Newman's Unquiet Grave: The Reluctant Saint (2 page)

Preface

So why yet another portrait of Newman?

In the light of Newman’s beatification, and other circumstances that have thrust him into the media limelight, it seemed timely to offer a shorter, less academic account of his life, accessible not only to Catholics, but non-Catholics and non-Christians as well. While being yet another version of his life, my interest focuses more on his character and importance as a writer than on his holiness. If my account touches on his foibles and human failings it is not intended to detract from the current celebration of his undoubted piety and saintly charisma.

Finally this book is the fruit, but by no means the culmination, of a personal quest which began in my late teens under the guidance of a friend and teacher, the late Doctor Henry Francis ‘Ikey’ Davis. Davis was for a quarter of a century Professor of Theology and Vice Rector at Oscott College, the Catholic seminary for the archdiocese of Birmingham. It was Davis who first proposed the cause for Newman’s canonisation in the late 1950s. His deep knowledge of the Early Fathers, Thomas Aquinas, Newman, and Karl Barth, formed the basis of his lectures and class notes on systematic theology. Davis sacrificed a life of writing for teaching. His students, at Oscott and later at Birmingham University, were the beneficiaries; the legacy is his personal influence on generations of theologians and philosophers of religion in Britain and in Europe.

Of the many stories told of him, this must suffice. During the Second World War he cycled every weekend 167 miles, each way (he was a champion cyclist), from Birmingham to a prisoner of war camp outside Colchester, Essex. There he spent Saturdays and Sundays teaching theology with a Newman bias, and in fluent German, to imprisoned seminarists who had been forcibly recruited into Hitler’s armed forces (he had studied for his doctorate in theology at the University of Freiburg in German-speaking Switzerland). Some eighty of those students became priests after the war; four of them bishops. It can be justly claimed that Davis contributed to the impetus of Newman studies in post-war Germany and beyond in Europe.

John Cornwell Jesus College, Cambridge

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Prologue
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On 5 October 2008 the following item was posted on the
TimesOnline
website:

The grave of the Venerable John Henry Cardinal Newman (1801–1890) was excavated with utmost care on Thursday 2 October 2008 … During the excavation the brass inscription plate which had been on the wooden coffin in which Cardinal Newman had rested was recovered from his grave. It reads (in English translation): ‘The Most Eminent and Most Reverend John Henry Newman Cardinal Deacon of St George in Velabro Died 11 August 1890 RIP.’ Brass, wooden and cloth artefacts from Cardinal Newman’s coffin were found. However, there were no remains of the body of John Henry Newman.

It was later explained by the Fathers of the Birmingham Oratory that on Newman’s express orders his grave in a burial ground in the Lickey Hills, Worcestershire, was filled with a rich mulch to hasten decomposition. When one takes into account reports that the graveyard was sited on saturated clay, the mystery of the vanished remains is more or less resolved. It is arguable that his instruction was tantamount to a final sermon, although Newman would have been amused at the attendant irony of his vanishing. On the day of the exhumation, those acquainted with Newman’s last published sermon might have remembered his homily ‘On the Fitness of the Glories of Mary’: ‘Who can conceive’, he preached, ‘that that virginal frame, which never sinned, was to undergo the death of a sinner? Why should she share the curse of Adam, who had no share in his fall? “Dust thou art, and into dust thou shalt return”, was the sentence upon sin; she then, who was not a sinner, fitly never saw corruption.’
¹
Newman’s orders to mulch his coffin was evidently an acknowledgment of his own sinfulness, deserving of final physical corruption. How could he have known that his burial instructions would result, paradoxically, in a circumstance parallel with the fate of Mary’s assumed body. The sermon continues: ‘Pilgrims went to and fro; they sought for her relics, but they found them not.’
2

But a more crucial, if mundane, fact is missing in the
TimesOnline
report: Newman, according to his own repeated wishes, shared his last resting place with a close friend, Father Ambrose St John. Nothing was found of St John’s remains either, although the mechanical digger employed for the exhumation removed the soil down to eight feet. That the joint burial involved two celibate

Newman’s Unquiet Grave

priests, one destined for sainthood, prompted media curiosity about Newman, now long neglected except by Catholics and those with a taste for nineteenth century Church history. A wide constituency of people, unacquainted perhaps with the Catholic cult of sainthood and relics, complained that Newman’s wishes had not been respected. Gay rights activist Mr Peter Tatchell proclaimed on the BBC current affairs programme,
Tonight
, that Newman was ‘gay’, and charged that the exhumation was a gesture of Vatican homophobia. The presenter Jeremy Paxman called on Father Ian Ker, the Newman scholar, to respond. Father Ker stated emphatically that, on the basis of all the evidence with which he was acquainted, Newman was ‘heterosexual’. On the day of the exhumation the graveyard was guarded by members of the local constabulary lest Gay Rights demonstrators should intrude upon the scene to cause an affray. No such insult occurred.

