Newman's Unquiet Grave: The Reluctant Saint (29 page)

CHAPTER 11
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Idea of a University

‘– there are no schools now, no private judgment (in the
religious
sense of the phrase,) no freedom, that is of opinion. That is, no exercise of the intellect …’

J. H. NEWMAN LETTER TO EMILY BOWLES, 19 MAY 1863

While still in the anxious throes of the Achilli trial, Newman had travelled to Ireland in early October, 1851. His first visit across the Irish Sea found him apprehensive and impractical (as he himself admits) without his guardian angel Ambrose St John, who had packed his case for him. From Thurles he had sent a message to the Birmingham Oratory: ‘We had a bad passage … I abjure Holyhead. We got to bed at Dublin between one and two a.m … tell F. Ambrose, that I, with my usual infelicity, spilt I can’t say how much of my precious medicine over the amice [part of the priestly Mass robes], and other contents of my portmanteau.’
¹
Newman was in Ireland at the invitation of Archbishop Paul Cullen of Armagh who had asked initially for advice on the appointment of staff for a proposed Catholic University. In fact, the bishop, who had got to know Newman at the Propaganda College in Rome, had it in mind to organize the entire venture and appoint him as the first Rector. As a prelude, and perhaps to get the measure of how Newman would establish and run such an institution, Cullen asked him, as if casually, to give ‘a few lectures on education’ to a specially invited audience of ecclesiastics and distinguished Irish lay figures in Dublin. Newman’s idea of a university, expressed in those ‘few lectures’, would deal on the face of it with how Catholic theology and philosophy of religion might survive in the face of growing secularism. It would become, however, a master-class on the ideals of

university education across many cultural and political divides.

In the wake of the catastrophe of the Irish potato famine, which had devastated the social fabric of Ireland resulting in more than a million deaths – the equivalent of a quarter of the population, sending an even greater number of emigrants abroad, the country had become increasingly nationalist and turbulent. Some seventy per cent of Ireland’s MPs were landed Protestants, and it dawned on the British government that Catholic Ireland needed a proper university for the Irish Catholic majority if it was to emerge from its manifest and mounting woes as a poverty-stricken, troubled and troublesome ‘colony’.

The remoter background to Cullen’s university proposal had been the original intention of English Protestants of Ireland to deprive the Catholic popula-

tion of education at any level after the final conquest of Ireland in 1691. For half a century Catholic children received an elementary education only in consequence of the ‘hedge’ schools, illegal classes held often in the open air by itinerant teachers. Catholic bishops were expelled from the country and only registered priests were allowed to minister to the faithful. Unregistered priests risked being hung, drawn and quartered. The provision of school education had improved by the middle of the eighteenth century, and by 1795 the British government had helped to fund St Patrick’s College, Maynooth. Catholics were not admitted to Trinity College, Dublin, it being a Protestant foundation. In 1845 the governments decided to establish three secular Queen’s Colleges in Belfast, Cork, and Galway, open to Catholics and Protestants alike. The degree giving body, founded in 1850, was to be known as the Queen’s University of Ireland. Theology was not to be taught in any of the colleges. While a handful of Irish Catholic bishops favoured the Queen’s plan, most were against it and so was the Holy See because of its lack of a faculty of Catholic theology. The Irish bishops and the Vatican wanted an institution comparable to the recently re-established Catholic University of Louvain in Belgium where theology held pride of place. Unfortunately the bishops envisaged something akin to a lay seminary (a circumstance Newman would discover when the bishops reproached him for allowing students to indulge in such licence as access to a billiard table and freedom to smoke).

But the detailed difficulties lay in the future. From the outset Newman was attracted to the idea. Perhaps, he suggested, such a foundation could be ‘the Catholic University of the English tongue for the whole world’,
²
or, at least, the British Empire, including Catholics of England who were deterred from entering Oxford and Cambridge. Perhaps he could recreate his beloved Oxford in Dublin, combining a university (with distinguished chairs) and a college system. Torn between enthusiasm for the project, and anxiety – prompted by his Oratorian confreres, who would be losing his presence in Birmingham – he agreed with some misgivings. But first there were the lectures. What should they be about, Newman asked, ‘in order to be useful?’ Cullen answered, ‘What we want in Ireland is to persuade the people that education should be religious’.
³
New-man concurred, but his perspective on this question was decidedly different to Cullen’s.

Newman’s work to establish a Catholic University in Ireland would absorb him for much of the rest of the decade. It would be a period fraught with practical chores involving finance, administration, architectural plans, property deals, furnishings, fund raising, recruitment, annoying delays, and squabbles with the Irish hierarchy. He did not excel in understanding Irish politics, and the impression that he was a patrician district colonial officer from England was inescapable. His attitude – make the money available and allow me to get

on with the job – was unrealistic, given the nature of Ireland’s hierarchy and the temper of the times. He was never entirely comfortable as an administrator, and he was torn between Dublin and his community in Birmingham, requiring some sixty journeys between the two cities between 1851 and 1858.

