-end of Newman's Oxford-Movement leadership and the trigger for his Littlemore-retirement period.
THE LITTLEMORE RETIREMENT
He retired to the Littlemore-village outside Oxford in 1842 in his forty-first year on the personal-decision to withdraw from the Oxford-Movement public-leadership and to pursue the personal-spiritual-discernment-period on his Anglican-versus-Roman-Catholic theological-position. He built the Littlemore community-house (a small-Anglican community-house of approximately six junior Oxford-Movement Anglican-clergy and Newman) on the Littlemore-Oxford-Movement community-arrangement, retired from the Vicar of St Mary's University-Church-Oxford position in September 1843, and across the 1843-to-1845 Littlemore-period worked on the Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine (the Newman theological-treatise that he was writing across the 1843-to-1845 period and that he would publish in October 1845 in his Newly-converted-Catholic identity).
THE WEDNESDAY EVENING
By early October 1845 Newman had reached the personal-conclusion that the Roman-Catholic-Church was the true-continuation of the Apostolic-Church and that he must convert. He invited the Italian-Passionist missionary-priest Father Dominic Barberi (a Italian-Catholic priest of the Passionist-order who was on the English-Catholic-missionary circuit and who had been the Passionist-mission preacher at the Aston Hall Staffordshire-Catholic-mission-station from 1841) to the Littlemore community-house for the conversion-ceremony.
Barberi arrived at the Littlemore community-house in the pouring-rain on the evening of Wednesday the eighth of October 1845, was received at the door by Newman with the words I wish to be received into the Church of Christ, and conducted the Catholic conversion-ceremony across the evening of the eighth and the early-morning of the ninth of October 1845. The ceremony included the conditional-baptism (the Catholic Catholic-conditional-baptism arrangement for a prior-baptised-Anglican convert), the First-Confession to Barberi, and the First-Communion at the Littlemore-altar in the Newman-community-house chapel that Newman had built across the 1842-to-1845 community-period.
THE VICTORIAN AFTERMATH
The Newman conversion was the foundational Victorian religious-and-intellectual event of the nineteenth-century-English religious-history. The news of the Newman conversion reached London on the tenth of October 1845 on the Times-of-London press-reporting, and triggered the largest Anglo-Catholic-conversion-wave to Roman Catholicism in the modern English religious-history (the Anglo-Catholic-conversion-wave of approximately 250 senior Anglican-clergy across the 1845-to-1855 ten-year-period following the Newman-conversion).
Newman moved to the Birmingham Oratory in 1849 on the Catholic-Oratorian-order foundation that he established in England, served as the founding-Rector of the Catholic University of Ireland 1854-1858 (the Newman-University-Dublin Catholic-university that became the University-College-Dublin), wrote the Apologia Pro Vita Sua (1864) in response to the Charles-Kingsley public-controversy over the Newman Catholic-conversion (the Apologia is the foundational Newman intellectual-autobiography and the central single English-prose-text of the Victorian religious-conversion tradition), and the Grammar of Assent (1870, the Newman theological-treatise on the philosophy of religious-belief).
He was created Cardinal-Deacon of San Giorgio in Velabro by Pope Leo XIII on the twelfth of May 1879 in his seventy-eighth year (the first English-cardinal-since-the-Reformation outside the English-Roman-Catholic-hierarchy episcopal-appointments, the Newman-Cardinal-elevation being the Vatican-recognition of Newman's foundational role in the nineteenth-century English-Catholic intellectual-revival). He died at the Birmingham-Oratory on the eleventh of August 1890 in his eighty-ninth year, was beatified by Pope Benedict XVI in 2010 (the first English-Anglican-convert to be beatified in the modern era), and was canonised by Pope Francis on the thirteenth of October 2019 (the first English-saint canonised since the Forty Martyrs of England and Wales in 1970). The Newman name in modern English-religious history carries the weight of the rain-soaked evening at the Littlemore community-house on the eighth of October 1845.