Newman's Unquiet Grave: The Reluctant Saint (23 page)

And yet, he had suggested to Wiseman that he wanted to be ‘strictly under obedience and discipline for a time’.
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His wish was granted in the form of a period of seminary training in Rome at the College of Propaganda. Founded in the seventeenth century, and under the teaching authority of the Jesuits, the college was a power-house for intending missionaries to distant lands. The choice signalled the expectation that Newman would head a new evangelisa-tion thrust in England.

While deciding on his future, and that of St John, Dalgairns and the other recent littletons converts, he would get a dose of
Romanitá
. He had been considering entering one of the great religious orders: the Vincentians, perhaps, the Dominicans, or the Jesuits. Wiseman had already suggested the Oratorian congregation for its ‘external secularism with a gentle inward bond of asceticism’.
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The Oratorians, founded by Philip Neri in Rome in the seventeenth century, were communities of secular priests, living together without vows in city locations, dedicating themselves to scholarship, writing, and pastoral work. There was no Oratory in England, and Wiseman evidently thought that such a community led by Newman in London or Birmingham, or perhaps both, could have a significant missionary influence in England.

Newman and St John set off for Italy, reaching Milan on 20 September. Again he was struck by the glimmering sanctuary lamps in all the churches. ‘It is really most wonderful to see this Divine Presence looking out almost into the open streets … I never knew what worship was, as an objective fact, till I entered the Catholic Church …’
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He would write that ‘there is nothing which has brought home to me so much the Unity of the Church, as the presence of its Divine Founder and Life wherever I go – All places are, as it were, one …’
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At the Duomo he was struck by the devotional buzz typical of Catholic cathedrals on the continent: ‘groups of worshippers, and solitary ones – kneeling, standing – some

at shrines, some at altars – hearing Mass and communicating – currents of worshippers intercepting and passing by each other – altar after altar lit up for worship, like stars in the firmament …’
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So unlike an Anglican cathedral!

His sensibilities were nevertheless affronted by Italian manners. ‘They spit everywhere – they spit on the kneeling boards – they encourage it, and as if for amusement go on every ten seconds … They spit over the floors of their rooms – their floors are filthy principally with dust … if you drop your coat or stockings in undressing, it is far worse than if you dropped them in the street.’
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Newman’s first impression of his hotel in Rome was of ‘a palace of filth’. He was disgusted by the Romans’ ‘horrible cruelty to animals – also with their dishonesty, lying and stealing apparently without any conscience – and thirdly with their extreme dirt’.
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Yet he was also struck by ‘
every where
a simple certainty in believing which to a Protestant or Anglican is quite astonishing’.
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He had preferred, however, that they revealed a faith that leads to ‘sanctity of character’ rather than a faith that can ‘disjoin religion and morality’.

PAPAL AUDIENCE

Visitors to Rome wishing to summon a fleeting sense of Newman’s presence should mount the steps from the famous Via dei Condotti with its international boutiques and turn right along the Piazza di Spagna passing the façade of the Propaganda College on the left and walk to the end of the street. There on the left is the church known as San Andrea delle Fratte, ministered by a Franciscan community. Within the church is the side-altar where a Jewish businessman, Alphonse Ratisbonne, claimed to have received a vision of the Virgin Mary. He subsequently converted to Catholicism in 1842 and became a priest (today the shrine is also celebrated as the place where Father Maximilian Kolbe – who gave his life up for a fellow inmate at Auschwitz – said his first Mass). If one looks from the nave of the church up through the high clerestory windows it is possible to see the windows of the apartment created for Newman and St John at the rear of the Propaganda building. They, in turn, could look down from their windows into the shrine of the Virgin.

A portrait by Maria Giberne hangs outside Newman’s room at the Birmingham Oratory, depicting Newman and Ambrose sitting at a table in their study at the Propaganda. They are dressed in cassocks and cloaks. Newman appears to be gazing pensively at the young, slim, blonde-haired St John, widely referred to by the Roman monsignori as an ‘Angel Guardian’; the younger man sits staring at the floor, as if in shock. Behind them is depicted the image of Our Lady of the Miraculous Medal, or Our lady of the Immaculate Conception (the result of

another apparition, to Catherine Labouré in the convent chapel in Rue du Bac, Paris, in 1830), which is commemorated in the church below.

