This article is about the English cardinal and saint.

For the Bohemian-American bishop, see John

Neumann.
"Cardinal Newman" redirects here. For other uses, see Cardinal Newman (disambiguation).
Saint

John Henry Newman

Cong. Orat.
Cardinal Deacon of San Giorgio in Velabro

Portrait of Newman in choir dress

by John Everett Millais, 1881
Church Catholic Church
Appointed 15 May 1879
Term ended 11 August 1890
Predecessor Tommaso Martinelli
Successor Francis Aidan Gasquet
 Fellow of Oriel College,
Oxford
Other posts  Provost of the Birmingham
Oratory

Orders
 13 June 1824 (deacon;
Church of England)
Ordination
 29 May 1825 (priest; Church
of England)
  30 May 1847 (priest;
Catholic Church)

Created 12 May 1879

cardinal by Pope Leo XIII
Rank Cardinal deacon
Personal details
Birth name John Henry Newman
21 February 1801
Born London, England,
United Kingdom
11 August 1890 (aged 89)
Died Edgbaston, Birmingham, England,
United Kingdom
Oratory House, Rednal, West
Buried
Midlands, England, United Kingdom
Nationality British
Catholic Church
Denomination
prev. Church of England
John Newman (died 1824)
Parents
Jemima Fourdrinier (1772–1836)
Alma mater Trinity College, Oxford
Cor ad cor loquitur
Motto
('Heart speaks unto heart')

Coat of arms

Sainthood
 9 October (Catholic Church)
 11 August (Church of
England)
Feast day
 21 February (Episcopal
Church)

 Catholic Church
 Church of England
Venerated in
 Episcopal Church

19 September 2010
Beatified Cofton Park, Birmingham, England
by Pope Benedict XVI
13 October 2019
Canonized
St. Peter's Square,[1] Vatican City
 by Pope Francis
Attributes Cardinal's attire
Personal Ordinariate of Our Lady of
Patronage
Walsingham
Birmingham Oratory,
Edgbaston, England
Shrines
Philosophy career
Apologia Pro Vita Sua
Notable work Tract 90
Grammar of Assent
Era 19th-century philosophy
Region Western philosophy
 Aristotelianism[2]
 Augustinianism
School  Empiricism[3]
 Christian humanism

 Faith and rationality

 Religious epistemology
 Historical theology
Main interests  Christian apologetics
 Philosophy of education
 Liberal education

 Development of doctrine
 Primacy of conscience
 Argument for conscience[4]
Notable ideas
 Illative sense
 Apologia

Influences[show]
Influenced[show]

John Henry Newman (21 February 1801 – 11 August 1890) was an English theologian and
poet, first an Anglican priest and later a Roman Catholic priest and cardinal, who was an
important and controversial figure in the religious history of England in the 19th century. He was
known nationally by the mid-1830s,[10] and was canonised as a saint in the Roman Catholic
Church in 2019.

Originally an evangelical Oxford University academic and priest in the Church of England,
Newman became drawn to the high-church tradition of Anglicanism. He became known as a
leader of, and an able polemicist for the Oxford Movement, an influential and controversial
grouping of Anglicans who wished to return to the Church of England many Catholic beliefs and
liturgical rituals from before the English Reformation. In this, the movement had some success.
In 1845 Newman, joined by some but not 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 cause 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. CUI in time evolved
into University College Dublin.[11]

Newman was also a literary figure: his major writings include 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),[12] which was set to music in 1900 by Edward
Elgar. He wrote the popular hymns "Lead, Kindly Light" and "Praise to the Holiest in the
Height" (taken from Gerontius).

Newman's beatification was officially proclaimed by Pope Benedict XVI on 19 September 2010
during his visit to the United Kingdom.[13] His canonisation was officially approved by Pope
Francis on 12 February 2019,[14] and took place on 13 October 2019.[15]

He is the fifth saint of the City of London, behind Thomas Becket (born in Cheapside), Thomas
More (born on Milk Street), Edmund Campion (son of a London book seller) and Polydore
Plasden (of Fleet Street).[16][17]

Contents
 1 Early life and education
o 1.1 At school in Ealing
o 1.2 Evangelical
o 1.3 At university
 2 Anglican priest
 3 Oxford Movement
o 3.1 Mediterranean travels
o 3.2 Tracts for the Times
o 3.3 Doubts and opposition
o 3.4 Retreat to Littlemore
 4 Conversion to Roman Catholicism
o 4.1 Oratorian
o 4.2 Lectures on the Present Position of Catholics in England
o 4.3 Achilli trial
o 4.4 Educator
o 4.5 Relationships with other converts
 5 Apologia
 6 Later years and death
 o 6.1 Cardinalate
o 6.2 Death
o 6.3 Remains
 7 Writer
 8 Theologian
 9 Character and relationships
o 9.1 Celibacy
o 9.2 Friendships
o 9.3 Discussion about potential homosexuality
 10 Influence and legacy
o 10.1 Tertiary education
 11 Cause for his canonisation
o 11.1 Feast day
 12 Works
 13 See also
 14 References and notes
 15 Further reading
 16 External links

