Newman's Unquiet Grave: The Reluctant Saint (33 page)

Through the 1840s and into the 1850s the Catholic Church in England had expanded and prospered numerically. Two significant events had given impetus to the self-confidence of the Catholic community – the Emancipation Act of 1829, which effectively ended social and political constraints on Catholics, and

the restoration of the Catholic hierarchy in 1850. But the numerical increase was due to demographic realities, in particular the new converts from Anglicanism, and the influx of immigrants escaping the consequences of unemployment, poverty, and famine in Ireland. The ever growing visible presence of the Catholic Church could be seen up and down the country with the erection of schools, chapels, churches, and presbyteries, many of them designed by the indefatigable Pugin and courtesy the generosity of John Talbot, the Earl of Shrewsbury. The 1840s had seen the completion of two fine metropolitan cathedrals: St Chad’s in Birmingham and St George’s in Southwark; and the great stone monastery of Mount Saint Bernard’s in Charnwood Forest, Leicestershire. The rapid growth had brought understandable tensions, between ‘old’ versus ‘new’ Catholics, clergy versus the laity, and contrasting styles of devotion. The old Catholics with their minimalist devotions preserved in Richard Challoner’s
Garden of the Soul
felt at odds with the lush pieties and missionary enthusiasms of such as Father Faber. A significant division, for example, was growing between those who looked to the Pope in Rome as the arbiter of all: the so-called ultramontanes or Romanists, as opposed to those who were more inclined to favour local discretion.

Newman would find himself increasingly at odds with both Cardinal Wiseman and Father Faber, tensions which, as biographer Ian Ker has put it, were to do with ‘the nature of the Church itself ’: what it meant to be a Catholic in England.
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Newman’s ‘very great anxiety’ was first occasioned by a dispute with Faber at the London Oratory. The matter, at this distance, appears trivial. Cardinal Wiseman had asked Faber’s help in providing spiritual direction for an order of nuns in London. As it happened, St Philip Neri had banned his Oratorians from hearing the confessions of nuns. Faber, however, took it upon himself to write to the Vatican for permission to suspend St Philip’s rule in the matter. The powers that be in Rome assumed that Newman, still officially overall head of both Oratories, had approved the application. He had done no such thing. Since it was not a question of obliging the Birmingham Oratorians to hear nuns’ confessions, Newman’s anxiety hardly seems merited in retrospect. But he was exasperated by Faber’s appeal to higher Roman authority without consultation at home: a classically ultramontane act of obeisance to central authority.

Newman wrote a firm, but reasonable letter from Dublin reproving him:

We learn from accidental information, confirmed by our Bishop, that he has received, or is to receive, in our behalf a relaxation or suspension, which we neither desire in itself, nor desire should come to us without our asking for it.

It is desirable for your sake, as well as ours, that such misconceptions should not recur; for, as your House has unintentionally involved us, so we unintentionally might involve you.

Suppose we were to petition Propaganda, (to take a parallel case) that the Birmingham Oratory might claim the private property of each of its subjects, and your Bishop received a letter empowering the Oratory at Brompton to exercise a similar power over its own subjects, and you were suddenly informed of this by an accidental channel, after the transaction had been going on for months over and around you, I think you would consider our act at Edgbaston a great inconvenience to you.
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Faber chose not to reply. In fact, he would remain silent until the following May.

Meanwhile Newman got wind that the Vatican had consulted three English bishops on the matter, including Cardinal Wiseman. It seemed likely that Rome was preparing documents to allow a relaxation of the rule which forbade hearing nuns’ confessions for both England’s Oratories. Newman wrote to Propaganda asking that it be understood that the two English Oratorian houses should be regarded ‘entirely independent of each other, and what one does is not the act of the other’.
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Newman further insisted that the request for relaxation should come through him in Birmingham and not London.

Although still embroiled with the Achilli libel trial, and the practical tasks of establishing the university in Ireland – with frequent commutes between Dublin, Birmingham and London – Newman decided to hurry out to Rome to resolve matters. The journey, made in the company of Ambrose St John late in December 1856, had its hazards: ‘In the afternoon’, Newman writes, after a stay in Verona, we ‘had got to the Station and were setting off for Padua, when we found the Engine of the train had burst on the way from Brescia, and we were detained at the Station. The day before Fr Ambrose had observed in the train with some anxiety how near we were to the Engine …’
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They transferred to a diligence. ‘In the midst of the journey too we heard that the brigands were every where in the Pope’s territories – that there had been a rising in the streets of Bologna in day time a fortnight before, and a diligence robbed … a Frenchman had been killed and in the way to Imola a Cardinal had been kept prisoner till his ransom was sent.’
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Travelling down through Italy and staying at various Oratorian houses, it had become clear to Newman that a circular letter had preceded him from the London Oratory, accusing him of ambition and of being an excessive controller. They finally entered the Eternal City in early January.

