Newman and the key to conversion

A novel and a “history of my religious opinions” offer insights into approaching and then entering the Catholic Church.

John Henry Cardinal Newman in 1887. [Wikipedia]

Lately, I’ve had occasion to read two books by Saint John Henry Newman.

One is Newman’s first novel, Loss and Gainwhile the other is that classic “history of my religious opinions” (Newman’s words), the Apologia Pro Vita Sua. Although the two volumes could hardly be more unalike in most respects, both are of considerable interest for what they tell us about the process of religious conversion.

Let’s start with Loss and Gain. Published in 1848, just two years after Newman’s own conversion, its central character is an Oxford student named Charles Reding whose religious journey, from Anglicanism to Catholicism, parallels Newman’s. The story is by no means autobiographical–Reding isn’t Newman by another name–but the process of conversion is much the same in both cases.

Both conversions, the one in the story and Newman’s in real life, are what might be called Oxford conversions. Reding’s occurs in the heyday of the Oxford Movement, the Anglican renewal effort that sought to make English Anglicanism more Catholic and ended—for those like Newman who, after much prayer and study, finally took the step of “crossing the Tiber” and became Catholics themselves.

And the key to conversion? Above all, God’s grace, of course, but paradoxically, in human terms, the key is often the objections raised by others against what is for Reding, as it was for Newman, no easy decision. Time and again this obstacle moves the young man to persist, even though persisting means breaking with family and friends and even his beloved Oxford.

On the morning of his final parting, Reding bids an intensely personal goodbye to the university, described in lyrical terms. “The morning was frosty, and there was a mist; the leaves flitted about; all was in unison with the state of his feelings….There was no one to see him; he threw his arms round the willows so dear to him, and kissed them; he tore off some of their black leaves and put them in his bosom.”

In the case of the Apologia Pro Vita Sua, the spur lay in the very circumstance that led to the book (“How great a trial it is to me to write the following history of myself,” Newman writes at the start). The story is familiar. An Anglican clergyman and popular writer named Charles Kingsley took an unprovoked cheap shot in a journal review at Newman and Catholic priests generally, alleging something very like habitual untruthfulness on their part.

Newman demanded a public apology, Kingsley hedged, and the upshot was a series of pamphlets by Newman putting the whole episode on the record. The pamphlets were the basis for what became the Apologia.

The book is not an easy read, since it assumes a familiarity with religious language that comparatively few readers today possess. But it contains memorable writing, such as this on the Catholic Church—an assembly of vastly different individuals “brought together as if into some moral factory, for the melting, refining, and moulding, by an incessant, noisy process, of the raw material of human nature, so excellent, so dangerous, so capable of divine purposes.”

These two books together point to a surprising conclusion: Often, as here, despite significant opposition, someone persists in a life-changing decision at least partly because the opposition has the unanticipated consequence of reinforcing the determination to persist. Although that may seem like a banal conclusion, in the hands of a master like Newman it sheds helpful light on what might otherwise look like incomprehensible stubbornness.


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About Russell Shaw 305 Articles
Russell Shaw was secretary for public affairs of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops/United States Catholic Conference from 1969 to 1987. He is the author of 20 books, including Nothing to Hide, American Church: The Remarkable Rise, Meteoric Fall, and Uncertain Future of Catholicism in America, Eight Popes and the Crisis of Modernity, and, most recently, The Life of Jesus Christ (Our Sunday Visitor, 2021).

23 Comments

  1. Thank you for this beautiful reflection on St. Newman.

    After Arianism lost theologically at Nicea, it won politically and militarily. The final and full failure of Arianism was brought about by believers who followed Jesus Christ, the Way to Live in the Truth of God.

    In the end, the only reason to be religious is in relation to the Divine Persons. Every other ideology is a false fad that will fade away. God is greater than space.

    • “Every other ideology is a false fad…”
      Maybe correct to delete “other” and to read “Every ideology is a false fad…” The “Truth of God” is not an ideology, and the Catholic Social Teaching–rooted in moral theology–is the negation of all ideology.

      • Thank you. Rest assured that I will strike the word “other” in my forthcoming Retractions.

        After the last decade, we should not want our writings to add to the messy confusion in our Church. And yet, since we are making distinctions like backwardists, allow a sed contra:

        We are in agreement that Christianity is not another ideology. And I assume that we are in agreement that Christianity is not another myth. Yet with the help of Tolkien, CS Lewis came to see Christianity as a “true myth.” So why should we not speak of Christianity as a true ideology? Perhaps the answer is in the natural law.