Early life and education

Newman was born on 21 February 1801 in the City of London,[12][18] the eldest of a family of
three sons and three daughters.[19] His father, John Newman, was a banker with Ramsbottom,
Newman and Company in Lombard Street. His mother, Jemima (née Fourdrinier), was
descended from a notable family of Huguenot refugees in England, founded by the engraver,
printer and stationer Paul Fourdrinier. Francis William Newman was a younger brother. His
eldest sister, Harriet Elizabeth, married Thomas Mozley, also prominent in the Oxford
Movement.[20] The family lived in Southampton Street (now Southampton Place) in Bloomsbury
and bought a country retreat in Ham, near Richmond, in the early 1800s.[21]

At school in Ealing

At the age of seven Newman was sent to Great Ealing School conducted by George Nicholas.
There George Huxley, father of Thomas Henry Huxley, taught mathematics,[22] and the classics
teacher was Walter Mayers.[23] Newman took no part in the casual school games.[24] 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 works by Thomas Paine, David Hume and perhaps Voltaire.[25]

Evangelical

At the age of 15, during his last year at school, Newman was converted, an incident of which he
wrote in his Apologia that it was "more certain than that I have hands or feet".[26] Almost at the
same time (March 1816) the bank Ramsbottom, Newman and Co. crashed, though it paid its
creditors and his father left to manage a brewery.[27] Mayers, who had himself undergone a
conversion in 1814, lent Newman books from the English Calvinist tradition.[23] 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, which, through God's mercy, have never been effaced or
obscured".[28] He became an evangelical Calvinist and held the typical belief that the Pope was
the antichrist under the influence of the writings of Thomas Newton,[29] as well as his reading of
Joseph Milner's History of the Church of Christ.[20] Mayers is described as a moderate, Clapham
Sect Calvinist,[30] and Newman read William Law as well as William Beveridge in devotional
literature.[31] He also read The Force of Truth by Thomas Scott.[32]

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."[33]

At university

Newman's name was entered at Lincoln's Inn. He was, however, sent shortly to Trinity College,
Oxford, where he studied widely. However, his anxiety to do well in the final schools produced
the opposite result; he broke down in the examination, under Thomas Vowler Short,[34] and so
graduated as a BA "under the line" (with a lower second class honours in Classics, and having
failed classification in the Mathematical Papers).

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

Anglican priest
On 13 June 1824, Newman was made an Anglican deacon in Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford.
Ten days later he preached his first sermon in Holy Trinity at Over Worton, near Banbury,
Oxfordshire, when on a visit to his former teacher the Reverend Walter Mayers, who had been
curate there since 1823.[35] On Trinity Sunday, 29 May 1825, he was ordained a priest in Christ
Church Cathedral by the Bishop of Oxford, Edward Legge.[36] He became, at Pusey's suggestion,
curate of St Clement's Church, Oxford. Here, for two years, he was engaged in parochial work,
and wrote articles on Apollonius of Tyana, Cicero, and Miracles for the Encyclopædia
Metropolitana.

Richard Whately and Edward Copleston, Provost of Oriel, were leaders in the group of Oriel
Noetics, a group of independently thinking dons with a strong belief in free debate.[37] In 1825, at
Whately's request, Newman became vice-principal of St Alban Hall, but he only held this post
for one year. He attributed much of his "mental improvement" and partial conquest of his
shyness at this time to Whately.
Portrait of Newman, by George Richmond, 1844[38]

In 1826 Newman returned as a tutor to Oriel, and the same year Richard Hurrell Froude,
described by Newman as "one of the acutest, cleverest and deepest men" he ever met, was
elected fellow there. The two formed a high ideal of the tutorial office as clerical and pastoral
rather than secular, which led to tensions in the college. Newman assisted Whately in his popular
work Elements of Logic (1826, initially for the Encyclopædia Metropolitana), and from him
gained a definite idea of the Christian Church as institution: "... a Divine appointment, and as a
substantive body, independent of the State, and endowed with rights, prerogatives and powers of
its own".[20]

Newman broke with Whately in 1827 on the occasion of the re-election of Robert Peel as
Member of Parliament for the university: Newman opposed Peel on personal grounds. In 1827
Newman was a preacher at Whitehall.

Oxford Movement
In 1828 Newman supported and secured the election of Edward Hawkins as Provost of Oriel
over John Keble. This choice, he later commented,[citation needed] produced the Oxford Movement
with all its consequences. In the same year Newman was appointed vicar of St Mary's University
Church, to which the benefice of Littlemore (to the south of the city of Oxford) was attached,[39]
and Pusey was made Regius Professor of Hebrew.

At this date, though Newman was still nominally associated with the Evangelicals, his views
were gradually assuming a higher ecclesiastical tone. George Herring considers that the death of
his sister Mary in January had a major impact on Newman. In the middle part of the year he
worked to read the Church Fathers thoroughly.[40]

While local secretary of the Church Missionary Society, Newman circulated an anonymous letter
suggesting a method by which Anglican clergy might practically oust Nonconformists from all
control of the society. This resulted in his being dismissed from the post on 8 March 1830; and
three months later Newman withdrew from the Bible Society, completing his move away from
the Low Church group. In 1831–1832 Newman became the "Select Preacher" before the
university. In 1832 his difference with Hawkins as to the "substantially religious nature" of a
college tutorship became acute and prompted his resignation.[41]