Their confrere, William Neville, would write a note about their remarkable act of asceticism on arrival near the Spanish Steps: ‘on alighting from the diligence [Newman] went with Father St John to make a visit of devotion to the shrine of St. Peter, going there the whole way barefoot … the streets were very empty, and thus, and screened by his large Roman cloak, he was able to do so un-recognized and unnoticed.’
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The journey was about three miles there and back. On 25 January Newman was finally received by Pius IX, an audience he found ‘long and most satisfactory’. Newman wrote to his confrere Father Edward

Caswall: ‘He knew all about
us
.’ Newman saw a letter from the London Oratory lying on the Pope’s table. But the Pope was kindly and ‘began by saying’, wrote Newman, ‘I was thin, and had done much penance – and that Fr Ambrose had got older’.
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Newman finally got from the Pope what he had set out to achieve ‘that nothing done by the Holy See by one Oratory might affect another.’
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He also received confirmation from Cardinal Alessandro Barnabò, Prefect of Propaganda, that his authority extended to sanctioning or vetoing the formation of any new Oratorian community in England. The significance of this understanding arose from Newman’s wish to found a second Oratory in London in a poor district of the East End, quite independent of the Brompton Oratory in its well-heeled West London district. With this, Newman made the return journey to London in just four days.

His satisfaction was short lived. Faber now sent two of his London Oratory acolytes to Rome to undo everything Newman had accomplished. In direct contradiction to Newman’s hopes, Faber received the backing of the Vatican in prohibiting the establishment of a second Oratory in London.

Letters of the period now show mounting antagonism between London and Birmingham. Faber wrote of the Birmingham Oratorians being ‘extremely united in condemning us, in real spirits, not regretting the row and considering themselves a very successful house, and all that they could wish’.
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He had evidence, he wrote, of their ‘feeling against us’ being ‘something awful’. Father Dalgairns, who had become something of a stirrer and trouble-maker, after moving backwards and forwards between London and Birmingham, reported a Birmingham Oratorian as saying that the London Oratory’s ‘professions of religion are simply “humbug”’.
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One of the chief instigators of tensions between Newman and Faber had been Monsignor Talbot, the Papal Chamberlain, who had begun to loathe Newman. The feelings were mutual. Cardinal Wiseman had also done his bit to upset Newman, although the occasion was minor on the face of it. Wiseman had included Newman with Faber in the dedication of a book he had published on St Philip Neri. Newman, for whom dedications were a sign of profound affection, felt that this was done deliberately to annoy him. He did not wish his name to appear on the same page of a book as Faber, albeit a book devoted to their common saintly patron.

At the same time Newman had run into problems with the Irish bishops. William McHale, Archbishop of Tuam in Galway, and Paul Cullen, Archbishop of Dublin, were in a power struggle for control of the Catholic Church in Ireland and its future. Cullen, who was anti-Fenian, had been made Cardinal in 1850 and had been chairing a synod to reform the hierarchy and relations with the laity of which the foundation of the Catholic university was an important

feature. While Wiseman was a confirmed ultramontane, McHale was a nationalist who hated all things English (he had translated the Pentateuch into Gaelic). He deplored Newman’s appointment as Rector and attempted to thwart Cullen at every opportunity.
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Newman’s rectorship of the university was becoming untenable. Newman, back in Dublin, uttered a wail of frustration to Ambrose: ‘I go to Rome to be snubbed. I come to Dublin to be repelled by Dr McHale and worn away by Dr Cullen. The cardinal taunts me with his Dedications, and Fr Faber insults me with his letters.’
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The letters between Faber and Newman were now crackling with mutual animosity. Faber wrote to Newman on 8 May complaining ‘of a long series of jealousies, doubts and misconstructions’, in Newman’s mind. There followed an example of Faber’s barbed religiosity:

At the beginning of the year I took St John the Evangelist for my year Saint, because of his being your patron, and in the hope of his bringing us together again, and so, what I am going to ask of you, I ask in his name. I know you well enough to know how you must yourself have suffered all this time. Now, is it quite impossible for you to forgive us, to be a father to us again, to destroy the scandal of unvisiting houses? What exactly is it in our conduct that has angered you so greatly …? Surely we are your sons, fathers must suffer for their children, must bear much from them.
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Newman, who had received no word from Faber for six months on the original quarrel between them, replied with his own brand of acidulously pious reproof:

My dear Father Wilfrid, It is a very great satisfaction to me to see your handwriting, and tho’ this is May and I wrote you in November your writing now is more than compensation for your utter silence then. I put it down to your continued indisposition, which has grieved me very much, and which I have been for a long time in practice of remembering at Mass and before the Blessed Sacrament … I am startled to find you talk of scandal having occurred; if I, or any of my Congregation, is in fault, I am sorry for it. Talking freely is the common source of scandal. I do not think we have done so.
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Faber wrote back, complaining of the ‘pain the perusal of your letter has caused. Why! my dear Father, almost every word of it seems full of alienation. But I must not be discouraged … If you leave it as your letter to me today leaves it, it will be refusing us peace.’
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And so it went on.

CLERICALISM AND THE LAITY

No sooner had the coldness between Cardinal Wiseman and Newman over the trifling matter of the book dedication subsided than there was cause for a much

more serious and lasting antagonism between Newman and Catholic authority on the score of the status and role of the Catholic laity.‌

In 1859 Newman wrote an article in which he remarked on ‘the endemic perennial fidget which possesses us about giving scandal; facts are omitted in great histories, or glosses are put upon memorable acts, because they are thought not edifying, whereas of all scandals such omissions, such glosses, are the greatest’.
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He was referring specifically to a row that had broken out over his links with a prominent Catholic periodical run by laymen. In the previous year, Sir John Acton, aristocrat and scholar, had become involved in the literary magazine, the
Rambler
, founded in 1848 for an educated Catholic readership. Acton, who had been a pupil of the German Church historian, Johann Joseph Ignaz Döllinger, insisted that lay Catholic scholars had an important part to play in the intellectual life of the Church. Newman agreed.