Newman's Unquiet Grave: The Reluctant Saint (24 page)

Meanwhile a visit to the great Oratorian house in Rome, adjoining the Chiesa Nuova (which can be viewed on the right of Corso Vittorio Emanuele II as one approaches the Vatican), finally won Newman over to the idea of establishing an Oratorian congregation in England. The domestic arrangements reminded him of an Oxford College, and he approved of the Oratorians being allowed to keep their money and property.

In January he wrote to Wiseman that he had now come round to his original suggestion that the Oratorian congregation would be an ideal choice of life for himself and his companions. The following month he put in a formal submission to the Vatican to establish a community in England, and it found immediate favour with the Pope. By May, he and St John had received Roman Catholic Holy Orders after a nine-day retreat with the Jesuits.

ORDINATION AGAIN

During his ordination retreat Newman wrote out an examination of conscience in Latin, translated by the Oratorian Father Henry Tristram in the posthumous

volume:
Autobiographical Writings
. At the heart of this exercise is the admission:

I am querulous, timid, lazy, suspicious … I have not that practical, lively and present faith, against the persistent working and wiles of the evil spirit in my heart, which I ought to have….

When I was growing up, and as a young man, I had confidence and hope in God … But when I began to apply my intellect to sacred subjects, and to read and write, twenty years ago and more, then, although what I wrote was for the most part true and useful, nevertheless, first, I lost my natural and inborn faith … then too I have lost my simple confidence in the word of God … That subtle and delicate vigour of faith has become dulled in me, and remains so to this day…. What is more serious, I have for some years

fallen into a kind of despair and gloomy state of mind.
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It appears indicative of a mild depression, an impression reinforced by a harsh image that follows. ‘I have in my mind a wound or cancer’, he wrote
²⁸
; and as he reflected in circular mode, it appears that he was experiencing a sense of lethargy and dissatisfaction typical of the complaint familiar among religious, known as
accidie
, or what he called ‘dreariness’.

Enlarging on his own modest attainments in the devout life, he confirms an assessment that he would make later of himself: ‘I have nothing of a saint about me as everyone knows.’
²⁹
He complains in his Rome self-assessment of lack of fervour. ‘I creep along the ground, or even run – well enough for one who creeps or runs, but I cannot fly.’
³⁰
He reveals himself as comfortable with routines of devotion and prayer: ‘The Mass, visits to the Blessed Sacrament, the Rosary, litanies, the Breviary – all these give me pleasure.’
³¹
But he declares that anything beyond this distracts and terrifies his mind, because he is ‘subject to scruples’, or distracting obsessive thoughts. He goes on to write ‘… it is difficult to explain and strange even to myself, but I have this peculiarity, that in the movement of my affections, whether sacred or human, my physical strength cannot go beyond certain limits’.
32

It is a remarkable admission, since he regards this as permanently limiting the scope of his spiritual life. He confesses that he is ‘always languid’ in his thoughts of ‘divine things’, and like a man ‘walking with his feet bound together’.
3
3
It is, he writes, a physical thing which prevents him from being ‘fervent in praying and meditating’.

While conscious that he had enthusiastically embarked on Catholic-style asceticism while still an Anglican at littletons, he notes that he no longer relishes such practices. His religious life is pedestrian. ‘I cannot rise above it to a higher level.’
³⁴
He accuses himself of mild self-centredness: ‘I do not like poverty, troubles, restrictions, inconveniences … I like tranquility, security, a life among friends, and among books, untroubled by business cares – the life of an Epicurean in fact.’
³⁵
He confesses to being unacceptably self-willed: ‘In

almost everything I like my own way of acting; I do not want to change the place or business in which I find myself, to undertake the affairs of others, to walk, to go on a journey, to visit others, since I prefer to remain at home.’
3
6
The comments are ironic in view of his activities five years hence, when he would found the Catholic university in Dublin, a city to which he would commute regularly from Birmingham while embroiled in a host of literary and vexing administrative tasks.

In the meantime, the self-examination shows him still smarting from what he saw as unjust treatment at the hands of the leadership of the Church of England; not unmixed with self-righteousness and self-pity – faults that he does not recognize in himself, at least at this stage of his life:

In the Church of England I had many detractors; a mass of calumny was hurled at me: my services towards that Church were misrepresented by almost everyone in authority in it. I became an exile in solitude, where I spent some years with certain of my friends, but not even in that retreat was I safe from those who pursued me with their curiosity. I believe and hope that I did not on that account give way to anger, indignation, or the like, for in that respect I am not especially sensitive, but I was oppressed and lost hope. And now the cheerfulness I used to have has almost vanished.37

After ordination into the Catholic priesthood, his spirits evidently revived during a trip to the Castelli region, including Tivoli, and the lakes of Albano and Nemi, before meeting up with his young confreres at the Cistercian community of Santa Croce in Rome. Here were the future Oratorians of England, joining their ‘Father’ Newman and Ambrose St John to make a mandatory novitiate retreat before formal admission as Oratorians: Dalgairns, Stanton, Bowles, William Coffin and Robert Coffin who had come out from England. But again, Newman sank back into his mild
accidie
under the novitiate regime, which he found ‘dreary’ in the absence of the ‘scouts’ and college servants of his Oxford days

– ‘room-sweeping, slop-emptying, dinner-serving, bed making, shoe blacking’.
38

But he broke the routine to visit Naples and the great Oratory there.

