Cardinal Newman finally and fittingly crowned prince of Catholic Church
The Catholic University had a slow and painful start getting off the academic ground, writes Dr John Kelly
JOHN Henry Newman, the founder and first rector of the Catholic University of Ireland, the precursor of University College Dublin, will be canonized by Pope Francis in Rome today. It will be a major milestone in the academic history of University College Dublin.
The Catholic bishops of Ireland in 1854, after many years of frustrating and unsuccessful negotiations with the government in London for support to establish a university for the Catholics in Ireland, took the courageous, but sometimes considered as a foolish academic initiative, to go it alone and set up the Catholic University of Ireland.
Up to the year 1840, there was only one university in Ireland: the University of Dublin with its single college, Trinity College, which was then effectively a Protestant institution, catering exclusively for the Protestant population which then represented 13pc of the Irish population. Furthermore, it had strong links with the Church of Ireland, so that its ethos and traditions made it entirely unsatisfactory to the Catholic hierarchy for the university education of Catholic youth. In those difficult post-Famine years, it was the clear objective of the Catholic bishops, as the guardians of the religious interests of the Catholics in Ireland, to establish a university which would cater exclusively for Catholics in the same way Trinity College had proudly and unashamedly catered for Protestants for over 200 years.
Trinity College was generously endowed by the London government, which formally recognised its degrees. The government gave no funding or powers to confer degrees to the new Catholic university. It was simply a private institution, established and owned by the Irish Catholic Church, under the control of the Catholic bishops, in which the London-based government had no interest.
It was, however, a great coup for the bishops to have persuaded the very eminent clergyman, John Henry Newman, then a recent convert to Catholicism, to leave his oratory in Oxford and take up the challenging position as the first rector and founder of the Catholic University.
Newman was born in 1801 and died in 1890. He had been a leading figure in the Anglican Church in the 1840s when, as a fellow of Oriel College in Oxford, undergraduates like Gladstone, the future prime minister, attended his popular Sunday morning sermons in the St Mary’s University Church. He wrote pamphlets in his campaign for the reform of the Church of England. In a controversial and much publicised move, he left the Anglican Church in 1845 and joined the Catholic Church, where he was immediately appointed as the superior in the Birmingham community of Catholic priests, the Congregation of the Oratory. In that position he published his seminal work, The Idea of a University, in 1852, and which is still highly regarded.
The Catholic University opened its doors to 17 students in number 86 St Stephen’s Green in November 1854. It had a slow and painful start getting off the academic ground, and receiving acceptance with the general Catholic communities in Ireland. Newman clearly had great faith and ambition for this new university, when he wrote: “I look towards a land both old and young, old in its Christianity, young in the promise of its future… The capital of that prosperous and hopeful land is situated in a beautiful bay and near a romantic region; and in it I see a flourishing university, which for a while had to struggle with fortune, but which, when its first founders and servants were dead and gone, had successes far exceeding their anxieties.”
It was a tough struggle for Newman. While he was indeed a very intelligent and dedicated man, who attended meticulously to every detail in the management and academic development of the university, it was a steep uphill struggle. Nevertheless, despite his frustrations and difficulties, he took many academic management initiatives so that the framework and staffing which he established in this young university was indeed the correct one and in complete accordance with the accepted higher education norms of the day, comprising professorial chairs in Latin, Greek, mathematics, geography, Italian and Spanish. He allowed one departure from the sciences and arts with the School of Medicine, which alone had a successful and independent existence in a separate venue in central Dublin.
Regrettably, his attempts to establish academic programmes in the professional disciplines of law and engineering did not succeed. His establishment of the students’ Historical, Literary and Aesthetical Society, later renamed the Literary & Historical Society, and which is still thriving today, was a very successful initiative. Newman also designed and got built the beautiful University Church alongside the university on St Stephen’s Green.
In the management of the university, the gentle and scholarly Newman had difficulties with the bishops, some of whom were not happy that they had to arrange for an Englishman to head up their new Irish university. In particular, he found it hard to work with the Archbishop of Dublin, Dr Paul Cullen, to whom he had to report. Furthermore, as an instrument of education, despite all his valiant efforts, Newman had to admit to himself that the Catholic University was a failure and, after four years as its rector, with great disappointment and personal depths of frustration, he decided in 1858 to resign and return to the peace and quiet of his Oratory in Birmingham where he knew precisely where he stood and to whom he had to report.
In 1885, with the change of its management to the Jesuit Order, the Catholic University was renamed University College Dublin; with increasing student numbers, it took on a new lease of life. James Joyce was a student in the years 1898–1902, and despite his criticism of the church, he had a very high regard for the writings of Newman.
Joyce never met Newman, who died in 1890, but as a student he proclaimed that Newman was the greatest prose writer of his day, a view which he continued to hold in his later life, and he is quoted as saying in 1931 that: “Nobody has written English prose that can be compared with that of a tiresome footling Anglican parson who afterwards became a prince of the only true church.”
Indeed it was a strange compliment for the Catholic Church from the once very holy schoolboy Joyce, which is in marked contrast to his many other earlier less than complimentary comments on that church.
Today, Newman will truly become a prince of the Catholic Church.