Our saint, whose feast we celebrate today, lived a famously long life full of many twists and turns and dramatic vicissitudes. He endured many painful personal difficulties as a result of them. Many of these were bereavements he suffered frequently through life; the sudden, early death of his dearest sister Mary, for instance, was to remain within him as a deep sorrow until the end of his own very long life over fifty years later. He could not even think of her in his old age without shedding tears. But there were other kinds of personal losses which he endured frequently, and these were also very painful, such as the loss of friends through their estrangement from him, or through betrayal of his friendship, but it is a fact that many of these came about as a result of his own actions and choices. What lay behind those choices is what we are celebrating today.
This feast falls on the anniversary of the single most catastrophic upheaval in his life (and I use the word catastrophic advisedly). Whereas on most saints’ days we celebrate their birthday into eternal life, that is not what St John Henry Newman’s feast day recalls. Instead, it was an event which took place when he was already halfway through his life: it was his becoming a Catholic at Littlemore on October 9th, 1845, an event which he described on that night in several letters to close relatives and friends, as his ‘being received into the one fold of the Redeemer.’ It was this step, he knew only too well, that would bring about a decisive breach with so many of his friends and colleagues in the Oxford Movement of the Church of England, a movement that he had started over a decade earlier with Keble, Pusey and others. He would also break off all contact not just with his university, which had been his home and workplace for well over a quarter of a century, but also with his remaining family, especially his remaining living sisters Jemima and Harriett, to whom he had always been close.
If the loss of so many dear and beloved persons was a sorrowful end to the entire first part of his life, it was more than made up for by something that was of inestimable value and joy: for on entering into this one fold of the Redeemer, the Catholic Church, Newman was filled with unquenchable joy and gratitude to God. On that fateful day he went into his library, on whose shelves stood the volumes of the Church Fathers he had been studying assiduously for years, and taking them down he joyfully kissed each of them, exclaiming, ‘now at last I belong to you!’
Belonging to the Church of the Fathers was far more than merely arriving at a common mind with historical figures from a remote past. As he wrote in the Essay on Development, the work in which articulated his reasons for seeking admission to the Catholic Church, Newman was truly entering a body, a vast entity with an organic unity in time and throughout the world. It was a body which was poor and despised in England generally and in Oxford especially at that time, socially and educationally inferior, barely emerging from centuries of persecution and the contempt of the powerful, yet Newman realised that these rather secretive, poor and despised people were essentially much more than they outwardly seemed. They were in truth members of one and the same as the communion that had contained and nourished the great fathers of the Christian faith: Athanasius, Ambrose, Cyril, Augustine and Leo. Belonging to them meant that he was now part of the same body, the body of Christ no less, sharing in the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, as St Paul had described the essence of the Church of Christ to the Ephesians.
This is the true significance of the words spoken by our Lord at the Last Supper and which we have just heard in the Gospel: ‘I am the vine’. All his life, Newman was utterly consistent about one thing in particular: his search for, and dedication to, truth. It was this that had inspired his great attempt to recover the apostolical character of the Church of England, which fuelled the vigorous expenditure of time and energy which he devoted to the Tracts that he not only largely composed, but personally distributed to clergy far and wide around Oxfordshire in order to reawaken the sense that the Anglican Church was not an instrument of the state or government of England, but was truly a branch of the apostolic Church of Christ. Truth always came first in Newman’s life; and obedience to wherever truth led him. That night in October, 1845 was a new stage in the long search for truth, and one that was destined to bring him not only to the unity of the faith, but also to mature manhood in Christ.
The kindly light had been leading him since his earliest years into the fullness of the life of the vine, the true vine. For he had come to see that the Church is the vine of Christ, and that he must enter into the life of that vine if he were to have any life within him. For, cut off from that vine he could do nothing. It was a step bought at a heavy price, but one that he knew was even worth such a cost. A month after his reception into the Church and his first Communion, he wrote a letter of farewell to one of his oldest remaining friends and comrade-at-arms, John Keble, thanking him for all that his friendship had brought him. Yet Newman wrote aware that they would be sundered from now on, since Keble would remain in that communion in which they had both been brought up. Knowing this, Newman wrote these words: ‘Let it be your comfort [my dear Keble] when you are troubled, to think that there is one who feels that he owes all to you, and who, though, alas, now cut off from you, is a faithful assiduous friend unseen.’
The pain of being cut off from Keble, as also the pain of being cut off from his sisters and many others besides, he could yet endure because he firmly believed and truly, that he was now most certainly not cut off from the true vine. He had laboured for many years within another communion, believing that he was part of the true vine, yet coming to realise that it was an illusion. The truth was more difficult to discern than simply viewing the surface. The splendour of the church and university to which he belonged, which had nurtured him, was not anything to set alongside the true vine of the apostolic and catholic Church which was not only the one fold of the Redeemer, but was His living body on earth.
Newman was now not only grafted onto the true vine, but was now subject to all that the Lord said at the Last Supper must happen to any branch that lived in Him: in order to bear much fruit, every branch in Him must be pruned or, as the original Greek word puts it, ‘made pure’, cleansed of all that would keep the branch less than fully fruitful as the Lord willed it to be. So it would prove many times throughout the forty five years that still lay ahead of him in this world. Newman would undertake many great works for the love of God and so many of them would seem to fail. This was undoubtedly a great part of Newman’s share in the cross which was the pruning or purification of his soul and will. Although he was not to enjoy the fruits of his labours and sacrifices in this life, they would grow to maturity in another age. It was only after over a hundred years had passed since his departure out of shadows and images into the reality of eternity that his holiness would at last be acknowledged by the universal Church at his canonisation, and even now more fruit is promised as the Church discerns his extraordinary gifts as a teacher of the faith, considering whether to make him a Doctor of the Church in our troubled times.
And there is one particular sign of Newman’s continuing influence in our times that I want to end with. It was by God’s providence that in 1847, when Newman was seeking how best to use his gifts within the Catholic Church, he was guided to the figure of St Philip Neri, the 16th century founder of the Oratory in Rome. The Oratory was to prove to be Newman’s new home in the Church, which was to make up for, and more than compensate for, the loss of his first home and of his family and friends.
Yet in setting up the Oratory in England Newman was constantly beset by many problems and insecurities. For instance, his deeply held hopes of founding an Oratory here in Oxford were frustrated in his lifetime and were only to be fulfilled exactly a century after his death. In such trials as this he made his own the prayer of the Oratorian Church historian, Cardinal Baronius, who prayed to St Philip imploring him to ‘visit this vine which thy right hand planted with so much labour, anxiety and peril.’ May the English Oratory, this humble branch of the true vine, flourish and produce its fruit through the intercession and example of saints Philip and John Henry. May Christ the Redeemer prune and purify us, so that we may use the grace given to each of us for the building up of the body of Christ until we all attain to maturity, to what St Paul calls ‘the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ’, in the glory of the saints in heaven. Amen.
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