Cardinal Newman
John Henry Newman became famous while he was an Anglican priest and a fellow (on the faculty) at Oriel College in Oxford University. He was a founder of the Oxford Movement, a group of clergymen who tried to reform the Anglican church by steering a path away from "Low Church" Protestantism and towards a "High Church" restoration of ancient Christian doctrine and practice. For years he was accused of leaning toward Rome and for years he vehemently denied it. "If there ever was a system which required reformation, it is that of Rome at this day, or in other words ... Romanism or Popery." His dead-serious intellectual approach, combined with his perception of the supernatural world as more compelling and present than the natural, made him famous within Oxford and outside it.
In 1845, after many years of subtle and obscure research into fifth- century heresies, he had an acute religious crisis. "In the middle of the fifth century I found Christendom of the nineteenth century reflected. I saw my face in that mirror, and I was a Monophysite." This is how he explained his conversion, but there must have been more than intellectual reasons for it. "Still so it is; we need a relief to our hearts, that they may be dark and sullen no longer, or that they may not go on feeding upon themselves; we need to escape from ourselves to something beyond." His reception into the Roman Catholic church that year caused an uproar among his Oxford friends, whom he was forced to leave behind. As a Catholic, he could not be a member of the University, by order of both Oxford and the Church. "I am going to those whom I do not know and of whom I expect very little -- I am making myself an outcast, and that at my age." (He was then 44.) He found a new place for himself in the Oratory of St. Philip Neri, a community of priests living under a rule but not under vows, which would allow him to continue his research and writing.
The independent and courageous intellect that brought Newman into the Church soon made his life difficult within it. His opposition to the formal definition of papal infallibity (proclaimed by Pius IX in 1870) made him unpopular with the hierarchy at Rome. "I fear that in one sense the iron has entered into my soul. I mean that confidence in any superiors whatever never can blossom within me." However, the next pope, Leo XIII, made him a Cardinal in 1879.
Modern liberals like to quote Newman on the primacy of the individual conscience, but Newman's conscience was not an easy one. "Now conscience is a stern and gloomy principle; it tells us of guilt and of prospective punishment. Dare not to think that you have got to the bottom of your hearts; you do not know what evil lies there. Fear and love must go together; always fear, always love, to your dying day. Doubtless; -- still you must know what it is to sow in tears before, if you would reap in joy hereafter."
In his later years he was to be an influence on the next generation of Oxford undergraduates, and counselled many (including the great poet Gerard Manley Hopkins) through their own religious crises. He tended to advise caution to those who expressed an interest in going over to Rome. "You must be patient, you must wait for the eye of the soul to be formed in you. Religious truth is reached, not by reasoning, but by an inward perception."
Cardinal Newman died in 1890. He chose for his memorial, "Ex umbris et imaginibus in veritatem." -- "From shadows and images to the truth."