Newman and St John were granted an audience with Pius IX, known familiarly as Pio Nono, who was in the first year of his pontificate and only 54 years of age. Pio had declared that he wished to see Newman ‘again and again’. As Newman genuflected to kiss the pontifical ring, he stumbled and banged his head against the papal knee. The Pope was evidently pleased with the prize conversion, referring to him as a ‘recovered sheep’. There were high hopes in the papal palace of the conversion of England to its old faith and His Holiness entertained the visitors with a story about a convert Anglican clergyman. But when St John – somehow failing to appreciate the avuncular drift of the anecdote – asked for specific details, including the man’s name, the pope laughed, took him by the arm, and replied that he could not pronounce English names. Newman noted that the Holy Father was ‘a vigorous man with a very pleasant countenance, and was most kind’.
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He also thought he had the most ‘English face’ in Italy: this evidently being intended as a compliment. But there was to be an early frisson as a result of an item of gossip winging its way around Rome and back to the Apostolic Palace. Newman was asked at short notice by a leading Roman nobleman to preach at the funeral of the niece of the Earl of Shrewsbury, the noted Catholic philanthropist and supporter of Pugin. The congregation included many members of the English nobility, including Protestants who were wintering in Rome. Newman’s friend Maria Giberne, who was also present (she had tried to kiss the Pope’s foot a few days earlier and nearly sent him flying), conceded that the preaching was rather ‘deliberate’ – a token of his ‘deep feeling’. Evidently his Oxford charisma was not working in Rome. He told the distinguished congregation that the Eternal City was ‘not the place for them, but the very place in the whole world where Michael and the Dragon may almost be seen in battle’. He lambasted the English tourists for ‘prying like brute animals into the holiest places’.
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The congregation spilled out of the church angrily asserting that Newman had referred to them as ‘dogs’. Ambrose St John noted in his diary that a group of glowering Protestants looked as if they would ‘eat’ Newman. One was heard to say that Newman should be tossed into the Tiber. Newman remarked later: ‘O, I was a sort of sucking child, just as much knowing what I should say, what I should not say, and saying nothing right, not from want of tact so much as from sheer ignorance’.
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Matters were made worse by a meddlesome Vatican official and former Anglican, Monsignor George Talbot, who had at first professed warm friendship with Newman on his arrival in Rome. Talbot, a relative of the Earl of Shrewsbury, was a favoured advisor and toady in the court of Pio, with title of Papal Chamberlain. Talbot, who was present at the sermon, and even admitted to liking it at the time, subsequently tittle-tattled to the Pope that it was a disaster and gave offence. Where-

upon Pio remarked that Mr Newman should apply honey rather than vinegar in his pastoral work, and that he was evidently more of a philosopher than a preacher. Monsignor Talbot will return to our story as an influential antagonist in years to come.‌

TO BE AN ORATORIAN

The sermon debacle was less of a concern to Newman, however, than the negative reception in Rome of his
Essay on Development
. An American newspaper editor, and well-known recent convert from Unitarianism to Catholicism, Orestes Brownson of Boston, had charged in an article in his own newspaper that Newman had given comfort to those who denied the doctrine of the Trinity. The Unitarians, he claimed, had seized on the book to claim that belief in the Trinity did not belong to ‘primitive’ Christianity, but was a development of the third century. Surely Newman’s book should be put on the Index of forbidden books. Newman was at first inclined to dismiss the attack as the work of ‘a half-converted Yankee’,
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but he was concerned by the news that America’s bishops were up in arms against him, and that doubts about his orthodoxy were gaining purchase in Rome, particularly among the Jesuits. The problem was that the Roman theologians did not know English, and the Jesuits were receiving bits of mistranslation from America. They did not understand him, and their terms were at variance. On a particular point: where Newman talked of ‘probability’ based on demonstrative and circumstantial evidence, the Jesuits took this as a denial that certainty could be attained in matters of doctrine. So Newman appealed to the authority of the theologian De Lugo on the contrast between reason and faith; but De Lugo, it appeared, cut little ice among the Roman professors. Father Carlo Passaglia, a leading theologian in Rome, opined that Newman was attempting to replace certainty with probability. Meanwhile Father Giovanni Peronne, a professor at the Jesuit Collegio Romanum, had plucked a quotation from one of Newman’s earlier Anglican anti-papal texts expressing the opinion that the Pope was Satan. It got back to Newman that the teachers at the Collegio were consequently plundering his Essay to teach the students the difference between orthodoxy and heresy. This was particularly irritating to Newman as Father Peronne himself was writing a book in defence of the imminent declaration of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception (a belief that had once been opposed by such great figures as St Bernard and St Thomas Aquinas); the Immaculate Conception, Newman declared, was a classic instance of development of doctrine in action. Remembering the case of Lamennais, the French philosopher and priest, who had once been welcomed in Rome, only to be later denounced by Gregory XVI, Newman was anxious lest it should be whispered that here was another Lamennais in the Eternal City.

Newman’s dismay was not a matter of authorial pride, nor even of personal anxiety lest he should find himself, as in England, at the centre of controversy. He was convinced that Rome’s theologians were not equal to countering the difficulties of Anglicans, on the one hand, and the growing atheism of the age, on the other. He was convinced that it was his vocation to expound apologetics for a new era. As he would write to his friend J. M. Capes on the same theme in December 1849:‌

Italian divines … know nothing at all of heretics as realities – they live, at least in Rome, in a place whose boast is that it has never given birth to heresy, and they think proofs ought be convincing which in fact are not. Hence they are accustomed to speak of the argument for Catholicism as a demonstration, and to see no force in objections to it and to admit no perplexity of intellect which is not directly and immediately wilful.
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He decided nevertheless that it would be best to take things slowly, hoping that the
Essay on Development
would in time achieve its effect. In the event, after he wrote a summary of his development theory in Latin for Perrone, the Jesuit’s doubts about Newman’s theology began to evaporate and they became friends. Ambrose St John reported: ‘N. has struck up quite a close friendship with F. Peronne: they embrace each other.’
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Peronne’s principal objection was now confined to Newman’s expression ‘new dogmas’ instead of ‘new definitions’. In principle they agreed. Both accepted that while the ‘deposit of the Faith’ was committed to the Church before the death of the last apostle, Christians were not explicitly conscious of all its intellectual implications. The ‘dogma’ was given once and for all, but the definitions would emerge, or develop, with time.