        • We’re on the same page, but not quite the same language. The term and idea of “ideology” was coined by Antoine Destutt de Tracy in 1796, while in prison during the Reign of Terror. He saw it as the “science of ideas” and hoped to oppose the irrationality of the mob. But, only an equal and opposite polarity?

          The Natural Law is not an idea at all; it is a fact (!), and, our ideas about the universal and baked-in Natural Law predate the French Revolution by millennia, and are confirmed in the self-disclosing Incarnation.

          This is why, in Veritatis Splendor (1993), St. John Paul II refers to the fact of the moral law and moral absolutes by saying that even the Church is neither its origin nor its arbiter (n. 95), and why in the earlier Centesimus Annus (1991) he stressed, therefore, that the Catholic Social Teaching is rooted in moral theology and categorically not in any ideology.

          So, yes, Christianity is the myth that happens to be true (C.S. Lewis), but maybe Natural Law still is not quite an ideology in any sense (only an idea), whether true or not. Rather, and directly, the “transcendent dignity of the [concrete] human person” without exception.

          • Amen! Thanks. Perhaps the only light between us is the Light of God. We bask in Him, Jesus Christ, Our Lord and Savior, the Word of God, the Logos.

            And yet, like a dog on the end of a rope, allow the continuation of my perseveration:

            So what if the word “ideology” was coined by an atheist by combining the Greek words for idea and logos. Neither of these words are off limits to Christians simply because they were first used by pagans. Logos is found 331 times in the New Testament. “In the beginning was the Word (Logos) and the Word (Logos) was with God and the Word (Logos) was God” (John 1:1)

            Why should Christians refrain from the use of any word that can convey the Truth of Jesus Christ, the Omnipotent Logos of God?

          • About the “dog on the end of a rope,” as the Hadith puts it: “the dogs bark but the caravan moves on!”

            But about coinage of words, John’s Gospel selects the term “Word” because it bore two meanings brought together in the Incarnation. To the Jews it meant Revelation and to the Greeks it meant Reason. These insights came together when Paul crossed into Macedonia—an evangelization journey highlighted by Benedict as very providential. Says he, Christian is not rooted in symbolism as were the contemporary pagan mystery religions, but rather in the coherence of faith and reason.

            Hence, the impasse between thinking Christians and devout Muslims. The Muslim world is not attuned historically to the Greek contribution. Such that even time and history are not real. Man chooses either God or his own passions (something like Augustine’s City of God, yet different). Reason tends to become a separate autonomy from the absolute autonomy of God, and therefore is blasphemy. Historically, then, the conflict between the ummah or House of Islam and the infidel House of War.

            No wonder monotheistic (and monolithic) Islamic scholarship rationalize (not reason) Christ as foretelling the coming of Muhammad rather than as promising the coming of the Holy Spirit from the Triune One. The incarnate “Word made flesh” (Jn 1:14) versus the dictated and Qur’anic “word made book.”

            We need not wonder whether the State Department and the world of secular diplomacy in the post-Christian West fully appreciate the depth of the impasse.

  2. I read somewhere that what decided Newman was seeing a pre-1958 Catholic Church full of heads nodding up and down at the Holy Name “Jesus” during rosaries and private devotions… Were Newman to witness a Novos Ordo Church today everything that inspired him has been cancel-cultured.

    • Mr. Cracked Nut, please source your statement about what decided Newman, because there is no mention of nodding heads in the Apologia. At least that I could find. What I do read about is Newman’s horror at discovering the schismatic similarities between the Anglican and Monophysite phenomena. He had staked everything on Antiquity only to find that Antiquity pulled the rug out from the Via Media, as it does with schisms in every age.

      • Wish I could Ed… could have been a talk I attended. Apparently he liked to stop at the door of a local Catholic parish and observe the goings on – the sea of nodding heads. I understood that this decided him. Perhaps another reader could fill in the blank for poor old Cracked Nut?

  3. Thank you for reminding us of the great insights of St. John Henry Newman. He is
    truly a holy man who speaks to us today. He believed fervently in the truth and
    pursued it wherever it led even though it cost him a great deal in human terms.
    Many of his works can be found on: http://www.newmanreader.org.