!

My interest in John Henry Newman began, as it happens, at that same graveside in the Lickey Hills in the Spring of 1960. On a cold, wet morning I set forth on foot to cross the city of Birmingham from the north to the south. I was nineteen years of age and a student for the Catholic priesthood at Oscott College. My companion was John Winterton (who later changed his Christian name to Gregory), a convert from Anglicanism. Wearing black suits, black raincoats and deep plas-tic clerical collars (as was the custom for Roman Catholic seminarists in those days), we were on ‘exeat’, a rare holiday from our cloistered confines. Winterton, a wraith-like man, stooped and intense, had fought during the Second World War in North Africa and Italy. We his younger fellow students assumed that since he was the son of a knighted Major General he was ‘in funds’. He had taken a shine to me, and promised ‘a rewarding mystery tour’ on our day out. I had visions of a traditional exeat treat: beef-steak lunch and a bottle of wine in the cosy bosom of a West Midlands hotel restaurant.

We marched in the freezing rain, Winterton, the military veteran, always a yard or two ahead; we took a bus, then walked some more as morning wore into afternoon. Eventually we arrived at the gate of a secluded rural cemetery. Striding ahead of me, Winterton went down on his knees. We had arrived at our mystery destination, Cardinal Newman’s last resting place, and I learned for the first time of his cohabitation in death with Ambrose St John who had prede-ceased him by fifteen years. Sodden and footsore. I could not bring myself to kneel in the mud; my thoughts were mainly on the missed lunch. Winterton entered a prayerful trance which lasted for a very long time.

I did not give the fact of the joint burial much thought; nor had anyone else, as far as I know now. On the return journey to the seminary, hungry as well as

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Prologue

wet through, I sulked as Winterton enthused about our visit. But drying out my clothes on one of Oscott’s lukewarm radiators, it struck me that my interest in Newman, from boyhood in the junior seminary, had been confirmed by the dead Cardinal himself. That’s how we seminarists thought in those days.

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PART ONE
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CHAPTER 1
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Who is John Henry Newman?

‘… here below to live is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often.’

J
.
H
.
NEWMAN
,
ESSAY ON DEVELOPMENT

Not so long ago a senior Anglican priest remarked to me, ‘John Henry Newman is just a Catholic pin-up boy: isn’t he?’ That characterisation, which has more than a grain of truth, is one of many: from the Newman of whom his fellow English Cardinal, Henry Manning, said, ‘He was a great hater!’, to Newman deemed by the Catholic Church a holy exemplar destined for sainthood. In Victorian England, depending on whether you were a Catholic or a Protestant, he was Newman who had seen the light and gone over to Rome; or Newman the apostate, who had betrayed friends, family, Church, to enter the idolatrous and superstitious embrace of the Whore of Babylon. He has been characterised as Newman the friend of liberalism, Newman the enemy of liberalism; Newman champion of conscience over dogma, Newman the champion of dogma over conscience. Lytton Strachey’s famous characterisation in
Eminent Victorians
depicted Newman as a dove to Cardinal Manning’s eagle. On reflection, Strachey wondered whether Newman was more like a hawk.

From his thirties Newman appeared in a variety of guises in portraits and caricatures: the austere, pinched-looking, bespectacled vicar dressed in surplice and black stole, preaching from St Mary’s pulpit, Oxford; G. Richmond’s flat-teringly handsome head, without spectacles, which, according to James Anthony Froude, was ‘remarkably like that of Julius Caesar’; the Vatican’s poodle in
Punch
magazine holding up the train of Cardinal Wiseman (‘Newboy’ to his Eminence’s ‘Wiseboy’); the early photographs of Newman the ageing ‘Father’ among his clerical ‘family’ in Birmingham’s Hagley Road. Then there is the portrait in the keeping of the National Portrait Gallery in London: Sir John Everett Millais’ Cardinal Newman, Prince of the Church. There he sits, swathed in scarlet shot silk and lace cuffs, the worn ascetic face gazing out at us apologetically: His Reluctant Eminence. The spectacular iconography would have signalled corrupt associations for a Victorian Protestant: Henry VIII’s Cardinal Wolsey; devious Papal Emissaries.