John Henry Newman plays the jack pudding
John Henry Newman wrote some finely comic passages in letters home from Ireland, where he set about the thankless task of setting up a university. This was in 1854, the coldest winter for 40 years.
At Kilkenny station he took a cab to see the Bishop of Ossory. No one came to the door when he rang, and after a while he tried the handle and went in. Still no one came when he called, so he went up some steps and knocked on a door and found a scullery maid who told him that her master was in London. At last it dawned on Newman that this was the palace of the Church of Ireland Bishop of Ossory, not the house of the Catholic Bishop.
He reflected that it was probably a good thing that the wrong bishop was out when he called, since for 15 years he had been writing against Newman and calling him bad names. Once he had found the right Bishop of Ossory, he discovered to his amusement why the cabman had taken him to the Protestant bishop’s palace.
Because of the terrible cold, Newman had bought a woolly plaid in Dublin, assured by the shopkeeper that it was quite in keeping as clerical wear. Perhaps it was, but it made him look like a Protestant clergyman not a Catholic one. Now he found himself “wandering over the wide world in a fantastic dress like a Merry Andrew, yet with a Roman collar on”.
This is an example of Newman’s self-awareness, which might sometimes be self-consciousness. He must have been embarrassed on the same trip to be suddenly asked to make a speech to 70 schoolgirls dressed in blue, each wearing a medal, only to be told at the end by the headmistress that it was not a proper speech and he must make another (or she’d have dressed up the girls for nothing), upon which he asked for a half-holiday for the girls, which was flatly refused. Newman recalled it was his birthday (February 21) and thought to himself that he was old enough (53) “to be forgiven if he could not at a moment act the spiritual jack pudding to a girls’ school”.
Self-conscious or not, Newman is soon to be canonised. I am glad he is to be a saint, for he clearly was one. In 2010 I stood with a few thousand other people in a muddy field in Birmingham when he was beatified in a ceremony conducted by Pope Benedict XVI, who had admired the English theologian as a student in post-war Germany.
Two years earlier, in Westminster Cathedral (where in 1903 Elgar had conducted the first performance of his Dream of
Gerontius, setting Newman’s poem), they had unveiled a mosaic designed by Tom Phillips. It showed Newman with eyes closed, beneath the inscription: “Prayer is a vital act of faith.” It seems an inspired choice of quotation, though I’m not sure where it comes in Newman’s works.
He did make interesting remarks about faith and prayer in a sermon for Easter. It was written when he was an Anglican clergyman (in communion with the other bishop of Ossory). But like all his parish sermons it was republished in his lifetime as still reflecting his ideas as a Catholic.
Prayer is granted, he insists, just as “faith leads infallibly to justification”. But it is not usually just one prayer that is granted; it is repeated prayer, and, in the same way “it is not one act of faith which justifies us, or two acts, but to live in faith and to walk in faith”.
The phrase “vital act of faith” was not invented by Newman, and he did not think, like some before him, that people are saved by a psychologically identifiable moment of belief. Once the work had begun, it must be persevered in.