What led one of the leading Anglicans of England, a brilliant theologian and Oxford graduate, to forsake Anglicanism for a belief that he had recently declared was led by the Antichrist pope? What occurred in his life during middle age that made him convert to the one belief that he had stood against his entire life?
John Henry Newman did what few people of the time expected: he converted to Roman Catholicism.
Catholicism and Anglicanism were very similar at the time Newman lived, the nineteenth century. The big differences between the two expressions of Christianity were the leadership of the pope, the veneration of saints and Mary, and the dispute over the Real Presence in the Eucharist. Compared to other Protestant expressions, Anglicanism, with its hierarchy and liturgy, was very much like Catholicism. And yet the differences for a person such as Newman seemed vast. How did his conversion come about? He recorded this spiritual change in his autobiographical portrait of himself, Apologia Pro Vita Sua.
Born in 1801, Newman was raised in London, attending elite schools and embracing evangelical Protestantism. Like all school children, he was taught that the Church of England was the true Church, having broken away, thanks to the Tudor monarchs and intellectuals such as Thomas Cranmer and Richard Hooker, from the Roman Catholic Church, which had been the bulwark of Christianity for fifteen hundred years. The Anglicans retained much of the liturgy and rituals of the Catholics, but substituted English for Latin in the service, scripture, and writings. Over time they kept the Creed and the sacraments, but they rejected the veneration of the saints and the Virgin and saw the Body and Blood as symbolic. Primarily, they rejected the pope and pronounced him the Antichrist.
Newman, attending Oxford then becoming a tutor, became a High Church Anglican, was ordained a deacon then a priest, and served as a vicar and had his own parish. By the time he was in his early thirties, he became concerned over changes in England that were weakening the power and authority of Anglicanism. He believed the Church was giving into the forces of modernity in England. At this time, under the leadership of Newman and others, the Oxford Movement began.
In some respects, the Oxford Movement of the 1830s anticipated the concerns that led to Vatican I. The thinkers of the movement, led by Newman, believed that the traditions of the Church Fathers were being sacrificed to the new god of Reason, a product of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. Newman had made a special study of the writings of the Church Fathers and believed fervently in Apostolic Succession, and that in England only the Anglicans (rather than the Nonconformists) had benefited from the laying on of hands that went all the way back to Christ and His Apostles. Unknowingly, he was beginning the process of abandoning Anglicanism for Roman Catholicism.
During the 1830s, Newman took the lead in a series of articles, ninety in total, that examined the current situation of the Anglican Church in England. These were called Tracts for Our Times. An early leader in the Tract Movement was Richard Hurrell Froude, who before his untimely death was slowly turning to Catholicism. Froude, Newman wrote in his Apologia, impressed Newman with his ideas on tradition as the basis for Christianity, the belief in the influence of the Virgin, the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist, the reality of miracles, and the influence of the saints. Newman records:
[Froude] made me look with admiration towards the Church of Rome, and in the same degree to dislike the Reformation. He fixed deep in me the idea of devotion to the Blessed Virgin, and he led me gradually to believe in the Real Presence.
Early on in his transformation, Newman began to have a feeling for the “Primeval Mystery” and “the movement of my Spiritual Mother.” He believed that Liberalism would spell the death of Anglicanism. He felt that “there was something greater than the Established Church, and that that was the Church Catholic and Apostolic.” Part of this growing affinity with Rome was his belief that Dogma must preside over Reason in Church affairs, that there is wisdom in the past that surpasses the great minds of the present. The ancient Roman Catholic Church was the mother of tradition that bore the children Latin Catholicism, Greek Catholicism, and Anglo-Catholicism.
His statement in Tract 90 was something of a declaration of independence from Anglicanism:
Our Prayer Book is acknowledged on all hands to be of Catholic origin, our [39] articles also, the offspring of an uncatholic age, are, through GOD’S good providence, to say the least, not uncatholic, and may be subscribed by those who aim at being catholic in heart and doctrine.
Intellectually, by 1840, Newman was ready to reject Anglicanism for Catholicism, but emotionally he still had the old prejudices with him. Indulgences and Purgatory had been long derided by Protestants. But even more, Protestants despised popery, for it was the papacy that Protestants had for centuries made into an archenemy of all things Christian. But as Newman realized that the antiquity and tradition of Roman Catholicism was what made it so necessary to embrace, he realized as well that the Church, from the beginning, had had a Vicar of Christ at its head.
Ultimately, Newman had to embrace the whole, even if some of the parts were concerning. While reading the Fathers of the Church, he discovered that Catholicism, more than Anglicanism or any other Protestant belief, provided the most probable basis for truth. He believed in God, Christianity, and Catholicism on probabilities; religion is based in probabilities, not absolute certainty, and these probabilities he believed in provided the amount of certainty that he needed.
Moreover, the intellectualism of the Church Fathers far surpassed the reasoned propositions of Richard Hooker on why the King should be head of the Church. The Anglican Church had become more a ritualistic parade and the mouthing of words to a precise if unclear formula rather than a place of love and emotion and thought. Newman needed the thought, the philosophy, and the traditions by which he could come to know a personal God who cared for him. He proclaimed, in short:
I am a Catholic by virtue of my believing in a God; and if I am asked why I believe in a God, I answer that it is because I believe in myself, for I feel it impossible to believe in my own existence (and of that I am quite sure) without believing also in the existence of Him, who lives as a Personal, All-seeing Being in my conscience.
His conversion from Anglicanism to Catholicism brought John Henry Newman to a place of integration, in which he could believe exactly what he professed and what he did—both during Mass and at all other times.
St. John Henry Newman, pray for us, for our belief, and our practice of the Faith!
Image via Wikimedia Commons
