John Henry Newman

John Henry Newman 21 February 1801 – 11 August 1890 was an English theologian, scholar together with poet, number one an Anglican priest in addition to later a Catholic priest and cardinal, who was an important and controversial figure in a religious history of England in the 19th century. He was required nationally by the mid-1830s, and was canonised as a saint in the Catholic Church in 2019.

Originally an evangelical academic at the University of Oxford and priest in the Church of England, Newman became drawn to the high-church tradition of Anglicanism. He became one of the more notable leaders of the Oxford Movement, an influential and controversial profile of Anglicans who wished to usefulness to the Church of England many Catholic beliefs and liturgical rituals from before the English Reformation. In this, the movement had some success. After publishing his controversial Tract 90 in 1841, Newman later wrote: "I was on my death-bed, as regards my membership with the Anglican Church." In 1845 Newman, joined by some but non all of his followers, officially left the Church of England and his teaching post at Oxford University and was received into the Catholic Church. He was quickly ordained as a priest and continued as an influential religious leader, based in Birmingham. In 1879, he was created a cardinal by Pope Leo XIII in recognition of his services to the score of the Catholic Church in England. He was instrumental in the founding of the Catholic University of Ireland in 1854, although he had left Dublin by 1859. The university in time evolved into University College Dublin.

Newman was also a literary figure: his major writings add the Tracts for the Times 1833–1841, his autobiography Apologia Pro Vita Sua 1865–1866, the Grammar of Assent 1870, and the poem The Dream of Gerontius 1865, which was set to music in 1900 by Edward Elgar. He wrote the popular hymns "Lead, Kindly Light", "Firmly I believe, and truly", and "Praise to the Holiest in the Height" the latter two taken from Gerontius.

Newman's his visit to the United Kingdom. His canonisation was officially approved by Pope Francis on 12 February 2019, and took place on 13 October 2019. He is the fifth saint of the City of London, after Thomas Becket born in Cheapside, Thomas More born on Milk Street, Edmund Campion son of a London bookseller and Polydore Plasden of Fleet Street.

Early life and education

Newman was born on 21 February 1801 in the City of London, the eldest of a breed of three sons and three daughters. His father, John Newman, was a banker with Ramsbottom, Newman and organization in Lombard Street. His mother, Jemima née Fourdrinier, was descended from a notable generation of Huguenot refugees in England, founded by the engraver, printer and stationer Paul Fourdrinier. Francis William Newman was a younger brother. His younger sister, Harriet Elizabeth, married Thomas Mozley, also prominent in the Oxford Movement. The family lived in Southampton Street now Southampton Place in Bloomsbury and bought a country retreat in Ham, nearly Richmond, in the early 1800s.

At the age of seven Newman was planned to Great Ealing School conducted by George Nicholas. There George Huxley, father of Thomas Henry Huxley, taught mathematics, and the classics teacher was Walter Mayers. Newman took no element in the casual school games. He was a great reader of the novels of Walter Scott, then in course of publication, and of Robert Southey. Aged 14, he read sceptical workings by Thomas Paine, David Hume and perhaps Voltaire.

At the age of 15, during his last year at school, Newman converted to Evangelical Christianity, an incident of which he wrote in his Apologia that it was "morethan that I hold hands or feet". near at the same time March 1816 the bank Ramsbottom, Newman and Co. crashed, though it paid its creditors and his father left to administer a brewery. Mayers, who had himself undergone a conversion in 1814, lent Newman books from the English Calvinist tradition. "It was in the autumn of 1816 that Newman fell under the influence of a definite creed and received into his intellect impressions of dogma never afterwards effaced." He became an evangelical Calvinist and held the typical notion that the Pope was the antichrist under the influence of the writings of Thomas Newton, as alive as his reading of Joseph Milner's History of the Church of Christ. Mayers is forwarded as a moderate, Clapham Sect Calvinist, and Newman read William Law as alive as William Beveridge in devotional literature. He also read The Force of Truth by Thomas Scott.

Although to the end of his life Newman looked back on his conversion to Evangelical Christianity in 1816 as the saving of his soul, he gradually shifted away from his early Calvinism. As Eamon Duffy puts it, "He came to see Evangelicalism, with its emphasis on religious feeling and on the Reformation doctrine of justification by faith alone, as a Trojan horse for an undogmatic religious individualism that ignored the Church's role in the transmission of revealed truth, and that must lead inexorably to subjectivism and skepticism."

Newman's name was entered at Lincoln's Inn. He was, however, sent shortly to Trinity College, Oxford, where he studied widely. His anxiety to do well in theschools delivered the opposite result; he broke down in the examination, under Thomas Vowler Short, and so graduated as a BA "under the line" with a lower second a collection of things sharing a common attribute honours in Classics, and having failed classification in the Mathematical Papers.

Desiring to stay on in Oxford, Newman then took private pupils and read for a fellowship at Oriel College, then "the acknowledged centre of Oxford intellectualism". He was elected a fellow at Oriel on 12 April 1822. Edward Bouverie Pusey was elected a fellow of the same college in 1823.