  4. At Newman and Catholic priests generally, alleging something very like habitual untruthfulness on their part (Kingsley’s cheap shot).
    Newman is the Protestant every Catholic loves. During his trip to Sicily as a young man he portrays himself in the Apologia exactly as he was, an English Anglican sophisticate, duly prejudiced, who found it astonishing that his Sicilian hosts treated him as if he were Jesus Christ when stricken with illness. Nevertheless he mentioned this in a letter to his mother with an air of snobbishness. He was completely honest about himself.
    That honesty in his journey to Catholicism is evident throughout his modern equivalent to Augustine’s Confessions. Shaw leaves us with some personal insights on his conversion. I leave a bait for those who believe one must be a baptized Catholic, or a professed Catholic to enter paradise. Who would believe, perhaps better said, want to believe that had he died during his long journey when at times filled with doubts and unwillingness that Our Lord would have condemned him? Christ with foreknowledge of where the process would have gone would also seem to be part of the equation.

      • No Nemo. It’s precisely a reference to his intellectual and spiritual challenge as a prominent Anglican, his admirable honesty and integrity during his years as a Protestant searching for the truth regarding Catholicism.

    • I appreciate your position, but what I have always leaned on is the understanding that “in my Father’s house are many mansions.” In my humble opinion, this allows for those who come to know Christ, but did not find their way the salvific sacraments of the Catholic Church. There is both a reason and a value to the priesthood, and why those sacraments are made valid through those given authority to do so. One cannot buy the authority (Simon Magus) or assume the authority in the false belief of the authority of the believer we hear from Protestants.
      Through Jesus Christ we all are made perfect, but that does not mean that all have received the sacraments.

      • “This allows for those who come to know Christ, but did not find their way the salvific sacraments of the Catholic Church”. Michael B. What you say here regarding the many mansions in God’s house has always been my opinion.

        • What encouraged me to think that Michael B is the letter of innocent III to the Archbishop of Arles in 1201. That letter instructed the Archbishop that only those who die in unrepentant mortal sin are condemned. That the unbaptized [although Augustine and Aquinas thought otherwise], infants, persons who follow God’s grace are withheld the Beatific Vision.
          The opinion was held that these persons are in an indeterminate state, the meaning of the word Limbo. Today the Catechism simply says that the Church has hope in God’s mercy. Thus, the opinion I and some hold is that they’re saved from Hell but denied the Beatific Vision. I believe Dante Alighieri, a devotee of Aquinas, nonetheless held that position in the Inferno.
          Consequently, other mansions in God’s house may be that undetermined state.

      • Can you please further explain? Do you suggest that a person may be perfect without the sacrament of baptism? Jesus Himself modeled its necessary value.
        He Himself taught that He IS the Bread of Life in the sacrament of Holy Eucharist. He spoke of the ramification at John 6:53-55. How can one be perfected “through” Jesus Christ while rejecting His very Body—the Church—which He Himself founded?

        St. Theresa of Avila considered the ‘mansions’ of God’s house to be the stages of purification within a (Catholic) soul. One is saved while working toward and hoping to be graced and blessed by an ever-greater degree of God’s perfection.

  5. About the Oxford Movement, there was a little-known and very mini-Oxford Movement in the 1930s at the University of Washington (UW).

    One convert, a humanities scholar who for years had dallied as an “agnostic humanist, Herbert Ellsworth Cory, was drawn mostly by St. Augustine. But, he also devotes an entire chapter to the kind of “difficulties” that the cited NEWMAN had in mind: “Ten thousand difficulties do not make one doubt.” Ending with Thompson’s “Hound of Heaven,” Cory’s scholarly conversion story is published as “The Emancipation of a Freethinker” (Bruce Publishing, 1941).

    At least one of his students converted, Fr. Jack Fulton, O.P., whose own story is recounted in his more pedestrian “Love Blooms in [hometown] Brooklyn” (Hillcraft Publishing, 1992). Cory was his godfather. This peace-filled man graduated as the UW President’s Medalist in 1934, was ordained in 1942 and, beginning in 1962 at the UW Newman Center, was a dear friend too everyone he touched. Even the motorcycle crowd. Until, still in Seattle, he passed on the Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe in 1998, most likely as a saint. Novenas reportedly were answered.

    Noteworthy of Fulton is that he was first drawn by the REAL PRESENCE while still a teen when he sneaked into Seattle’s Gothic Revival (Dominican) Blessed Sacrament Church. And, later as a priest, he said the Mass weekly in both the Novus Ordo AND the Latin (the Dominican Mass which is 99% identical to the Tridentine, but a century older). In the 1980s, and as a formerly devout Methodist, his bible classes—some ecumenical—were conducted at five locations every week. His delightfully Protestant-ish “testimony” story was a big draw across the board for decades. Even in Presbyterian Scotland. About the Latin Mass, but also in all settings, people came from long distances—and yet, he suffered interiorly. But in 1994—and still 13 years before Pope Benedict’s Summorum Pontificum (2007)—the local archbishop extended permission in writing (!) to continue for “as long as I live.”

