In Newman’s Home

Contemporary theology receives its purpose from God. It receives its shape from St. John Henry Newman, who, as Joseph Ratzinger stated on the English cardinal’s centenary in 1990, made “his decisive contribution to the renewal of theology” when “he taught us to think historically in theology and so to recognize the identity of faith in all developments.” God came to us in history when the universal became particular in Jesus of Nazareth. We then come into relationship with the Word made flesh in our times and through our limited means.

In the Church, history does not remain confined to the past. It becomes present through multiple means: the action of the Holy Spirit, the Church’s living tradition, the celebration of the Mass, the commemoration of saints, and the honoring of their relics. Newman, who cited the veneration of relics as an example of legitimate doctrinal development, in a poem called relics “heavenly shrines.” As St. Jerome put it 1400 years earlier, “we venerate the relics of the martyrs in order the better to adore Him whose martyrs they are.”

Relics, in addition to leading us to the eternal God, help us in our unique walks of life. They bring saints from the past to the present as we touch a piece of the men and women whose holiness we seek to emulate. Of course, we can pray to saints without relics. Yet, like sacramentals, relics make what we believe visible so that, like Thomas in the upper room, we can see and believe.

During Easter week, I had a new kind of experience with the relics of saints: I visited the home of St. John Henry Newman in Birmingham, England.

When, in 1848, Newman returned to England after his studies and ordination in Rome, he founded in Birmingham an Oratory in the tradition of St. Philip Neri. He personally designed his community’s new home: a three-story Roman-style, colored edifice that could not have stood out more within an English industrial city. Such was precisely Newman’s purpose: Catholicism was being reborn in England after three hundred years of exile.

Newman wanted his countrymen to know that his Catholicism was, to the core, Roman, in continuity with the one true Church that Christ founded and England abandoned.

Newman lived in this home for the final four decades of his long life; he died here in 1890. Thanks to the wisdom of his confreres in the Oratory, the first floor of this home features a museum that showcases so many relics of his life: his chalice, vestments, cardinalate pontificalia, handwritten pages, pens, shoes, hats, and more.

On the second floor, Newman’s personal rooms (on becoming cardinal, he was granted a second) remain as he left them. The inner room has a divider running through the middle. On the near side by the door sits his desk on which he composed volumes of theology, sermons, letters, a novel, poems, and speeches. Some of his books, bibles, and breviaries surround it.

Around the divider rests his personal altar, which consumes the full width of the small space. A tiny baldacchino hovers above a painting of St. Francis de Sales and a crucifix. A few relics and candles touch the rear wall. On the left, a modest statue of the Madonna and child sits on a pedestal next to some paintings and framed letters. Beneath these is a thin closet containing four unadorned fiddleback chasubles, one of each liturgical color. On the right wall are over twenty small photos of family and friends.

“One can imagine,” I was told by one generous Oratorian, “Newman turning his head this way during the Memento of each Mass.” Stationed several steps before the altar, the cardinal’s prie dieu, padded with red fabric, consumes the space’s center.

“One can imagine.” Relics typically conjure saints in their heroism: their wondrous deeds or brilliant theology. Saints’ biographies typically confirm this sentiment. On their feast days, we mention the one or two works for which we remember them, and we try to draw a lesson from their accomplishments to stir our own souls into action. Too often, however, we excuse ourselves: “I’m not a religious; I cannot found an order.” “I’m not a priest.” “I’m not a martyr.” “I’m not called to work with the poor.” “I’m ordinary; the saint is extraordinary.”

Seeing Newman’s rooms inspires a new perspective: the quotidian, even dull, efforts that, over the grinding passage of years, contributed to making this saint. As brilliant as his theology and profound as his devotional writings were, it was Newman’s holiness of life that raised him to the altars. He did this one Mass at a time, one hour of prayer at a time—day after day, week after week, year after year. The graces he received in prayer infused his writings, which did not burst forth as water from a rock, but slowly—one word, one page at a time.

For his emphasis on situating theology within history, Newman has been called the father of the Second Vatican Council, through which the Magisterium emphasized the universal call to holiness for religious, clergy, and laity alike. Newman has taught me so much in the twenty-five years I have been reading him. Retracing his steps in his own home, he taught me something new: the path to God is not necessarily through books and theology, but through living in communion with the Lord, day in and day out.

Newman’s epitaph, written for one who has completed his journey from the particular into the universal, succinctly captures this mystery: “Ex imaginibus et umbris in veritatem. / From images and shadows into the truth.”

Newman’s home preserves his relics and his life so we, too, can make the same journey.