His nemesis in Rome, Monsignor George Talbot, moreover, set about raising doubts about his capacity for such a task, prompting a stout rebuke from New-man’s doughty friend Maria Giberne. Talbot had asked Giberne: ‘Do you think Dr Newman capable of taking the management of the Irish University where he will have to battle continually with all the Paddies? I am afraid he will retire into himself and do nothing.’ Giberne confessed to Newman that she had to bite her tongue for period, ‘lest I should come down upon him like a thunder shower’. She eventually declared: ‘Do nothing? If you knew Dr Newman as well as I do, you would know that he could move mountains, ay and men’s wills too by sitting still and silent to all appearance, better than 1000 violent squabblers – Do nothing? Why who has done all that is doing in the Church the last 20 years and that without lifting up his voice?’
4

A persistent problem would be Newman’s lack of ecclesiastical authority and status in a country where the bishops were at odds with Archbishop Cullen, and Cullen himself eventually at odds with Newman. Three years into the project, after many delays, and questions about Newman’s status, Cardinal Wiseman would tell Newman that he had taken up the cause of his lack of status in Ireland with the Pope himself. His Holiness, according to Wiseman, ‘smilingly drawing his hands down from each side of his neck to his breast … added: “
e manderemo a Newman la crocetta, lo faremo Vescovo di Porfiorio, o qualche luogo
[and let us give Newman the crozier, we will make him the Bishop of Porphyrium, or some such place”. This was spoken in his kindest manner. Of course, Porphyrium was only an
exempli gratia
, as it is filled up. But I thought it would be pleasing to you to have the Pope’s own words.’
⁵
He ended by asking Newman to treat the words of the Pope with ‘your own discretion’. In the event, Newman would not be made a bishop.

The delays and the obstacles continued for a further three years. Despite New-man’s unremitting toil in Dublin through 1854, Cullen sent him a letter in the depths of the summer vacation declaring ‘… there are complaints here, that no one is doing any thing for the university, and no one is charged to give information about what is to be done next’.
⁶
Newman responded that while on leave in Birmingham his assistant had been in attendance every day; but Cullen was determined to stir up trouble. He sent a letter out to the Propaganda in Rome:

For more than three months Father Newman has been in England, and has left a convert Englishman called Scratton here to take his place…. I have not therefore been able to find out how things stand, but they don’t seem to me to be going in a way that can be defended. The continued absence of the Rector cannot be approved. Then the expenses

have been very large, and furthermore the discipline introduced is unsuitable, certainly to this country. The young men are allowed to go out at all hours, to smoke, etc., and there has not been any fixed time for study. All this makes it clear that Father Newman does not give enough attention to details.
7

It being the depths of the vacation, it was clear that Archbishop Cullen had more long-term quarrels with Newman than his summer absence. The university, as Newman struggled to establish it, seemed doomed to failure; but his published lectures and discourses on the ideal nature of a university remain one of his most prophetic and enduring legacies into the twenty-first century.

DISCOURSES

He gave the first ‘discourse’ in February 1852 in the Exhibition Room at the Rotunda building in Dublin, site of major public meetings in the city. Some 400 people turned up, and he was eminently audible despite his soft delivery. He could report that ‘all the intellect, almost, of Dublin was there’, including leading clergy, and women. He detected a frisson in the room, he wrote: ‘when I said, not Ladies and Gentlemen, but Gentlemen.’

The
Idea of a University
, which grew out of the preparatory lectures or discourses, brings together Newman’s expressed general and particular views on higher education against the background of Catholic Ireland’s prevailing ecclesiastical culture. England had seen the challenge to Christian university foundations with the secular auspices of University College London, founded in 1826, which had opened its doors to both men and women, with a stress on science and technology, and with no requirement for Christian affiliation. The Queen’s colleges were to be a continuation of this trend. And yet the question of secular versus religious was still in contention: in England, there had been new university foundations with an emphasis in the curriculum on theology, of which King’s College, London (1829), and Durham University (1832), were examples. The abolition of great Catholic universities across Europe in a period of revolutions, the barring of Catholics from university education in England and Ireland, and the largely Protestant nature of university education in America, had stimulated the need for modern Catholic universities. Louvain had been refounded as a new Catholic University in Europe, and in the United States there had been Georgetown, Fordham and Notre Dame. Could Newman found a Catholic university not only for Ireland but for the entire Anglophone world of the British Empire? And what would be its special character and attraction? It had become clear to Newman, on conversion, that his vocation would be the education of Catholics rather than the conversion of Anglicans. He