    An island of CALM amidst post-Vatican II turmoil and hyperliberal Seattle in Western Washington. His favorite gospel was St. John, but his favorite line in all of dog-eared Scripture was this—1 Thes 1:5: “…because our gospel came to you not simply with words but also with power [!], with the Holy Spirit and deep conviction. You know how we lived among you for your sake.”

    About his CONVERSION from Protestantism and into the Church of the sacramental Real Presence, he explained: “I gave up nothing; I simply found what I always had thought I had.”

  6. I LOVE some of the stuff I have read by Newman. Read his ” Everyday Meditations”, as published by the Sophia Institute. These are short meditations, between 2 and 4 SMALL pages long. Easy to pick up and put down. What I found moving was the depth of emotion in his writing, unusual for men of the time. He was ostracized by many friends and family after he left the Anglican church and became a Catholic. A saintly man with the courage of his convictions.

  7. Either Catholic Truth as handed down until 1958 is true or it is false. To suggest it is otherwise than True undermines the entire faith.

    It is therefore false that we should hold to the modernist ecumenical New Church priniciple that baptism is irrelevant and any religion will do.

  8. About the Oxford Movement, there was a little-known and very mini-Oxford Movement in the 1930s at the University of Washington (UW).

    One convert, a humanities scholar who for years had dallied as an “agnostic humanist, Herbert Ellsworth Cory, was drawn mostly by St. Augustine. But, he also devotes an entire chapter to the kind of “difficulties” that the cited NEWMAN had in mind: “Ten thousand difficulties do not make one doubt.” Ending with Thompson’s “Hound of Heaven,” Cory’s scholarly conversion story is published as “The Emancipation of a Freethinker” (Bruce Publishing, 1941).

    At least one of his students converted, Fr. Jack Fulton, O.P., whose own story is recounted in his more pedestrian “Love Blooms in [hometown] Brooklyn” (Hillcraft Publishing, 1992). Cory was his godfather. This peace-filled man graduated as the UW President’s Medalist in 1934, was ordained in 1942 and, beginning in 1962 at the UW Newman Center, was a dear friend too everyone he touched. Even the motorcycle crowd. Until, still in Seattle, he passed on the Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe in 1998, most likely as a saint. Novenas reportedly were answered.

    Noteworthy of Fulton is that he was first drawn by the REAL PRESENCE while still a teen when he sneaked into Seattle’s Gothic Revival (Dominican) Blessed Sacrament Church. And, later as a priest, he said the Mass weekly in both the Novus Ordo AND the Latin (the Dominican Mass which is 99% identical to the Tridentine, but a century older). In the 1980s, and as a formerly devout Methodist, his bible classes—some ecumenical—were conducted at five locations every week. His delightfully Protestant-ish “testimony” story was a big draw across the board for decades. Even in Presbyterian Scotland. About the Latin Mass, but also in all settings, people came from long distances—and yet, he suffered interiorly. But in 1994—and still 13 years before Pope Benedict’s Summorum Pontificum (2007)—the local archbishop extended permission in writing (!) to continue for “as long as I live.”

    An island of CALM amidst post-Vatican II turmoil and hyperliberal Seattle in Western Washington. His favorite gospel was St. John, but his favorite line in all of dog-eared Scripture was this—1 Thes 1:5: “…because our gospel came to you not simply with words but also with power [!], with the Holy Spirit and deep conviction. You know how we lived among you for your sake.”

    About his CONVERSION from Protestantism and into the Church of the sacramental Real Presence, he explained: “I gave up nothing; I simply found what I always had thought I had.”

  9. My father converted to Catholicism to marry my mother. He went to Chuch with her and every so often he would let siip how pedestrian and out-of-touch and juvenile and unspiritual the sermons were. Still are. In my years in a Catholic religious order and at a Catholic university and then teaching at a Catholic seminary , I find one of the roots of all this : A lazy anti-intellecutalism. Just get through Latin or whatever so you can be a priest and really do something that matters. I remember Jesus saying to a mystic “DO not think I was holier or more pleasing to My Father when I was giving the sermon on the Mount then when I was in the workshop with St Joseph”

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  1. Newman and the key to conversion – seamasodalaigh

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