While touring the city’s churches and shrines he gave cautious credit to the variety of liquefaction ‘miracles’, of which there were some fifty within ten miles of the centre; but he was unable to attend the most famous one of all, the liquefaction of the blood of San Gennaro (Saint Januarius). Gennaro was a fourth century bishop and martyr whose blood was collected in an ampule from the sand of the amphitheatre where he was killed. The blood remained black and solid until the occurrence of its liquefaction phenomenon, first reported in the fourteenth century, and a regular event on the commemoration of the saint’s martyrdom, 19 September.

Newman made a distinction between doctrine and devotion, and the cult of Januarius was emphatically devotional although, describing it to Henry Wilberforce, he gave qualified credence to the supernatural nature of the event:

Catholics, till they have seen it, doubt it – Our [Oratorian] father director here tells us that before he went to Naples, he did not believe it. That is, they have vague ideas of natural means, exaggeration etc, not of course imputing fraud. They say conversions often take place in consequence … it is not simple liquefaction, but sometimes it swells, sometimes boils, sometimes melts – no one can tell what is going to take place. They say it is quite overcoming — and people cannot help crying to see it. I understand that Sir H. Davy attended every day, and it was this extreme variety of the phenomenon which convinced him that nothing physical would account for it. Yet there is this remarkable fact, that liquefactions of blood are common at Naples – and unless it is irreverent to the Great Author of miracles to be obstinate in the inquiry, the question certainly rises whether there is something in the air. (Mind, I don’t believe there is – and, speaking humbly, and without having seen it, think it a true miracle – but I am arguing). We saw the blood of St Patrizia, half liquid,
i.e.
liquefying, on her feast day.
39

By November the new English Oratorians came out of their retreat and prepared to return to England. Newman bade farewell to Pio Nono at the Quirinal Palace, the papal summer residence, on 3 December and set off for England via Loreto – to visit one of the most famous, and, for Protestants, most suspect of devotional shrines, the Holy House of Mary. Legend had it that the house in which the Virgin Mary was born, and received news of her pregnancy from the Angel Gabriel, was carried by Angels from Nazareth in three stages, to be deposited, finally, at its present site (nowadays Our Lady of Loreto is the patron of airline pilots!). Writing again to Henry Wilberforce, he noted: ‘We went there to get the Blessed Virgin’s blessing on us.’ As if to boast his new Catholic credentials, Newman went on to emphasise his devotion to the Virgin, and his consciousness of her protection, as a feature of his adult life: ‘I have ever been under her shadow, if I may say it. My College was St Mary’s, and my Church; and when I went to littletons, there, by my own previous disposition, our Blessed Lady was waiting for me. Nor did she do nothing for me in that low habitation, of which I always think with pleasure.’
40

LOSS AND GAIN

During his sojourn in Rome Newman found time to write a novel that carried him back to his early Oxford years, although its central theme explored more re-cent preoccupations and decisions.
Loss and Gain: The Story of a Convert
, depicts the hero, Charles Reding, as an undergraduate on the path from Anglicanism to Roman Catholicism. His spiritual journey, with its hesitations, scruples, and questionings, is described in a series of conversations at his home (his father is a parson) and on walks around Oxford, and in college rooms. The principal foil for Charles’s quest is Sheffield, a clever fellow undergraduate. Newman would

claim in later years that he wrote the novel to help out his publisher, James Burns, who was sustaining financial loss as a result of Newman’s going over to Rome. That does not tell the whole story. The book is clearly autobiographical, and expresses a languorous nostalgia for a world of innocent male intimacy, where there was time to walk and talk the days and weeks away; endless breakfasts, luncheons and dinners, long vacations when time stood still.

In
Loss and Gain
Newman describes young men walking and talking two by two, when ‘a soft melancholy came over us, of which the shadows fall even now …’
⁴¹
; young men walking ‘arm-in-arm along Broad Street, evidently very intimate’. The diffidence towards women is pointed up in the discussion between Charles and Sheffield on the topic of dancing:

It makes me laugh to think what I have done, when a boy, to escape dancing; there is something so absurd in it; and one had to be civil and to duck to young girls who were either prim or pert. I have behaved quite rudely to them sometimes, and then have been annoyed at my ungentlemanlikeness, and not known how to get out of the scrape.

‘Well, I didn’t know we were so like each other in anything’, said Charles, ‘oh, the mis-ery I have endured, in having to stand up to dance, and to walk about with a partner! – everybody looking at me, and I so awkward. It has been torture to me days before and after.’
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The book opens with Charles’s clergyman father declaring: ‘No one on earth can know Charles’s secret thoughts. Did I guard him here at home ever so well, yet, in due time, it would be found that a serpent had crept into the heart of his innocence.’
⁴³
Newman the author, however, does know the secrets of Charles’s heart, because he is clearly modeled on himself. In the course of the novel we find him searching for ‘reality’ in religion, but he is also seeking love. He had ‘found very few friends’ among his former school acquaintances: ‘Some’, he remarks, ‘were too gay for him, and he had avoided them; others, with whom he had been intimate … had fairly cut him on coming into residence.’
⁴⁴
He makes friends with Sheffield and they embark on discussions about the relative merits of Anglicanism and Catholicism – to which Charles is increasingly drawn.